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.D'Souza cites other policies, such as supporting the Ground Zero victory mosque or changing NASA's mission to Muslim-outreach, that otherwise seem inexplicable but are consistent with his having adopted his father's anti-colonialism as a guiding philosophy. Obama's reverence for his father is well supported by passages from Obama's autobiography. D'Souza writes:
Over the weekend, Newt Gingrich picked up on this theory. Now the left is going nuts. MediaMatters, the Soros-funded propaganda site, says that this makes Gingrich (and Fox News) racist. How exactly is never explained. Is the idea that Obama might revere his father racist? Is the idea that his father was influenced by his time in Kenya racist? Is it racist to suggest that someone is an anti-colonialist? No, the charge doesn't make any sense.In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir "the record of a personal, interior journey--a boy's search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American." And again, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself." Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, "My father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!"
The climax of Obama's narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father's grave. It is riveting: "When my tears were finally spent," he writes, "I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago--all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father's pain."
The blog, PoliticsPlus, takes this one step further by writing:
In this latest, Newt Gingrich has once again flirted with birtherism to emphasize Barack Obama’s Kenyan roots.So, suggesting that Obama is influenced by his father is now "flirting with birtherism"? Is it PoliticsPlus' claim that Obama could only have been influenced by his father if Obama was born in Kenya? No, of course not.
Since rational thought can be hard work, it is understandable that the left prefers name-calling.
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