Dreams from a Crackpot Universe

One of the problems with journalism is its love of novelty. Fret not that an argument makes no sense, love its novelty instead! This has been exacerbated in the internet era which, for all its many virtues, has been a boom-time for crackpots. One assumes that this explains why Forbes magazine, desperate for some attention, decided to give Dinesh D’Souza its cover this week to argue that, despite appearances to the contrary, Barack Obama’s presidency only makes any kind of sense if you remember that he’s actually wanting to honour the memory of the father he barely knew and destroy the United States of America. Obama, you see, is secretly channelling “the ideology of the Luo tribesman”. Yes indeedy. Let D’Souza explain it himself:

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America’s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe’s resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West.

Daniel Larison tears this piffle apart but you can see why this ingenious article would receive plenty of attention and this is doubtless why no-one at Forbes cared that the magazine would look daft for running this tripe. And, of course, there are idiots who will agree with D’Souza and so it’s no surprise that our old chum Newt Gingrich is quick-off-the-mark to tell us:

Gingrich says that D’Souza has made a “stunning insight” into Obama’s behavior — the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.”

“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]?” Gingrich asks. “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,” Gingrich tells us.

“I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating — none of which was true,” Gingrich continues. “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.”

Given that Gingrich has almost no chance of winning the Presidency it’s easy to see this as just more nonsense designed to keep him in the public eye. However since he takes himself seriously and, bafflingly, is treated with some seriousness by some not-obviously-nuts people we may have to endure Newt’s haverings for a while yet. He’s the Donald Trump of would-be Presidential candidates: ridiculous but ineradicable.

Still, all this makes one pine for the George HW Bush presidency – the last President whose behaviour wasn’t (I think!) subjected to crack-pot psychological babble of a kind too absurd even for daytime television or wallet-thieving televangelists.

Meanwhile, sensible, pragmatic Republicans – Daniels, Christie et al – must wonder what on earth is going on.