Obama's America 2016 (Non-Fiction)(2012) (14 page)

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Authors: Dinesh D'Souza

Tags: #Non-fiction, #Political Ideologies, #Conservatism & Liberalism, #Political Science

BOOK: Obama's America 2016 (Non-Fiction)(2012)
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George’s book is called
Homeland: An Extraordinary Story of Hope and Survival
. The book was published by Simon & Schuster, but Damien Lewis told me that before it came out in America the publisher without explanation decided to shred the entire print run. The book was published in Britain, however, and Damien Lewis sent me a copy. “George and I thought the book was a story of triumphing over difficult circumstances,” Lewis said. “We expected President Obama to embrace the story, to embrace George. But that never happened. And I believe that Obama has powerful friends at Simon & Schuster who felt that what George has to say may make Obama look bad. They decided they would rather take a loss and take the book out of circulation. This is the effect that Obama has on some people. Even I used to feel it, but not anymore.” Lewis also told me that George had been trying to come to the United States to visit his mother Jael Otieno for several years. “But he can’t get a visa. The U.S. government won’t let him in. Twice he tried to come, and twice he was rejected.” I must say I found this incredible. Suppressing a book is one thing, but on what grounds could you deny a guy—who happens to be the president’s half-brother—permission to come to America to visit his own mother?
I asked George about all this, and he expressed frustration that the American embassy denied him a visa; despite his earlier juvenile delinquency, he has no criminal record. He has a mother living in Atlanta and was given no explanation why he was turned down. George was also bitter about Simon & Schuster shredding his book so he couldn’t tell his story in the United States. He refused, in each instance, to blame Obama. No, Obama wasn’t responsible for the visa denial; it was those guys at the U.S. consulate. No, Obama wasn’t the reason his book had been suppressed; the publishers had their own inexplicable, and uncommunicated, reasons. George even insisted that his wealthy and powerful brother doesn’t owe him anything. George said he believes in self-reliance, in making it on your own. I told him I agreed, but pointed out that Obama claims we have a responsibility to help those who are less fortunate than we are. Obama is even willing to compel people to assist others who are unrelated to them. So why would Obama refuse to discharge his own moral duty to help George, especially considering it would cost him so little? At this point George became very defensive and ashamed. I felt it was to his credit that he made his best attempt to defend Barack Obama. Somehow George had no idea why he had become objectionable to his famous brother, and
persona non grata
in the Obama family.
The answer, I believe, can be found in George’s book. First, George tells us things that make President Obama look bad, not because George is trying to be negative, but because the facts are damning by themselves. George describes a scene, for example, in which he is in a bar in Nairobi on America’s election night. When Obama is elected, people cheer and express astonishment. George observes, “What would the drinkers think, I wondered, were they to realize that Barack Obama’s half-brother sat in their very midst—George Obama, an unremarkable resident of the Huruma slum?”
17
This episode is poignant as narrative, but it’s probably not what Obama wants the American people to hear.
Second, George expresses complete indifference to his biological father, Barack Obama Sr. He pays no obeisance to the Great One. Then George goes on to recount that after his father died, his mother moved in with a white man, a French aid worker named Christian. This man treated George as his own son, taking him to games, helping him with his homework, and doing all the things that Barack Obama Sr. never did for his own children. George makes the point that Christian, a white man, took the trouble to raise him while his own black father drank himself into oblivion. So that seems to be George’s offense number two: when the African father fails, a white Westerner comes to the rescue.
