JACK CASHILL DISSENTS FROM DINESH D’SOUZA’s THEORY ON OBAMA’s WORLDVIEW–SOMEWHAT

A few days ago, we published D’Souza: Barack Obama’s Anticolonial Mindset, which commented on the Forbes article by Dinesh D’Souza on Obama’s anti-colonial mindset.

Now there’s more discussion on the point by Jack Cashill, who does good work.

What D’Souza Doesn’t Get Quite Right

Dinesh D’Souza has long been one of America’s shrewdest and bravest political observers. His much discussed Forbes article “How Obama Thinks,” a prelude to his forthcoming book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, burnishes that reputation. Indeed, Newt Gingrich describes D’Souza’s thesis as the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.”

As much as I admire D’Souza, however, I must take issue with his argument. Yes, Obama does seem to espouse a certain inchoate anticolonialism, but the “dreams” do not come so much from his father as from his mother, and they have been given voice by Obama’s muse, terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers. As a result, Obama’s ideology is less coherent and more malleable than D’Souza would have the reader believe.

Having read all of Jack Cashill’s pieces at American Thinker, I think his case is persuasive. But, perhaps this is just the thought of one of Cashill’s converts?

Jack Cashill makes a persuasive case, however.

We’ll call it the “Cashill Corollary to the D’Souza Theory of Obama’s Worldview.”

MORE: Ayers is a Violent, Revolutionary Communist. What is Obama? Probably the gentler, friendlier face on Ayer’s philosophy. Except for Obama’s “get in their face” comment, he doesn’t appear to be violent.

STILL MORE: Neocolonial Dreams from Obama’s Mother. When your mother is a product of the 60s, what are you to expect from the son? A fusion of sorts of D’Souza and Cashill and others by George Neumayr of American Spectator.

by Mondo Frazier
image: dbkp file

Back to DBKP Front Page.

Your Ad Here

THE STATE OF CIVIL LIBERTIES IN THE MIND of JUSTICE STEPHEN BREYER:

BURNING THE FLAG is PROTECTED SPEECH
BURNING A CROSS is PROTECTED SPEECH
BURNING A KORAN? JUSTICE BREYER SAYS YOU’VE CROSSED A LINE!

Justice Stephen Breyer: Is Burning Koran ‘Shouting Fire In A Crowded Theater?

Last week we saw a Florida Pastor – with 30 members in his church – threaten to burn Korans which lead to riots and killings in Afghanistan. We also saw Democrats and Republicans alike assume that Pastor Jones had a Constitutional right to burn those Korans. But Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told me on “GMA” that he’s not prepared to conclude that — in the internet age — the First Amendment condones Koran burning.

“Holmes said it doesn’t mean you can shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater,” Breyer told me. “Well, what is it? Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?”

It’s tempting to guess that Breyer was joking, but to liberal justices the law is whatever they say it is at the moment. Sometimes, the First Amendment is inconvenient.

Ed Morrissey, Justice Breyer: No right to burn Korans in First Amendment?

Hopefully, they put more thought into it than Justice Breyer does in this argument. The “fire in a crowded theater” standard is intended to limit government intrusion on free speech, not enable an expansion of it. It means that only when speech that will directly and immediately result in a threat to human life in the proximate setting can the government criminalize it — and it has to contain the element of malicious falsehood as well. After all, no one will prosecute a person who yells “Fire!” in a crowded theater when it’s really on fire, or when the person yelling honestly believes it to be so.

Otherwise, Breyer’s argument would put government in charge of judging the qualitative value of all speech. Would speech urging an invasion of Pakistan be therefore criminalized, too? After all, it might cause Pakistanis somewhere to riot and people to die, even if the argument is largely discredited in contemporary American politics.

As Morrissey sums up, “Put simply, Breyer couldn’t have possibly been more wrong in this answer, and one has to wonder just what kind of standard Breyer will apply to future cases of free speech.”

There’s no need to “wonder.” Free speech is whatever Stephen Breyer fits it into his ideology. The law is not much of a standard or guide, apparently.

Burning a flag is free speech; burning a cross is free speech; but, burning a Koran is a bridge too far.

Thanks to Barack Obama, this sort of free-floating thinking masquerading as legal interpretation will be on the court for years to come in the minds of wise Latina, identity politics posterchild Sonia Sotomayor and malleable careerist Elean Kagan.

To Stephen Breyer,burning stuff is only free speech only if it doesn’t insult a protected group–like conservatives.

Free speech is in the eye of the beholder–and Justice Breyer apparently feels he’s got two of the only eighteen eyes that truly matter.

by Mondo Frazier
image: Jamie

Back to DBKP Front Page.

Your Ad Here

TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OF OUR PRESIDENT’S MANY MYSTERIOUS POLICY MOVES

Dinesh D’Souza has a most excellent piece in the next Forbes. Part of it is posted on the magazine’s website.

It really is a must-read for a credible explanation of our President’s worldview.

How Obama Thinks

Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government’s control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama’s approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.

The President’s actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. 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.

