Obama's Dreams (Thomas Sowell)

Creators Syndicate ^ | September 4, 2012 | Thomas Sowell

[jazusamo]

After reading Barack Obama's book "Dreams from My Father," it became painfully clear that he has not been searching for the truth, because he assumed from an early age that he had already found the truth — and now it was just a question of filling in the details and deciding how to change things.

Obama did not simply happen to encounter a lot of people on the far left fringe during his life. As he spells out in his book, he actively sought out such people. There is no hint of the slightest curiosity on his part about other visions of the world that might be weighed against the vision he had seized upon.

As Professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School has pointed out, Obama made no effort to take part in the marketplace of ideas with other faculty members when he was teaching a law course there. What would be the point, if he already knew the truth and knew that they were wrong?

This would be a remarkable position to take, even for a learned scholar who had already spent decades canvassing a vast amount of information and views on many subjects. But Obama was already doctrinaire at a very early age — and ill-informed or misinformed on both history and economics.

His statement in "Dreams from My Father" about how white men went to Africa to "drag away the conquered in chains" betrays his ignorance of African history.

The era of the Atlantic slave trade and the era of European conquests across the continent of Africa were different eras. During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, most of Africa was ruled by Africans, who sold some of their slaves to white men.

[uncommonsense]

"Those who called themselves "progressives" have worked like termites to erode and destroy America's foundations in liberty"

I had an exterminator describe how termites behave as a collective and calling progressives "termites" is spot on. They survive as a group with predefined divisions of labor, they work tirelessly to find large sources of food (our homes) to feed the giver of life - the queen (their state), they know exactly how much they can destroy before they bring down the structure or give away their destructive activities, and they make calculated sacrifices of their workers to break through chemical barriers if they run low on food (other people's money). The whole ecosystem is the insect world of liberalism (or maybe the other way around).

[loveliberty2]

Thank you, uncommonsense, for such an apt description of the parallels between the activities of termites and those of the movement in America variously called "liberal" and "progressive," where those who would undermine and destroy the foundations of liberty have combined to erode and destroy the very supports essential to that liberty.

Unwilling to call what they have done by the ugly name of "censorship," they systematically have removed America's founding ideas from the so-called "education" system they controlled, thereby robbing new generations of understanding the Source of their lives, rights, liberty, and laws.

A massive effort must be undertaken to restore the foundations, using every means available, so that future generations will not live in slavery to those whose ideas are counterfeit.