In her latest Hail Mary effort to replace the flag of conservative Reason with the flag of liberal Emotion, Maureen Dowd goes talons-out for Newt Gingrich, for “making outrageous, unsubstantiated comments to appeal to the wing nuts among us. ”
Harry Reid tweets Lady Gaga while Newt Gingrich is truly gaga…The conservative who fancies himself a historian and visionary did not use his critical faculties to resist his party’s lunacy but instead has embraced it, shamelessly. He has given a full-throated endorsement to a dangerously irresponsible and un-Christian theory by Ann Coulter-in-pants Dinesh D’Souza.
For those who missed round one, D’Souza is the author of a new book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, a peek into which was afforded us thanks to the recent issue of Forbes, which published “How Obama Thinks.” D’Souza’s thesis: that Obama is acting out his Kenyan father’s anti-colonial resentment against the West.
What makes D’Souza’s quite logical interpretation of Obama’s psyche “dangerously irresponsible” to Dowd is, of course, the mere fact that she disagrees with it. If Maureen says it’s wrong, it’s wrong. Q.E.D., no further proof necessary.
Gingrich’s support for D’Souza’s theory–that you can only understand Obama “if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior”–made proud, loud Dowd howl louder:
So the smear artists are claiming not only that the president is a socialist but that he suffers from a socialism gene.
In Dowdspeak telling it like it is equals “smearing.” Dowd, like most substance-avoidant haranguers, is adept at the shallow art of invective. In a diaphanous effort to marginalize them, she equates Gingrich with Palin (“Palinize” = to make unsubstantiated outrageous claims) and D’Souza with Ann Coulter (Dinesh should be flattered).
Preferring the sugar of Vilification to the bread of Logic, Dowd never addresses the legitimacy of the D’Souza thesis. She’d rather dismiss it by attacking its supporters (Gingrich) and his own admittedly less-than-exemplary marital history. It matters little that Obama’s father was a philanderer nor that Gingrich has never offered himself as a model of morality. These are red-herring distractions from the real point of D’Souza’s argument.
For instance, Dowd doesn’t once acknowledge one of our greatest insights into the Obama soul, his own autobiography Dreams from My Father, hardly the title a pater-abjuring author would give his first literary effort. If Dowd has even read the book (it’s unclear from her odd failure to mention it), she would realize that the anti-colonialism depiction is not only accurate but was later evidenced early on in the 2008 campaign by then-candidate Obama in his Uriah Heep-inspired “citizen of the world” New World Order speech in Berlin.
This speech was made in July 2008, back when the candidate was still comparatively humble. He hadn’t yet promised to heal the planet or make the oceans recede. But he had already struck the first blow in what would later become the only war he favors–the war on American exceptionalism.
Obama’s main talent, like that of any cloying huckster, is currying favor, now more picturesquely called “sucking up.” He is our President Eddie Haskell and he shrewdly realizes that the bigger the audience, the more favor there is to be curried. Hence, his sucking up to the entire European complex in Berlin and, more broadly, to the world at large.
Rather than addressing Obama’s anti-colonialism directly, Dowd wastes her digital breath clawing at Gingrich, most likely in a preemptive attempt to derail a possible 2012 presidential bid by the former House Speaker. Still, to attempt to persuade us that Obama is a staunch supporter of American exceptionalism by claiming his prosecution of the war on radical Islam is hawkish is both laughable and insulting.
It’s inconsistent to accuse a president who’s raining drones on bad guys in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen of having an inherited anti-colonial ideology.
Obama’s flaccid commitment to winning in Afghanistan is patent to anyone with ears to listen to his speeches or eyes to watch his body language. The summer 2011 troop drawdown is awaited by our Placater-in-Chief with the same glee a five-year-old crosses the days off the calendar until Halloween.
Dowd tries to turn the tables on Gingrich and D’Souza by bringing up–shock–W.
If the conservatives are so interested in psychoanalyzing father and son relationships, why didn’t they do so back when W. was rushing to avenge and one-up his father by finishing what daddy started with Saddam?
Dowd is right. George W. was rushing to complete what his father, regrettably, left unfinished—a war that needed to be completed post-haste. Bush fils’ act of liberation was one of courageous daring that he undertook knowing full well that dimmer wits like Dowd would view his extinction of the tyranny of Saddam Hussein as the impulsive act of a trigger-happy Texas cowboy. But unlike Obama, George W. Bush had the moral fortitude to make the unpopular decision, knowing he’d be accused of the very one-upsmanship that Dowd alleges here. No matter that, as Dowd and her ilk fail without fail to mention, Bush was far from a lone ranger, but rather led a mighty coalition of nations after the umpteenth toothless U.N. resolution left a defiant Hussein continuing to slaughter and tyrannize his subjects.
Wordsworth said “the child is the father of the man.” The Obama child, one who in his earliest years grew up far away from the American way of life, should hold little surprise for us now that he is the Obama man.