More strange behavior: Obama’s June 15, 2010 speech in response to the Gulf oil spill focused not on cleanup strategies but rather on the fact that Americans “consume more than 20% of the world’s oil but have less than 2% of the world’s resources.” Obama railed on about “America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels.” What does any of this have to do with the oil spill? Would the calamity have been less of a problem if America consumed a mere 10% of the world’s resources?

The oddities go on and on. Obama’s Administration has declared that even banks that want to repay their bailout money may be refused permission to do so. Only after the Obama team cleared a bank through the Fed’s “stress test” was it eligible to give taxpayers their money back. Even then, declared Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the Administration might force banks to keep the money.

There are more inexplicable Obama behaviors detailed. But, D’Souza is just getting warmed up.

He then tries to make sense of it all. He lets Obama do some explaining in his own words.

What then is Obama’s dream? We don’t have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father’s dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn’t writing about his father’s dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.

So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.

An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa’s struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country’s future.

I know a great deal about anticolonialism, because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country’s independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century. To most Americans, however, anticolonialism is an unfamiliar idea, so let me explain it.

This is just the tip of the anticolonialism iceberg.

Read the entire thing.

It’s a keeper.

by Mondo Frazier
image: dbkp file

Back to DBKP Front Page.

Your Ad Here

It’s almost a foregone conclusion that the second scoop of the double dip is coming.

Some snapshots to add to the glorious economic mosaic that is Obamanomics.

EXCLUSIVE: Outlook Gloomy at Secret Billionaire Meeting

For 25 years, legendary Wall Street strategist Byron Wien, now with The Blackstone Group, has held summer meetings with high net worth individuals to get their outlook on the global economy and investing. This year’s group, totaling fifty individuals and including more than 10 billionaires, was decidedly pessimistic on the U.S. economy, investment opportunities and the Obama administration.

“They saw the United States in a long-term slow growth environment with the near-term risk of recession quite real,” said Wien, in a commentary to Blackstone clients. “The Obama administration was viewed as hostile to business and that discouraged both hiring and investment. Companies and entrepreneurs were reluctant to add workers because they didn’t know what their healthcare costs or taxes were going to be.”

When you’ve lost George Soros–oh wait, unless he’s shorting the dollar.

George Will brings tidings of Cash for Clunkers–among other things.

Americans have good reason not to believe in Obamanomics

Does this increase anyone’s confidence? About as much as noting the one-year anniversary of the end of another of the administration’s brainstorms.

The used-car market is an important mechanism for redistributing wealth to low-income persons: The price of a car drops when it is driven out of the dealership, but much of its transportation value remains when it enters the used-car market. Unfortunately for low-income people, the average price of a three-year-old automobile has increased more than 10 percent since last summer. This is largely because the Car Allowance Rebate System, aka “Cash for Clunkers,” which ended in August 2009, cut the supply of used cars.

Cash for Clunkers provided up to $4,500 to persons who traded in a car in order to purchase a new car with better gas mileage, but it stipulated that the used car had to be scrapped. The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby reports that a study by Edmunds.com shows that all but 125,000 of the 700,000 cars sold during the clunkers program would have been bought even if no subsidy had been available. If this is so, each incremental sale cost taxpayers $24,000.

Don’t know if this has anything to do with the subject matter of this post, but just in case, Regulators Back New Bank Rules to Avert Crises:

BASEL, Switzerland — The world’s top bank regulators agreed Sunday on far-reaching new rules intended to make the global banking industry safer and protect international economies from future financial disasters.

The new requirements will more than triple the amount of capital that banks must hold in reserve, an effort to move banks toward more conservative positions and force them to maintain a larger cushion against potential losses. They come two years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off a worldwide banking crisis that required billions in government bailouts.

Examiner Editorial: Bribing the public with the public’s money

A new report by the Federal Reserve points to “widespread signs of deceleration” in the U.S. economy. No kidding! These signs follow what the Fed calls a “burst” of growth in the last quarter of 2009 and first quarter of 2010 triggered by President Obama’s $862 billion stimulus package. Unfortunately, the burst failed to help anybody except special interests like unions and public employees. Note the Fed’s evasive word choice: Another word for “decelerating” would be “contracting.” That’s what happens in an economy debilitated by high unemployment, government over-regulation, spiraling public debt, and whopping tax increases looming for the most productive people and businesses.

The Fed report also warned that consumers are not spending like they used to. In other words, they are instead prudently doing what Washington politicians seem incapable of doing — reducing debt instead of piling on more of it. Consumers are thus casting an overwhelming vote of “no confidence” in Washington’s ability to put the nation back on the road to prosperity in the age of Obama. When you add taxpayer bailouts of ineptly or dishonestly managed corporations and a massive expansion of health care entitlements, it becomes clear that America is at a historic crossroad.

The editorial goes on to paint a picture of what happens when more people are taking than are contributing tax dollars.

And lastly, John Boehner, House Minority Leader, demonstrates why the Republican majority–if it happens–might just be a very short-lived thing: let’s let the tax cuts expire for those who would create the jobs.

