Talk about irony: Dinesh D’Sousa accuses President Obama of being anti-colonialist, his evidence being that Obama’s father was an anti-colonialist from Kenya. Never mind that Obama’s father deserted the family when he was two. In his autobiographical Dreams from My Father, Obama writes, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself."
There you go.
Also, Obama's father wrote an article defending socialism.
We knew it all the time.
The result, says D’Sousa, is a president who evidences all the basic attitudes of the socialist anti-colonialst: “Do the views of the senior Obama help clarify what the junior Obama is doing in the Oval Office? Let's begin with President Obama, who routinely castigates investment banks and large corporations, accusing them of greed and exploitation. Obama's policies have established the heavy hand of government control over Wall Street and the health-care, auto and energy industries.”
Also, he wants to raise taxes on the rich.
Those of us not in the know might have confused these policies and attitudes with those of, say, a moderate Democrat coming to the presidency in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression—let’s call it the Pretty Good Recession—brought on in large part by the greed and lack of regulation on Wall Street. How this amounts to anti-colonialism, D’Sousa does not quite make clear.
I think the more interesting question is why, since he clearly opposes everything Obama believes and does, D’Sousa is such an advocate for colonialism, an –ism that pretty much died out in the mid-last-century when Britain and France lost the fight in places like Kenya and Algeria. The answer lies in the small italicized print at the bottom of his column in today’s Washington Post: “Dinesh D'Souza is president of King's College in New York City.”
King's College! Talk about a smoking scepter.
Also, let’s just ask ourselves how a native of India got the name “of Sousa” if he was not named for the famous composer of rousing pro-colonialist marches such as “The Stars and Stripes Forever”?
Coincidence? I think not. There's your irony.
If one of my students back in freshman comp had handed in an essay as logically weak-kneed as D’Sousa’s, I’d have required a rewrite that goes beyond Superman-scaled leaps of reason based on five or more of the logical fallacies covered in our textbook. In fact, I used to use D’Sousa himself as a good example of bad reasoning from a few crumbs of evidence found on the floor since his essay criticizing Rigoberta Menchu's’ book I, Rigoberta was the first selection in the anthology I used for the class.
Menchu, an indigenous Guatemalan, had written a book detailing some of the horrific crimes committed by the Guatemalan government during that county’s civil war from 1960-1996. American anthrolopoigist David Stoll discovered that a few of the claims in the book were dubious since, for example, Menchu said she never went to school when in fact she had finished 8th grade.
As it turned out, most of Stoll’s charges proved to be false, although Menchu did acknowledge that she fudged a little and included a few experiences of her brothers and sisters, a crime never equaled in the long tradition of “nothing but the facts, Mam” truthiness to be found in all previous autobiography.
D’Sousa regurgitated the claims of Stoll and wrote an essay claiming Menchu was a fraud and therefore none of the terrible things she said about the Guatemalan army were true. That’s why it were no crime that the U.S. trained and supported the Guatemalan army. The whole thing, D’Sousa said, was a cleverly constructed fantasy designed to discredit the U.S. and its wholly owned subsidiary, the United Fruit Company.
When the dispute was submitted to an independent fact-finding agency, it ruled in favor of Rigoberta and gave her the Nobel Peach Prize.
Wait. Typo. “Nobel Peace Prize.”
D’Sousa’s current essay first appeared as the cover story in Fortune magazine and was instantly trounced by just about everybody but Christine O’Donnell for its self-levitated reasoning, so apparently D’ thought he had to defend himself by saying the same thing all over again in a brief column that even the liberals over at the Post could understand.
Anyway, since I'm also named after my father, you’re probably wondering what clues can be discovered about my own anti-colonial bias. Here’s your answer:
"Ross
Gender: Male
Origin: Latin
Meaning: Red Rose"
Red rose!
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