Highbrow birtherism: Conservatives attack Obama as an “African colonial”

Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich recently made news by suggesting that President Obama is engaged in “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior,” but he isn't alone in using the African heritage of Obama's father and grandfather as fuel for ridiculous smears.

Gingrich attacked Obama for “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview

Gingrich: “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” From a September 11 interview with National Review Online:

Gingrich says that [Dinesh] D'Souza has made a “stunning insight” into Obama's behavior -- the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.”

“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” Gingrich asks. “That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”

“This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president,” Gingrich tells us.

“I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating -- none of which was true,” Gingrich continues. “In the Alinksy tradition, he was being the person he needed to be in order to achieve the position he needed to achieve . . . He was authentically dishonest.

Conservatives claim Obama is ”African colonial," his “faith” is “African nativism”

D'Souza: “For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West.” In a September 27 article in Forbes magazine, Dinesh D'Souza wrote:

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.

Beck claimed Obama resents the British because they tortured his Kenyan grandfather. On his June 29 Fox News show, Glenn Beck cited the return of a bust of Winston Churchill to the British government as a sign that Obama harbored resentment for the torture of his paternal grandfather by British soldiers during Kenya's Mau Mau Uprising in the 1950s. In fact, Obama never met his paternal grandfather, the bust was scheduled for return to the British prior to Obama's presidency, and other British-based artifacts and gifts remain in the Oval Office. Beck rehashed this theory on August 9.

American Thinker: “Obama, the African Colonial.” A June 25, 2009, article in the conservative American Thinker titled, “Obama, the African Colonial” by L.E. Ikenga, said, "[D]espite what CNN and the rest are telling you, Barack Obama is nothing more than an old school African Colonial who is on his way to turning this country into one of the developing nations that you learn about on the National Geographic Channel." Ikenga also wrote of Obama, “The key to understanding him lies with his identification with his father, and his adoption of a cultural and political mindset rooted in postcolonial Africa.”

Limbaugh: Obama “more African in his roots than he is American.” On the June 26, 2009, edition of his radio show, after reading from Ikenga's piece, Rush Limbaugh commented, "[Obama] wants to turn this into a Third World country. ... The only way to try to do this is to just attack the private sector and deplete it of its resources, of its money, of its capital, which is exactly what he is doing." He later added, “We've elected somebody who is more African in his roots than he is American, loves his father who is a Marxist, and is behaving like an African colonial despot.”

Pruden: Obama lacks “blood impulse” for what America “is about” in part due to “Kenyan father.” In a November 16, 2009, column, Washington Times editor Wesley Pruden wrote: “It's no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of 'the 57 states' is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.”

Beck: Obama “chose to use his name Barack ... to identify, not with America,” but with "[t]he heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya." On the February 4 edition of his radio show Beck said: “He chose to use his name Barack for a reason -- to identify, not with America -- you don't take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical?”

Investor's Business Daily: “The core” of Obama's faith “is African nativism.” In a January 16, 2008, editorial, Investor's Business Daily claimed that “the core” of Obama's “faith -- whether lapsed Muslim, new Christian or some mixture of the two -- is African nativism” and that Obama's familial ties to Africa “have potential foreign policy, even national security, implications.”

James Humes: “Perhaps Obama ... took umbrage” at Churchill's actions “wiping out the Mau-Mau.” On March 12, 2009, Newsmax columnist James Humes (in a column which featured an apparently false quote attributed to Obama) wrote: “Perhaps Obama, the son of a Kenyan, took umbrage at Prime Minister Churchill's actions in 1953 of wiping out the Mau-Mau, the Kenyan terrorists who made a specialty of slitting throats of sleeping white and Black Kenyans.” Humes claimed that this “umbrage” explains why Churchill's bust was returned to the British.

Jim Quinn: Obama “is an African colonial” who “hates” “the Brits.” On June 11, syndicated radio host Jim Quinn said that BP “stands for the two things that Obama hates the most in his life ... the Brits and petroleum.” Quinn continued, “Let us not forget, he is ... an African colonial,” adding that “this guy's got a hard on for the Brits in particular, and Western civilization in general.”