David Harsanyi has a great piece today in the Denver Post, both taking issue with Dinesh D’Souza “tortured contention” about the Kenyan roots of Obama’s politics (which Newt Gingrich strangely embraced) and reminding Republicans not to personalize their opposition to the president.
He concludes that “Obama’s political behavior might be alien to common sense and good government, but not alien to the United States.” Indeed. The Democrat is not the first to propose sweeping statist schemes.
He warns that “if Republicans begin incorporating the festering obsession with President Barack Obama’s
birthplace, loyalties, origins or religion into their official argument, they will have blown it.” I don’t think there’s much risk of mainstream Republicans doing that, but this warning bears repetition.
Conservatives should instead
. . . make an uncluttered argument — using the empirical data of a collapsing economy — that less spending, less regulation and less government is the way to create more prosperity. Dragging Third World colonialism into it — and I can say this with near certitude — is a bad idea on a number of levels.
Read the whole thing.
*Obama Derangement Syndrome.
Here, here to that. To my shock, I find that I have come around to the same view of Obama’s citizenship status as the wild-eyed “birthers”. But even so, I still realize that candidates need to be pragmatic enough to not use that as core campaign billy-club because it will just damage their credibility and viability as an elected official in the process. It is crystal clear what factors the electorate are basing their decisions on and it is not about birth documents. The only paperwork we’re interested is the kind that will pay our bills and keep us in our homes.
If Pres. Obama had been raised in a household where his father was present, I might be the “Kenyan anti-colonialist” meme…but he wasn’t. He was raised by his mother, his mother’s second-husband’s family in Indonesia…and I think most importantly by his grandparents in Hawaii. He spent his most formative years attending an elite private high school where he was known as “Barry Dunham”.
I don’t buy the argument…Obama’s “radicalization” came later in life and from other more domestic sources.
Why should the Republican party even bother with ad hominem attacks? They have the truth; the course this country is on is unsustainable, and we not only need to spend less, we need to cut some of the costly programs we cant ever hope to fund. This ship is sinking!
It is the Democratic party who has no platform. National health care was the liberal holy-grail……..but they’re done that already. Now after enacting the program that will solve every last problem the US faces, whats left for the DNC to do?
Really, what would justify more taxing and more spending? The manufactured crisis addressed by Cap-N-Trade, global warming?
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Agreed: One can argue against Obama’s destruction of America on policy and moral grounds alone, with no reference to Obama’s person or background (real or imagined).
I know that the Left is all about personalizing and demonizing – the Alinsky playbook – and that some on the Right have had Alinsky-envy these last couple of years. But it’s a huge mistake for the Right. The fact that your degraded enemy uses degraded tactics and they sometimes work for him, does not mean you can pull it off. Nor that you should try.
We should want to stick to the issues, no matter how Obama tries to divert us with hiding his past, making it an easier target.
My comment on the topic of John Boehner goes so well here I’ll repeat it:
<blockquote cite="By Mentioning Boehner 8 times in one speech, Obama added John B. to his long list of those he tried to marginalize by demonization (a la Saul Ailinsky).
GWBush is no longer working as Obama’s personal demon.
Neither is Sarah Palin.
When he tried it on Humana Health, demanding they come to DC and retract their ads against ObamaCare, Humana simply ignored him.
Demonizing one’s opponent only works in the court of public opinion.
It does not work in real courts.
And it is wearing thin with the public, too, it seems.
Any thusly demonized opponent who refuses to come down to Obama’s level looks lofty-minded as they stick to issues instead.
Why is anyone surprised that Gingrich embraced the allegation of “kenyan anti-colonialism”. The man is a racist and with his eyes on 2012 he’s throwing red meat to the legions of “birthers” in the Tea Party that now controls the once-great Republican Party and will name the presidential candidate in two years.
It’s not just a matter of Democrats and Republicans. The ‘populist method’ is seriously flawed!
Are we conscious, thinking creatures, or do we only react to stimuli? Are we political jihadists who’s existence is determined by one ‘outrage!’…..then the next ‘outrage!’…..then the next ‘outrage!’……as they are arranged to appear by our leaders?
It’s ‘mob mentality’ we organize through shock value alone. That thing that sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, our self-awareness, is surrendered if we react to things emotionally instead logically. People are most easily manipulated when their individuality is suppressed.
Didn’t we all get our fill of this crap in high school? (“OMG, Jenny is such a slut!”) A idea has no more meaning if it’s printed on an activists sign, or if a group of hippies chant it in harmony. Peer pressure is still ‘group pressure’ vs ‘individual choice’. It’s yet another reminder that even within ‘the peoples party’, its still NOT OK TO BE DIFFERENT.
Reacting to the shock value of a statement is something that a lynch-mob does. Lies should be countered with the truth, not a new group of lies. The choice we offer should be more than moving people from one mob to another.
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It might be hard for some people to accept this double standard, insofar as we saw for how many years Bush’s critics personalized everything about him. They brought up his supposed cocaine habit, two weeks when he didn’t show up for Reserves duty, his accent, whether he was really cutting brush, childhood traumas and Oedipal analyses of his parents’ personalities…. It went on and on an on. It’s tough not to stoop, to take the higher ground. But folks have to. I agree with GayPatriot on this one.
I must confess, though, to taking no small amount of pleasure in seeing how the lefties squeal in horror at the D’Souza theory. You should read the Maureen Dowd piece about it and savor the irony. One doesn’t need to savor it very long before noticing that Maureen Dowd attempts to revive, once again, her theories about George W. Bush having issues with his father. I guess she’s mad that someone who doesn’t write for the New York Times is engaging in theorizing of that sort.
While I think Harsanyi’s point is a good and reasonable one, I can’t exactly fault D’Souza for writing the article or Gingrich for saying he found it insightful. D’Souza, after all, is using some of the left’s favorite techniques against them by deconstructing exactly what the title “Dreams From My Father” might mean. But more to the point, some of Obama’s actions have been very strange (returning the Churchill bust, snubbing the Norwegian king when he went to get his Nobel Prize, and so on and so forth), and the anti-colonialist theory does have some explanatory power. It doesn’t explain everything, and it’s not without its flaws, but it can be an interesting exercise to try to figure out what is motivating your political opponents. It can also be a futile exercise, but it’s a natural thing for people to wonder about.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that GOP candidates pick up D’Souza’s banner, though I personally think he makes a compelling argument. There ought to be a symbiotic relationship between pundits who criticize Obama philosophically and politicians who attack his policies, but can answer questions like “Is Obama an anti-Colonialist” with, “It doesn’t matter what viewpoint his policies come from, it only matters that his policies are wrong.”
Get it right: It’s Dinesh D’Dhimmi and NOT Dinesh D’Souza. >:-(