Perhaps most telling, George through his experience develops a very independent set of opinions—toward colonialism, toward Africa, and toward the British. In school, George says, he had “been taught that all Kenya’s problems were owing to the British colonial legacy.” George, however, doesn’t buy it. He says, “I didn’t believe the myths people told about our country and the cause of its ills.” George tells a friend that at the time of Kenya’s independence in the early 1960s, “Kenya was on an economic par with Malaysia or Singapore. We were at the same level in terms of development. Look where we are now, and where they are. They’re practically developed and industrialized, while Kenya is still a basket case.” To drive the point home, George adds, “The British granted those countries independence about the same time as us, so what’s the difference? What’s our excuse for failure? We don’t have one. We’ve only got ourselves to blame, or at least those at the top of our messed-up society.”
George compounds his heresy by suggesting that American troops, having liberated Iraq in order to establish democracy there, consider the prospect of invading Zimbabwe and getting rid of the dictator Robert Mugabe. While some say Mugabe’s anti-colonialism justifies his corruption, thuggery, and tyranny, George is skeptical. “If there was a crazed and autocratic dictator who needed removing from power,” he writes, “Robert Mugabe was it. If there was one people who truly needed liberating, it was the Zimbabweans.” George isn’t finished. He next addresses the taboo subject of why South Africa is the most economically advanced country in Africa, suggesting that this seems related to the whites who until recently ruled the country. “Look at South Africa,” George says. “They were under the whites until the 1990s, and look where they are now. They’re practically a developed nation. The corruption there is nothing like what it is here. So who is better off? Us, who kicked out the British, or the South Africans? Maybe if we’d let the whites stay a bit longer, we’d be where South Africa is today.”
18
If Barack Obama read these words, he no doubt winced at them. George’s sin, I concluded, isn’t that he’s sly or conniving, but that he is a standing rebuttal to everything that Barack Obama represents. George doesn’t idolize Barack Sr., and he doesn’t go along with his father’s and brother’s anti-colonial, anti-Western ideology. I can’t think of any other reason why Obama won’t help George, and is even willing to hurt him. Vindictively, the Obama administration refuses to let George come to the United States and visit his mother. Equally appalling, Obama continues his moral exhortations on the campaign trail, demanding that the rest of us pay higher taxes to help needy people who are unrelated to us; meanwhile, Obama refuses to give even a little help to his own half-brother who desperately needs it.
Obama’s behavior toward George tells you something about the man, about his supreme hypocrisy. His behavior toward the sellouts also reveals his Manichean mindset, one that eagerly embraces those who share his anti-colonial sympathies and reviles those who reject them. Now we understand why Obama demonizes those who disagree with him, implying that they are not just wrong but unholy. He attributes to his Republican and conservative opponents evil motives that transcend the normal differences of policy debates. We can also see better why Obama refuses to compromise on issues like debt and health care. He will make strategic retreats, to fight another day, but he doesn’t believe in searching for middle ground with his adversaries. He could have won some Republican votes on health care reform had he moved a little to accommodate some GOP ideas, but he refused and got the bill passed without a single Republican vote. For Obama, the GOP is the neocolonial party, and to compromise with it is a form of ideological sellout. We can expect more of the same from Obama if he is granted a second term. Freed from the demands of re-election, he may be even more polarizing, further fracturing the fragile bonds that have held this country together.
CHAPTER SEVEN
 
