Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

Gingrich: Obama Wants Whitey’s Money

David Frum September 13th, 2010 at 10:51 am

Newt Gingrich upped the rhetoric against the president on Friday night. Interviewed by National Review’s Robert Costa, Gingrich cited Dinesh D’Souza’s cover story in Forbes.

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.”

With the Forbes story and now the Gingrich endorsement, the argument that Obama is an infiltrating alien, a deceiving foreigner – and not just any kind of alien, but specifically a Third World alien – has been absorbed almost to the very core of the Republican platform for November 2010.

Rush Limbaugh has been claiming for almost 2 years that President Obama is bent upon “redistribution” and “reparations.” Following D’Souza, Gingrich has now stepped up to suggest that this redistribution is motivated by anti-white racial revenge. If Obama wants to expand health coverage, tighten bank regulation, and create government make-work projects it’s not because he shares the same general outlook on the world as Walter Mondale or Ted Kennedy or so many other liberals, living and dead, all of them white and northern European. No, Obama wants to do what he does because he thinks like an African, and not just any kind of African but (in D’Souza’s phrase) “a Luo tribesman.”

It is to vindicate this African tribal dream that Obama wishes to raise the taxes of upper-income taxpayers and redistribute money away from these meritorious individuals. D’Souza contends that Obama is acting to vindicate his father’s supposed dream of overthrowing the global order and ending the global domination of the white race over other peoples.

If Obama shares his father’s anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more. The anticolonialist believes that since the rich have prospered at the expense of others, their wealth doesn’t really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just. Recall what Obama Sr. said in his 1965 paper: There is no tax rate too high, and even a 100% rate is justified under certain circumstances.

Prepare yourselves: at his deepest personal level, what Barack Obama really wants to do is strip white property owners of everything they possess.

Obviously I don’t know, but I’d venture that Gingrich’s words were not a one-drink-too-many rhetorical excess. Through his career, Gingrich has emphasized the use of harsh and stereotyping language to draw political contrasts, as in the famous 1996 GOPAC memo. [ Language: A Key Mechanism of Control - http://www.wfu.edu/~zulick/454/gopac.html

Earlier this year, Gingrich deployed the phrase “secular socialist machine.” Adopting as his own D’Souza’s new epithet about “the ideology of the Luo tribesman” revs Gingrich’s attack into a higher gear. It would be very characteristic of Gingrich to road-test the new concept with friendly journalists and audiences. If they applaud, we’ll hear more of it.

Happily, the first responses are negative. Byron York sarcastically tweeted today: “Say you’re a GOP leader. With elections approaching, the public prefers your position on major issues of the day.” “Your Democratic opponents are suffering massive self-inflicted wounds. So what do you as a GOP leader do?” “Attack Obama’s ‘Kenyan, anti-colonial’ worldview, of course.”

But remember: Newt Gingrich no longer leads the congressional Republicans. Of course he wants to see Republicans elected (and to receive credit for helping to elect them). But as he prepares to run for president, he has other priorities – and other problems. Gingrich endorsed TARP. He has acknowledged that human activity is warming the globe. He attempted to work with Hillary Clinton on healthcare reform and with Al Sharpton (!) on education. He endorsed Dede Scozzafava in the NY-23 special election. As Speaker, he joined Bill Clinton to pass the S-Chip program, a big expansion of the healthcare entitlement. And then there is the tangled complexity of his personal life. Gingrich must feel very vulnerable to the kind of attack from the right that has slammed so many Republicans this year.

So it’s his mission now to present himself as the most ferocious right-winger in the race. Confident (over-confident) that he can best Sarah Palin among business-minded and ideas-minded Republicans, he wants to deny her or some other Tea Party style challenger any footing to attack him as a compromise-minded moderate. Calling President Obama a Kenyan fits into that strategy.

As for the underlying D’Souza article that inspired Gingrich, what is there to be said? When last was there such a brazen outburst of race-baiting in the service of partisan politics at the national level? George Wallace took more care to sound race-neutral.

Here’s the question, though, for the rest of us: Why do Forbes (which presumably has many choices of cover material) and Gingrich imagine that such a message will resonate with their conservative audience? Nothing more offends conservatives than liberal accusations of racial animus. Yet here is racial animus, unconcealed and unapologetic, and it is seized by savvy editors and an ambitious politician as just the material to please a conservative audience. That’s an insult to every conservative in America.

Conservatives object to the Obama administration as too expensive, too regulatory, too intrusive, too beholden to Democratic special interest groups, and too apologetic about America’s role in the world. It’s a libel to claim that we object to the administration as too black or too alien. Bad enough when the libel is issued by liberals. Much worse when it is heard from our own writers, from magazines that speak to us, from political leaders who would speak for us.


Embedded links
http://www.frumforum.com/gingrich-obama-wants-whiteys-money