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[netnet]

These are ad hominem arguments that don't address the substance of what D'sousa has discovered. The arguments go something like this:  Dinesh allegedly believes: A,B,C,D.  Therefore, his model that he claims will explain: F must be of no account, and we should dismiss it without even looking at what he says.

 

 None of these emotional attacks is a logical refutation of his model.

 

No on the contrary.  You cited D'souza per se as a reputable, serious scholar, etc..  I am merely giving you his work.  Ad hominem attacks by definition bring up irrelevant issues.  If you tell me he is credible because of his wise opinions and I show you he has some  crack pot ideas then this is hardly irrelevant.  It's hardly emotional, as you put it, to cite an author's views, particularly if it shows his general methodology. Remember you have to read in context.  Thus, you read, for example Mein Kampf a certain way because Hitler wrote it.  So too you read Freud, in the light of both his other writings and Vienna of the time.

 

Now on to his argument.  D'souza has created (as he has in the past) interesting stories via speculation and selective quoting, (again Dinesh is a brilliant polemicist), so from Media Matters:

 

 

CLAIM: Obama sees his father as a "hero" who "represented a great and noble cause"

 

From D'Souza's Forbes article:

 

    So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.

 

    An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.

 

    [...]

 

    In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir "the record of a personal, interior journey -- a boy's search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American." And again, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself." Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, "My father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!"

 

Kurtz: Dreams "offers a largely critical portrait" of Obama's father. Kurtz wrote on September 16:

 

    D'Souza says his thinking about Obama's influences draws heavily from the president's memoir, "Dreams From My Father." But that book describes a young man's struggle to understand his African roots and the father he never really knew, and offers a largely critical portrait of the Harvard-educated man who left his family.

 

Weigel: "Everyone else" who read Dreams "saw Obama burning with disappointment in Barack Sr." In a September 13 review of D'Souza's forthcoming book, Slate.com's David Weigel wrote, "While everyone else read Dreams From My Father and saw Obama burning with disappointment in Barack Sr., D'Souza sees a man burning with 'hatred derived from the debris of the anti-colonial wars.' "

 

CJR: Did anyone come away from reading Dreams ... with the idea that Obama thought his father was a hero? I sure didn't." In a September 13 Columbia Journalism Review post, Ryan Chittum called D'Souza's article "a fact-twisting, error-laden piece of paranoia." The post further stated, "Did anybody come away from reading Dreams From My Father with the idea that Obama thought his father was a hero? I sure didn't."

 

Reason's Tim Cavanaugh: Dreams is "a narrative of Obama's non-relationship with his father." Tim Cavanaugh of Reason wrote on September 12:

 

    Dreams From My Father is in fact a narrative of Obama's non-relationship with his father. The whole point of the book is that the author's paternal heritage is delivered in fragments during brief and usually troubled encounters. While Obama goes on about his father's misfortunes -- many of them clearly self-inflicted -- in Kenya, there is no evidence for the claim that the elder Obama bequeathed his son a coherent or even a partial political philosophy.

 

D'Souza crops passage from Obama's book to omit portion where he discussed shortcomings of his father. D'Souza quoted a passage from Dreams from My Father in which Obama writes, "My father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!" But D'Souza omitted the following paragraph, which states: "Now, as I sat in the glow of a single light bulb, rocking slightly on a hard-backed chair, that image had suddenly vanished. Replaced by...what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost!"

 

From Obama's book Dreams from My Father:

 

    All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own. The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader -- my father had been all those things. All those things and more, because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image, because I hadn't seen what perhaps most men see at some point in their lives: their father's body shrinking, their father's best hopes dashed, their father's face lined with grief and regret.

 

    Yes, I'd seen weakness in other men -- Gramps and his disappointments, Lolo and his compromise. But these men had become object lessons for me, men I might love but never emulate, white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela. And if later I saw that the black men I knew -- Frank or Ray or Will or Rafiq -- fell short of such lofty standards; if I had learned to respect these men for the struggles they went through, recognizing them as my own -- my father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!

 

    Now, as I sat in the glow of a single light bulb, rocking slightly on a hard-backed chair, that image had suddenly vanished. Replaced by...what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost!

[netnet]

 

 

Bronco - this is the weirdest thing. We disagree so much on the analysis and rhetoric but your suggestions are pretty easy to accept. Again I think that's a good idea. I dont think we should subsidize plant closures but it doesn't make sense to trap capital abroad (MSFT, WDC). I like carrots and sticks though.

 

Agreed.

 

The Dems in my opinion have dropped the ball. How do you lose business support (after bailing them out) and the populist angle (The Tea Party has that market) is beyond me.

