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In 2008, I was initially disturbed by Obama’s bizarre hero worship of his absentee Kenyan father which sometimes bordered upon pagan idolatry.

First, Dreams describes feelings Obama claims to have felt as a child or an adolescent. At that age, it's not unheard of for children to idealize an absent parent. But what the book relates doesn't convey whatever Obama's adult feelings may be, any more than an account of your childhood or mine would explain our current emotions and views.

Secondly, we know that the book played up the racial theme and the "Mother from Kansas, Father from Kenya" theme. Without the mixed race background and the foreign (absent) father, there wouldn't have been any story or any book or any fat book contract, so it was in the interest of whoever put the book together to give greater emphasis to a father who really didn't play much of a role in his son's life and to family myths that may not have been very important either.

I really doubt Obama had much emotionally invested in the family myths of Kenyan or Indonesian anti-colonialism that his father's and step-father's families circulated. Look to Chicago -- to Alinsky and to practical Chicago Democratic politics -- if you want to know where Obama is coming from, whatever ideas or feelings may be circulating in the background.

But the anti-colonial theme is very important to Dinesh D'Souza. He even attributes Obama's lack of interest in his half-brother George's difficulties to conflicts over imperialism and colonialism (when it's pretty obvious that family feelings are neither very warm or very deep in the Obama clan). But there's a reason for that. "Anti-colonial" Indians seized Dinesh's home city of Goa in the year he (and Obama) was born. So this stuff is very important to him.

For the rest of us -- not so much. Figuring out the rights and wrongs of colonialism and imperialism and anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism isn't easy. The answer isn't going to be a simple for or against. Pitting Thomas Jefferson and George Washington against "anti-colonialism" also looks way too oversimplified.

You make some interesting points. I doubt that any of us wil ever learn any of the true answers anytime soon. Obama, Inc., is predicated upon myths rather than dreams.

Take the point about his white mother from Kansas. Stanley Ann Dunham’s connections to that Midwestern state are quite thin. She spent most of her childhood and adult life elsewhere. It is sort of like calling Gerald R. Ford a Nebraskan rather than a Michigander. Technically true, but so what?

For all of the time and energy expended on the birth certificate issue, I think the bigger story is to be found in Obama’s suppressed student records. I suspect that he accessed some easy dollars for higher ed by claiming to be a foreign student as a means of cashing in. Barack and Michelle have delusions of adequacy and powerful senses of entitlement. For all of their complaining, both of them have shaken down the USA for every dollar that they could and gotten quite wealthy in the process by feeding at the public trough.