"Dinesh D’Souza Sentenced in Manhattan Federal Court to Five Years of Probation for Campaign Finance Fraud"
That, too.
5) What is D'Souza's view of Barack Obama?Not positive! D'Souza has a distinctive grand unifying theory of Obama, expressed in a 2010 Forbes feature; his books vx[p]6700758[t]w[r]google.com[d]D]The Roots of Obama's Rage, vx[p]6700758[t]w[r]google.com[d]D]America: Imagine a World Without Her, and vx[p]6700758[t]w[r]google.com[d]D]Obama's America: Unmaking the American Dream; and his two documentaries. He rejects the frequent conservative attack that Obama is a European-style (or perhaps Alinskyan) socialist at heart, arguing instead that Obama is best understood through the lens of anticolonialism, in particular Kenya's struggle against British imperialism.
Obama was taught by his father, D'Souza argues, to view the US as an imperialist actor trampling upon states both through outright war (as in Vietnam or Iraq) and through economic exploitation, a natural successor to the more formal role that the British Empire played in much of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. "From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction," D'Souza writes. "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."
Everything Obama does can be understood in light of these fundamental commitments, D'Souza believes: "Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world’s energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more … Obama supports the Ground Zero mosque because to him 9/11 is the event that unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and Afghanistan. He views some of the Muslims who are fighting against America abroad as resisters of U.S. imperialism."
As was the case with The Enemy at Home, many conservatives rejected D'Souza's theory as preposterous, noting that there are plenty of other, much more plausible explanations for why the Democratic president has pursued policies roughly in line with the Democratic platform, and that Obama's memoir made it very clear that he, far from wanting to emulate his father's politics, was deeply disappointed in him.
In a particularly pointed piece, The Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson identified "misstatements of fact, leaps in logic, and pointlessly elaborate argumentation" throughout the book. "There is, indeed, a name for the beliefs that motivate President Obama, but it’s not anticolonialism; it’s not even socialism. It’s liberalism!" he writes. "Nearly everything that Obama has done as president, including the policies that D’Souza cites as proof of his inherited anticolonial ideology, would have been as eagerly pursued by President John Edwards or President John Kerry."
For liberals, meanwhile, "Kenyan anticolonialist" became something of a punchline. Matt Steinglass at the Economist decided to turn the tables on D'Souza and concocted a byzantine explanation for D'Souza's conservatism, based upon his family's caste, Catholicism, and position within the Portuguese Indian territory of Goa, that is just as unnecessary as D'Souza's explanation for Obama's liberalism. James Mann at the New Republic added, for good measure, "anti-colonialism is itself not exactly alien to American traditions; our country was founded on it."
But some important conservatives took D'Souza seriously. In 2010, Newt Gingrich called his argument "the most profound insight I have read in the past six years about Barack Obama," adding, "Only if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior can you piece together [Obama’s actions]. That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior."
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