Posted on 05/28/2011 10:50:17 AM PDT by James C. Bennett
Getting inside the mind of Barack Obama has been a challenge for journalists since the 2008 presidential campaign. But during the last two and a half years, as the public has gotten more familiar with the president, the picture is becoming a bit clearer.
On Thursday’s syndicated “Hugh Hewitt” radio show, columnist and National Review Online contributor Mark Steyn offered some thoughts. After host Hugh Hewitt referenced a Wednesday interview with Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe, in which he wondered aloud about what motivated Obama to make grand policy gestures, Steyn suggested that perhaps this was the first time Obama stayed in a job long enough to see his actions effect change.
“I think that is interesting,” Steyn said. “I mean, I think that if you look at Obama, he was wafted upwards basically through Columbia, Harvard Law, the Harvard Law Journal, community organizing, the Illinois legislature, the United States Senate – without ever lingering in those jobs long enough to have to do anything. He basically was someone who was kind of just wafted upwards through the system until he became the beneficiary of the ultimate waft into the Oval Office. And for the first time – for the first time in his life the words he said, and the actions he takes have consequences – for the first time ever. This is a guy who, you know as far as I know, has never had a paper route. This is the first time what he does has consequences and so the senator’s words are interesting.”
Steyn wondered if Obama realized what he was saying last week when he suggested a return to 1967 borders for Israel.
“And the fascinating thing about this 1967 borders stuff is whether he intended it as a conscious shift in U.S. policy that would allow the Israeli government or whether it – with the casual arrogance of his half-wit 12-year-old speechwriter, it just somehow got in there and he finds himself up there saying it,” Steyn said. “That’s what I don’t understand.”
LISTEN TO AUDIO:
However with that in mind, Steyn suggested there were historical and psychological reasons behind the president’s attitude toward long-time U.S. allies, specifically the United Kingdom, India and Israel.
“As we were talking last week, you know I think he has a — I think it’s hard to avoid the growing feeling that he is a contempt for long-time American allies,” he said. “I think he has in that sense a contempt for the United Kingdom and India. I hear from Indian politicians all the time and Indian diplomats who are amazed at his off-handedness toward India. And I think Israel falls into that category too. There are deep-seated historical reasons for this. I think there are perhaps some peculiar psychological ones in the back of his mind too. But I think he thought he was getting in a cheap shot at Israel and as usual, as with all this great, you know – the greatest speaker of all time, after he has given his great speech, the great orator then has to go out and give these mopping-up speeches every 48 hours to try to correct the damage he’s done.”
YOU WILL NEVER SEE OBAMA THE SAME WAY AGAIN
He’s been called many things: a socialist, a radical fellow traveler, a Chicago machine politician, a prince of the civil rights movement, a virtual second coming of Christ, or even a covert Muslim.
But as New York Times bestselling author Dinesh D’Souza points out in this shockingly revealing book, these labels merely slap our own preconceived notions on Barack Obama.
The real Obama is a man shaped by experiences far different from those of most Americans; he is a much stranger, more determined, and exponentially more dangerous man than you’d ever imagined. He is not motivated by the civil rights struggles of African Americans in the 1960s—those battles leave him wholly untouched. He is not motivated by the socialist or Marxist propaganda that hypnotized a whole generation of wooly–minded academics and condescending liberals—those concepts also leave him cold.
What really motivates Barack Obama is an inherited rage—an often masked, but profound rage that comes from his African father; an anticolonialist rage against Western dominance, and most especially against the wealth and power of the very nation Barack Obama now leads. It is this rage that explains the previously inexplicable, and that gives us a startling look at what might lie ahead.
In The Roots of Obama’s Rage you’ll learn: Why Obama’s economic policies are actually designed to make America poorer compared to the rest of the world Why Obama will welcome a nuclear Iran Why Obama sees America as a rogue nation—worse than North Korea The real reason Obama banished a bust of Winston Churchill from the White House and ordered NASA to praise the scientific contributions of Muslims Why Obama would like to make America’s superpower status a thing of the past
Stunning, provocative, original, and telling—no one has better diagnosed who Obama is, what he intends to do, and why he poses an existential threat to America than Dinesh D’Souza in The Roots of Obama’s Rage.
The preceeding is from the Amazon Editorial description. Basically, it goes back to his father’s relationship with the British colonialists in Kenya.
That matches, but doesn’t explain his fascination with Wright’s “church”.
For someone of normal mental capacity to get inside Obama’s mind somehow makes me think of a camel passing through the eye of a needle. This is not a trivial undertaking.
Obama is a radical communist Muslim. Of course he has contempt for all Western nations and their allies. He is a MUSLIM.
Was Koufax the dullest pitcher of his era? Hewitt is a respectable enough guy. But it's truly remarkable the lengths he will go to make his show as excruciatingly boring as possible. The guests he chooses (Steyn excluded, of course) are especially awful.
He recently dedicated the whole three hours to interviewing a southern California monk about his monastery. I couldn't help tuning back in periodically to see if he was indeed still interviewing the monk. Sure enough, the entire three hours. He is the grand champion of tedium, no doubt about it.
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