CERTIFICATES OF ABSOLUTION
 
We must first see the world as it is and not as we would like it to be.
1
—Saul Alinsky,
Rules for Radicals
 
 
 
N
ow we are in a position to admire the political genius of Barack Obama. Actually “genius” is probably too strong a word. I don’t think that Barack Obama is a genius. He is, however, a highly intelligent man, and he is possessed of a certain kind of low cunning that makes him politically formidable. Obama’s skill—that is perhaps a more appropriate term—is to figure out what the American people want to
see
and
hear
, and then give it to them, while
doing
something entirely different. Obama has also injected fear on the right, and inspired giddy enthusiasm on the left, by playing the “race card” in a way never previously done in American politics. Such techniques not only enabled Obama’s meteoric political rise, they also enabled him to win the presidency. Moreover, they have muted effective criticism and sustained for him a level of political loyalty that would be unthinkable in any other president with a comparable record. If Obama were white, he would have virtually no chance of being re-elected. Yet his success is not due to affirmative action; something else—something more interesting and strange—is going on here.
Let’s review our theory about Obama to this point. We have seen that Obama was abandoned by both his parents, and underwent a profound search for roots, for who he is and where he is from. He found his roots in Africa, and in an epiphany at his father’s grave he saw that he could eschew aspects of his father’s personality while embracing his father’s ideological dream. Obama’s anti-colonialism, inspired by his father, was nevertheless developed and reinforced by a series of radical mentors, not in Kenya but right here in America. And where have we gotten this story? We got it from Obama himself and from everything that is known about Obama. It is supported by Obama’s family members and by those who knew Obama during his formative years, and it is corroborated by Obama’s actions toward those people. As we have seen, Obama was drawn to anti-colonial radicals and even terrorists, while he was repelled by people who turned away from his father and his ideology. All the biographical information we have about Obama, much of it from Obama himself, supports our theory, and there are no facts so far that contradict it.
Even so, anti-colonialism is a foreign ideology with its roots in Third World history. While it came to America in the 1960s, anti-colonialism is still an unfamiliar concept to most Americans. So here is Obama’s problem. How does he sell this Third World, anti-American philosophy to American voters? How does he market it to mainstream liberals and independents who are not anti-American? Not only has Obama done this, but even today he continues to sustain a largely uncritical camp of followers in the media, in academia, among young people, and in the country at large. We have already seen the way that biographers and journalists apologize for Obama and cover for him. How has Obama managed to make ordinarily diligent people behave so irresponsibly? Obama has also immobilized some conservatives who know that Obama is not a traditional Democrat, but they cannot find the language, or the resolve, to say why. They seem nervous, even apprehensive, to trace Obama’s roots and connect them to his actions—actions that only make sense when viewed against his background. How did Obama pull off this silencing trick, inhibiting even his determined adversaries?
For Obama, the story begins in Chicago, but I only understood the story recently while walking the streets of New York. I am the president of the King’s College in New York. Ours is a Christian, free market college, until recently located in the Empire State Building, now right off Wall Street. For many months, Wall Street has been swamped with protesters calling themselves Occupy Wall Street. A group of our students recently visited the protest sites and engaged the protesters in discussion about economic and religious issues. I too decided to visit, although my goal was not to argue with the protesters; rather, it was anthropological, to study them as members of a distinct tribe. And this they surely were. I could not believe media accounts that portrayed Occupy Wall Street as a mainstream, all-American movement. Sure, the group was broad and diverse in a sense. There were men and women, young and old, fat and thin. But what united the group is that everyone was kind of unhappy, angry, dirty, and disheveled.
Yet this was a particularly American kind of dirtiness. One of the most shocking aspects of Occupy Wall Street, to observers, was the tendency of the protesters to defecate and urinate on the street. Actually, I find that sight quite familiar: I see it all the time in India. But the people who do that in India are slum-dwellers who have nowhere else to go. They go on the street because they have to. In the case of the Occupy protesters, they were doing that to make an ideological statement. They wanted to show their contempt for cleanliness, for the middle class lifestyle, for the cops, and for the city. Yet while they railed against the establishment, they expected to be catered to by the city establishment and lionized by the establishment media. I was especially amused by their slogans about the 1 percent and the 99 percent: they wanted redistribution of income from the top 1 percent to the remaining 99 percent. Yet they sought this redistribution only in America; somehow global redistribution wasn’t on their agenda.
These Occupy Wall Street types reminded me of the protesters that I saw on the Dartmouth campus in the 1980s; they were the most miserable, unclean, and poorly dressed segment of the student body. One of my professors, Jeffrey Hart, wrote a column in the campus newspaper calling them “The Ugly Protesters.” In that column, Hart speculated on what would cause relatively affluent and well-fed students to be so angry all the time? He concluded that most likely they were protesting their own ugliness! I’m not sure I agreed with this analysis in the mid-eighties, but it did come back to me as I surveyed the Occupy Wall Street guys. Wow, I said to myself, it’s been a quarter-century, and these are the same people!

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