 

Agreed.  It's a mystery to me as well.  Although I don't think it will happen, but should the Tea Party run the Republican Party and they win the White House and the Congress in '12, we will be in for interesting times.  You won't see Russia from your doorstep, but you may see disaster from your roof!

[twacowfca]

These are ad hominem arguments that don't address the substance of what D'sousa has discovered. The arguments go something like this:  Dinesh allegedly believes: A,B,C,D.  Therefore, his model that he claims will explain: F must be of no account, and we should dismiss it without even looking at what he says.

 

 None of these emotional attacks is a logical refutation of his model.

 

No on the contrary.  You cited D'souza per se as a reputable, serious scholar, etc..  I am merely giving you his work.  Ad hominem attacks by definition bring up irrelevant issues.  If you tell me he is credible because of his wise opinions and I show you he has some  crack pot ideas then this is hardly irrelevant.  It's hardly emotional, as you put it, to cite an author's views, particularly if it shows his general methodology. Remember you have to read in context.  Thus, you read, for example Mein Kampf a certain way because Hitler wrote it.  So too you read Freud, in the light of both his other writings and Vienna of the time.

 

Now on to his argument.  D'souza has created (as he has in the past) interesting stories via speculation and selective quoting, (again Dinesh is a brilliant polemicist), so from Media Matters:

 

 

CLAIM: Obama sees his father as a "hero" who "represented a great and noble cause"

 

From D'Souza's Forbes article:

 

    So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.

 

    An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.

 

    [...]

 

    In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir "the record of a personal, interior journey -- a boy's search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American." And again, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself." Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, "My father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!"

 

Kurtz: Dreams "offers a largely critical portrait" of Obama's father. Kurtz wrote on September 16:

 

    D'Souza says his thinking about Obama's influences draws heavily from the president's memoir, "Dreams From My Father." But that book describes a young man's struggle to understand his African roots and the father he never really knew, and offers a largely critical portrait of the Harvard-educated man who left his family.

 

Weigel: "Everyone else" who read Dreams "saw Obama burning with disappointment in Barack Sr." In a September 13 review of D'Souza's forthcoming book, Slate.com's David Weigel wrote, "While everyone else read Dreams From My Father and saw Obama burning with disappointment in Barack Sr., D'Souza sees a man burning with 'hatred derived from the debris of the anti-colonial wars.' "

 

CJR: Did anyone come away from reading Dreams ... with the idea that Obama thought his father was a hero? I sure didn't." In a September 13 Columbia Journalism Review post, Ryan Chittum called D'Souza's article "a fact-twisting, error-laden piece of paranoia." The post further stated, "Did anybody come away from reading Dreams From My Father with the idea that Obama thought his father was a hero? I sure didn't."

 

Reason's Tim Cavanaugh: Dreams is "a narrative of Obama's non-relationship with his father." Tim Cavanaugh of Reason wrote on September 12:

 

    Dreams From My Father is in fact a narrative of Obama's non-relationship with his father. The whole point of the book is that the author's paternal heritage is delivered in fragments during brief and usually troubled encounters. While Obama goes on about his father's misfortunes -- many of them clearly self-inflicted -- in Kenya, there is no evidence for the claim that the elder Obama bequeathed his son a coherent or even a partial political philosophy.

 

D'Souza crops passage from Obama's book to omit portion where he discussed shortcomings of his father. D'Souza quoted a passage from Dreams from My Father in which Obama writes, "My father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!" But D'Souza omitted the following paragraph, which states: "Now, as I sat in the glow of a single light bulb, rocking slightly on a hard-backed chair, that image had suddenly vanished. Replaced by...what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost!"

 

From Obama's book Dreams from My Father:

 

    All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own. The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader -- my father had been all those things. All those things and more, because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image, because I hadn't seen what perhaps most men see at some point in their lives: their father's body shrinking, their father's best hopes dashed, their father's face lined with grief and regret.

 

    Yes, I'd seen weakness in other men -- Gramps and his disappointments, Lolo and his compromise. But these men had become object lessons for me, men I might love but never emulate, white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela. And if later I saw that the black men I knew -- Frank or Ray or Will or Rafiq -- fell short of such lofty standards; if I had learned to respect these men for the struggles they went through, recognizing them as my own -- my father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!

 

    Now, as I sat in the glow of a single light bulb, rocking slightly on a hard-backed chair, that image had suddenly vanished. Replaced by...what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost!

 

 

Thanks, netnet.  That's a well balanced account of the central theme of the book.

 

Regarding Dinesh,  He's the historian's version of the skeptical economist, always looking for good evidence that may cast the official received version of history in a different light.  Some of the things he's written have rubbed me the wrong way too.  I'm awaiting the publication of his book to see if his thesis may be a little bit too pat or if he's got a lot more evidence to back up his his model.