Boehner: I’ll Drop Tax Cut for Rich If I Have To

The leading Republican in the House, and a vocal proponent of allowing an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for all Americans, including the wealthiest 3% of earners, objected to charges by President Obama that Republicans are holding tax breaks for the bottom 97% of earners hostage unless the wealthiest also get an extension.

In a pre-taped interview to appear on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday, Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner said that, if approving a bill to extend breaks for middle class income Americans were “the only option,” he would support it.

Republicans have four years to clean up such empty-headed thinking before a large number of conservatives bolt for another party. A Tea Party?

Maybe. But if Boehner’s remarks are the way the Republican leadership is thinking, they won’t remain in the leadership for long.

by Mondo Frazier
image: dbkp file

Back to DBKP Front Page.

Your Ad Here

US News has a semi-interesting article on the “17″ Republicans it claims are in the running for the presidency for 2012. As usual with USN, readers should take the report with a grain of salt.

At Least 17 Republicans in 2012 Presidential Election Field

When Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour told us this week that the 2012 GOP presidential field will be “wide open,” we had no idea just how many Republicans might be marching to Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada for the opening caucuses and primaries. Including Barbour, who will decide after the fall midterm elections but who is expected to run in 2012, Washington political insiders tell us that nine Republicansare almost a lock to run and another eight are considering a presidential bid.

The piece’s author, Paul Bedard, counts noses as well as anyone with the “big guns” and includes Palin, Romney, Huckabee, etc.

But in the second tier, Bedard throws in SC State Senator Nikki Haley–who hasn’t won any office of consequence yet.

Still, it’s an interesting piece because this is the season for speculation–no matter how offbeat.

The piece does have the additional value of including Gov. Barbour of Mississippi, who just acknowledged that he’ll think about it after the elections.

by Mondo Frazier
image: dbkp file

Back to DBKP Front Page.

Your Ad Here

[Click image to enlarge; click again to super-size it]

Hillary Clinton is suddenly contradicting her boss on matters of foreign policy. After 19 months of being part of the problem, Clinton has apparently decided that people will remember what she said and the actions she took during her months as Obama’s Secretary of State.

Obama Rejects Hillary Clinton Mexico-Colombia Comparison

A day after his secretary of state likened Mexico to Columbia in the bad old days of 20 years ago, a narco state struggling with an insurgency at the same time, President Barack Obama rejected the comparison.

Reuters reports that Obama made the comments to La Opinion, a Los Angeles-based Spanish language newspaper. According to the news service, a transcript of the interview was available only in Spanish from the White House. No English-language version was handy.

This is the second time within a week that the SoS and the president have had substantial differences of opinion on foreign policy.

How long will this go on?

Figure it to continue as long as Obama poll numbers head south.

MORE: Obama-Clinton Rematch 2010: Obama Corrects Hillary on Mexico

by Mondo Frazier
image: Jamie

Back to DBKP Front Page.

Your Ad Here

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE LIPSTICK COMES OFF OF THE PIG?

Sometimes, a piece appears that nails it. Ed Driscoll has assembled such a piece. From It’s Deja Coakley All Over Again:

“With less than an hour before President Obama’s scheduled speech, 75 seats remained empty in the recreation center at Cuyahoga Community College’s Western Campus,” the Cleveland Plain-Dealer reports today:

So organizers went around campus and recruited more students to fill the seats.

Student Jennifer Rahal, of Parma Heights, whose class was canceled today, was working on her art work in the coffee shop in the basement of the building when the call went out for more guests.

After dropping off their stuff at a bag check, the newly invited guests cleared security and filed into the gym.

The supporting evidence gathered by Driscoll builds a damning case against, not Obama–who is and was merely being himself–but the Liberal Progressives who ushered him to power, thereby absolving themselves of having to discuss his lack of experience or any accomplishments.

Particularly effective is inclusion of Victor Davis Hanson’s ‘Like a Dog’: The Origins of Barack Obama’s Petulance.

I would be miffed too if I were Obama

Obama in just twenty months has developed a reputation for being petulant, unusually sensitive to the normal run-of-the-mill criticism. His latest pushback was his strangest so far: “And they’re not always happy with me. They talk about me like a dog. That’s not in my prepared remarks, it’s just — but it’s true.”

Given that Obama has previously called out talk radio critics by name — Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh — attacked everything from limb-lopping surgeons to vacationing at Las Vegas, and in condescending fashion tsk-tsked those who attend Glen Beck rallies, rural Pennsylvanians, and his own “typical white person” grandmother who raised him, his thin-skin touchiness seems inexplicable.

Surely the most powerful man in the world knows that when you elevate talk radio critics to near-equal adversaries, then one cannot complain that they press their now high-profile serial attacks even further.

It gets better. Two pieces well worth the time spent reading them.

Obama is over-rated as an orator off-teleprompter; when the president ventures in the impromptu, he’s a human Gaffe-O-Matic. But in the realm of condescending snark, he’s not bad. Remember his crack about lipstick on a pig, with its sly reference to Sarah Palin?

Obama’s lipstick is gone and his former boosters are left to wonder, “How’s the market for 19-month-old pork chops?”

by Mondo Frazier
image: dbkp file

Back to DBKP Front Page.

Your Ad Here