Shikha Dalmia: Obama is a Keynesian Stimulator, Not a Kenyan Anti-Colonialist
[Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a Forbes columnist.]
Just when the ObamaCare debate was heating up, I was dining with a renowned conservative professor with impeccable Ivy credentials when the conversation suddenly turned surreal. Encouraged that I too had deep misgivings about the direction in which the new president was taking the country, the good professor opined that America had put in the White House a subversive radical. Obama wasn’t a well intentioned but misguided liberal, he insisted, he was motivated by actual malice toward America. What evidence did he have for this rather bizarre suggestion, I asked, shocked? Among the things the professor cited was that in his public appearances, Obama communicated with a cabal of fellow America haters in secret hand gestures. For example, during one speech, Obama stroked his cheek with his middle finger extended to convey “fuck you, America,” the professor said imitating Obama.
I had completely forgotten that conversation, dismissing it as the crazy ruminations of a kooky academic, till Forbes put on its cover Dinesh D’Souza’s latest opus, offering as sophisticated an explanation for the Obama agenda as the professor’s hand-gesture theory.
D’Souza’s central thesis is that the ideology that motivates Obama is not socialism or some variant thereof. Rather, it is anti-colonialism, something that he inherited from his long-dead Kenyan father whom he saw only twice. According to this doctrine, which reigned supreme in the 1960s when Obama’s father was cutting his intellectual teeth, rich countries got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries. Even after the colonial powers depart, this doctrine holds, poor countries “continue to be manipulated from abroad by powerful corporate and plutocratic elites,” as D’Souza puts it.
How do we know Obama still subscribes to a worldview that is now passé even in the Third World where it originated, thanks to the post-liberalization success of the Indian and Chinese economies? Because he constantly rails against the rich for not paying their fair share in taxes. And he believes that Americans engage in unseemly conspicuous consumption. As proof, D’Souza trots out this Obama quote: “(Americans) consume more than 20% of the world’s oil but have less than 2% of the world’s resources.” Anti-colonialism, D’Souza posits, offers a unified explanation for Obama’s foreign and domestic policy initiatives...
Read entire article at Forbes
Just when the ObamaCare debate was heating up, I was dining with a renowned conservative professor with impeccable Ivy credentials when the conversation suddenly turned surreal. Encouraged that I too had deep misgivings about the direction in which the new president was taking the country, the good professor opined that America had put in the White House a subversive radical. Obama wasn’t a well intentioned but misguided liberal, he insisted, he was motivated by actual malice toward America. What evidence did he have for this rather bizarre suggestion, I asked, shocked? Among the things the professor cited was that in his public appearances, Obama communicated with a cabal of fellow America haters in secret hand gestures. For example, during one speech, Obama stroked his cheek with his middle finger extended to convey “fuck you, America,” the professor said imitating Obama.
I had completely forgotten that conversation, dismissing it as the crazy ruminations of a kooky academic, till Forbes put on its cover Dinesh D’Souza’s latest opus, offering as sophisticated an explanation for the Obama agenda as the professor’s hand-gesture theory.
D’Souza’s central thesis is that the ideology that motivates Obama is not socialism or some variant thereof. Rather, it is anti-colonialism, something that he inherited from his long-dead Kenyan father whom he saw only twice. According to this doctrine, which reigned supreme in the 1960s when Obama’s father was cutting his intellectual teeth, rich countries got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries. Even after the colonial powers depart, this doctrine holds, poor countries “continue to be manipulated from abroad by powerful corporate and plutocratic elites,” as D’Souza puts it.
How do we know Obama still subscribes to a worldview that is now passé even in the Third World where it originated, thanks to the post-liberalization success of the Indian and Chinese economies? Because he constantly rails against the rich for not paying their fair share in taxes. And he believes that Americans engage in unseemly conspicuous consumption. As proof, D’Souza trots out this Obama quote: “(Americans) consume more than 20% of the world’s oil but have less than 2% of the world’s resources.” Anti-colonialism, D’Souza posits, offers a unified explanation for Obama’s foreign and domestic policy initiatives...