THE LUDICROUS D’SOUZA, THE DESPICABLE GINGRICH

In a comment on the declining state of magazine journalism, conservative firebug Dinesh D’Souza has published an article in Forbes that is one of the goofiest, sloppiest, most nonsensical pieces of punditry I have had the misfortune to read. D’Souza, once a rising star among right-wing polemicists, proves himself one of its dimmer bulbs in his piece “How Obama Thinks,” which is underreported, insightless, and so casual in its relationship with facts that it seems to have been written after the writer had lit up a doobie.

D’Souza says Obama is the most anti-business president in American history. An example: “Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: “Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling.” Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling–but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama’s backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro–not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.”

Somehow in his haste to latch onto this story from a year ago, D’Souza overlooks this story from the Times from March 31st, less than six months ago: “The Obama administration is proposing to open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time, officials said Tuesday. The proposal — a compromise that will please oil companies and domestic drilling advocates but anger some residents of affected states and many environmental organizations — would end a longstanding moratorium on oil exploration along the East Coast from the northern tip of Delaware to the central coast of Florida, covering 167 million acres of ocean.”

Yes, that’s right–Obama was going to drill, baby, drill, at least until that underregulated behemoth BP blew up the Deepwater Horizon, killed eleven men, and blackened the Gulf of Mexico for the length of the summer.

Following a thread better suited to the plot of an overheated thriller, D’Souza says Obama gets all his ideas from his father, Barack Obama Sr. ““Our president is trapped in his father’s time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”

In other words, says D’Souza, because Obama’s father was an anti-colonialist–as though that was a bad thing to be in Africa after the second world war–Obama views America as a malignant imperial agent that must be stopped, and that American capitalism is a force that must be controlled in order to establish justice. “Gosh, Rex–do you mean the Black Wizard’s father was. . . Hitler?”

It’s not a surprise that corporate America opposes America. Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, America’s businesses have had a field day, Taxes have been cut and businesses deregulated. The result has been the great financial meltdown, massive unemployment, failures of government like Katrina, and a superrich minority that is arrogating unto itself a massive portion of the national wealth (According to Robert Reich’s new book Aftershock, the top one percent of earners in the 1970s accounted for 8 to 9 percent of the national wealth. In the 1980s, it rose to 10 percent to 14 percent. In the late-’90s, it was 15 percent to 19 percent. In 2005, it passed 21 percent. By 2007, they earned 23 percent of all income.)

I’m not surprised Steve Forbes is squealing like a stuck pig–he is a pig, after all, and he’s being stuck–but I am disappointed to see the D’Souza claptrap in a respectable magazine. (D’Souza’s article, by the way, is from his new book, which is entitled The Roots of Obama’s Rage. Hah! I’ve never seen the man’s demeanor rise above the level of pique!)

D’Souza’s ludicrous article has been latched onto by Newt Gingrich. The former speaker is a transparent case: a man of great gifts and potential whose appetites and arrogance cost him his position of power. Now, with his moment in the sun eclipsing, with what will almost certainly be his last opportunity for the presidency falling onto the shoulders of the peawit Sarah Palin, Gingrich is dialing up his rhetoric. Two weeks ago, he threw his unhelpful presence into the argument about the proposed Muslim community center in lower Manhattan. ““Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington,” Gingrich said. “We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor.” Now, following up that viscious bit of drive-by character assassination, Gingrich has seized the D’Souza article as a kind of Rosetta Stone.

In an interview with National Review, Gingrich said, “ “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?. That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior. This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president. I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating — none of which was true. In the Alinksy tradition, he was being the person he needed to be in order to achieve the position he needed to achieve . . . He was authentically dishonest.”

It’s an accusation breathtaking in its immensity–Obama’s entire life is a lie, and his entire presidency is a con.

It’s no secret what game Gingrich is playing. We’ve seen the act before. It’s the same ugly act Joe McCarthy made so famous. Sow the seeds of distrust and suspicion, create an“other”, an alien in the bloodstream. Label them commies, witches, niggers, fags–whatever you need. Invoke their insidious power to destroy our American way of life. Appeal to their worse instincts. Create a dragon, and offer yourself to the public as a dragon-slayer. Seize power by manipulating the fear and ignorance and weak-mindedness of the people.

There’s one word for what Gingrich is doing: Despicable.