Beck dreams up new dreams from Obama's father

Glenn Beck just can't seem to stop attacking President Obama through his family. This time he left the president's wife, daughters, mother and aunt alone and instead went after his father and grandfather, mischaracterizing the content of Obama's autobiography, Dreams from My Father, to declare that the dreams of Obama's father were "communism." "That's why he left his son, to go back to Kenya and start a communist country," Beck explained.

In fact, the only times the words "communism" and "communist" appear in Obama's book are in descriptions of the politics of Indonesia or in sentences like, "I suspect that I sound incurably naive, wedded to lost hopes, like those Communists who peddle their newspapers on the fringes of various college towns." [Page XV]

So Beck and his crew must have been reading between the lines in Obama's description of how his father "had been selected by Kenyan leaders and American sponsors to attend a university in the United States, joining the first large wave of Africans to be sent forth to master Western technology and bring it back to forge a new, modern Africa" and how his father eventually "returned to Africa to fulfill his promise to the continent." [Pages 9-10]

New, modern Africa? Obama must be hinting that his father loved communism.

Even this shaky theory is undermined later in the book, when Obama describes his father's return to the United States and an appearance he made at Obama's grade school. Obama writes that his father told the class "that Kenyans, like all of us in the room, longed to be free and develop themselves through hard work and sacrifice." [Page 70]

This does not exactly sound like the communist philosophy that Beck sidekick Pat Gray said had been "carved in stone" in the young president.

Perhaps Beck was referring to Obama's father's involvement in the Kenyan government when Odinga Odinga was vice president. Odinga, Obama writes, thought that "Kenyan politicians had taken the place of the white colonials, buying up businesses and land that should be redistributed to the people," and he was "placed under house arrest as a Communist." But Obama never ties his father to such sentiments; he writes that his father's criticisms of the government were regarding tribalism and poorly qualified government employees. [Page 214]

Beck also claimed that "that was the dream of his grandfather as well -- not necessarily communism or Marxism, but to shake off the shackles of imperialism of Great Britain." Leaving aside the question of why a desire to "shake off the shackles of imperialism" is something that could corrupt your grandson, Beck's smearing of Obama's grandfather isn't founded in Dreams from My Father either. Transcribing his grandmother's description, Obama wrote of his grandfather:

And he was very strict about his property. If you asked him, he would always give you something of his -- his food, his money, his clothes even. But if you touched his things without asking, he would become very angry. Even later, when his children were born, he would tell them always that you do not touch other people's property. [Page 402]

Given all this, it's hard to conclude, as Beck does, that the dreams of Obama's father were "communism."