Anti-American Fanatic Dinesh D'Souza's "The Roots of Obama's Rage" rooted in lies

Anti-American Fanatic Dinesh  D'Souza's "The Roots of Obama's Rage" rooted in lies

In his new book The Roots of Obama's Rage, Dinesh D'Souza theorizes that President Obama is motivated by an "anti-colonial" ideology inherited from his father, and boasts that this theory explains Obama's actions in a way "that no rival theory can even begin to do." In reality, D'Souza's absurd "anti-colonial" theory is premised upon a series of false and misleading claims.

1. CLAIM: Obama "hadn't lifted a finger to help a destitute close relative," half-brother George

From pages 3-4 of The Roots of Obama's Rage:

    I'm a conservative, and I didn't vote for Obama. During the 2008 presidential campaign, I read an interesting article in the London Telegraph titled "Barack Obama's Lost Brother Found in Kenya." The article featured a picture of a 26-year-old man standing inside a ramshackle hut on the outskirts of Nairobi. CNN confirmed the story, reporting, "We found Barack Obama's half-brother living in a Nairobi slum." He was George Hussein Obama, the product of a liaison between Barack Obama Sr. and an African woman. "I live here on less than a dollar a month," George said. Humiliated by his poverty, he confessed he never mentioned his famous half-brother. "I say we are not related. I am ashamed." In 2006, George briefly met Barack Obama, who was then a United States senator from Illinois, but felt as though he was talking to a "total stranger." I found it remarkable that Barack Obama, who had a net worth of several million dollars and who was within striking distance of the world's highest office, hadn't lifted a finger to help a destitute close relative.

    Seeing from the article that George Obama aspired to be a mechanic, I started the "George Obama Compassion Fund." On a daily blog I wrote for AOL at the time, I invited people to make small contributions to help George move out of his hut and get some training to realize his dreams. We raised a couple of thousand dollars, and a Christian missionary promised he would deliver the money in person to George. Then I was contacted by a reporter for a large newspaper in Kenya who told me that the Obama family had refused the money. Evidently they had consulted with the Obama campaign and been told to go into hiding. My attempts to locate George proved unavailing. So I tore up the checks, figuring that perhaps I had jostled Obama into doing something for George, if only to save himself from political embarrassment.

REALITY: George Obama is a community organizer, chooses to live among poor

The Associated Press reported on June 14, 2009, that George Obama had signed a deal with Simon & Schuster to write a book detailing his "fall into crime and poverty as a teenager and his eventual embrace of community organizing -- a passion shared by the president -- and of advocacy for the poor, an identification so strong that he chooses to live among them." As Media Matters documented, after conservatives (like D'Souza) used the initial reports of George Obama's living conditions to attack President Obama, George called the reports "exaggerated" in an interview with CNN, saying: "I was brought up well. I live well even now." George added: "I think I kind of like it here. I'm Kenyan, so definitely I'd really love to live in Kenya."

2. CLAIM: Obama initiated financial, auto industry bailouts

D'Souza twice indicates that Obama initiated the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the federal bailout of the automobile industry. From page 5 (emphasis added):

    As Obama launched his spending spree -- a bailout plan followed by a stimulus plan followed by an automobile industry rescue plan followed by a national health care plan and then new environmental and financial regulations -- I became alarmed.

From pages 17-18 (emphasis added):

    At the same time, Obama has transformed the relationship between American citizens and their government. He has passed the most significant raft of laws since the Great Society: the bank rescue plan, the auto industry bailout, the stimulus package, sweeping regulation of Wall Street, a complete remaking of the health care system.

REALITY: Both programs were begun under Bush

The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (commonly known as the bank bailout) was signed into law -- as its name indicates -- on October 3, 2008, by then-president George W. Bush. In December 2008, Bush announced that $13.4 billion of the funds allocated by Congress for the bank bailout would be loaned to General Motors and Chrysler to prevent the companies from collapsing. Bush said at the time: "In the midst of a financial crisis and a recession, allowing the U.S. auto industry to collapse is not a responsible course of action. The question is how we can best give it a chance to succeed."

3. CLAIM: Obama started going by "Barack" to adopt his father's "African identity"

On pages 26-27, D'Souza writes that Obama "is his father's son, and his dreams are derived from his father's aspirations and failures." Expanding on this claim, he writes:

    Obama even took his father's name in order to cement his explicit identification with him, and they way he did so is even more revealing. Young Obama's parents named him Barack, after his father. But from birth until his young adult years, he was known as Barry. Actually, Obama's dad was also called Barry; Barry was the name he adopted when he came as a student from Kenya to America. While the father went from Barack to Barry, however, the son went in the opposite direction. As a young man, Obama asked people to stop calling him Barry and instead to call him Barack. For Obama's father, the switch from Barack to Barry was no big deal; he was just doing what many immigrants do in order to fit in. For the son, by contrast, the move from Barry to Barack was a very big deal. He didn't just take his father's identity; he self-consciously rejected his father's American name in favor of the senior Obama's African identity.

REALITY: Obama on name switch: "It was not some assertion of my African roots"

D'Souza sourced his claim to a March 22, 2008, Newsweek article titled "When Barry Became Barack." According to that article:

    Obama wanted a clean slate. "Going to New York was really a significant break. It's when I left a lot of stuff behind," he says. "I think there was a lot of stuff going on in me. By the end of that year at Occidental, I think I was starting to work it through, and I think part of the attraction of transferring was, it's hard to remake yourself around people who have known you for a long time." It was when he got to New York that, as he recalls it, he began to ask people to call him Barack: "It was not some assertion of my African roots ... not a racial assertion. It was much more of an assertion that I was coming of age. An assertion of being comfortable with the fact that I was different and that I didn't need to try to fit in in a certain way."

4. CLAIM: Obama's push for a "nuclear-free world" is evidence of his "anti-colonialism"

D'Souza claims on page 38 that Obama "must constantly translate his ideology into terms that are accessible and palatable to the American people," adding:

    He cannot say that he hates the rich, so he has to talk about fairness and equality. He cannot say America is a nuclear menace to the world, so he has to say that he wants a nuclear-free world. He cannot say he thinks Wall Street is evil, so he must accuse the investment firms of not looking out for the interests of Main Street. Obama sometimes blows it; he doesn't always succeed with his anti-colonial marketing. Even his attempt, however, is impressive; this is a skill he has been honing for many years.

REALITY: If this is true, then Ronald Reagan was also "anti-colonial"

Obama, in his April 5, 2009, speech in Prague, called for a world free of nuclear weapons:

    OBAMA: So today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. I'm not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly -- perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change.

In his second inaugural address, Ronald Reagan also called for a world without nuclear weapons:

    REAGAN: There is only one way safely and legitimately to reduce the cost of national security, and that is to reduce the need for it. And this we are trying to do in negotiations with the Soviet Union. We are not just discussing limits on a further increase of nuclear weapons. We seek, instead, to reduce their number. We seek the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth.

Many delusional anti-American conservatives are eating this up like crack addicts given a fix of all the loony unsubstantiated urban myths they believe. hey its is a book it must be true and since they want all these falsehoods to be true, of course they do not perform any fact checking. Fact checking requires energy and integrity, something sorely lacking in the radical anti-American conservative movement.