It's True, Because It's Not

Searching for years for the perfect meme by which to take down Obama, Fox "news" has finally come up with it. It took that paragon of conservative credibility, Newt Gingrich, to do it; and whereas the idea that disgraced former speaker Newt has anything to say worth listening to is hilarious (in a non-hilarious way) on its face, as far as Fox is concerned it's a plus. Since when, after all, has credibility been a requirement for their sycophancy?

Newt's idea didn't originate with him; he's just the one misterspeakering it over to Fox, where it's been shined, redoubled, and poured down the necks of its viewers. The idea came from Distort D'Newsa, who's made a career of spit-polishing racism and selling it as something else. Anyhow, here it is:

Citing a recent Forbes article by Dinesh D'Souza, former House speaker Newt Gingrich tells National Review Online that President Obama may follow a "Kenyan, anti-colonial" worldview.

Gingrich says that 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."

It's perfect. That nothing in Obama's behavior actually confirms the theory, confirms the theory: he's hiding it. It doesn't get better than that, conspiratoriallywise. No matter what a person does, it proves your point. Tidy. He's out of touch because he seems in touch.

And what, tell, is "Kenyan" anti-colonialism? This: "Look, he's a black guy. And probably wasn't born here."

To thoughtful people, it's as laughable as the idea of Newt still being given credence by anyone. In other words, it'll fall like Halloween candy into the laps of the teabaggoid, and be swallowed whole. They won't be thinking like this:

In these retellings of Obama's personal history, the president's life is an epic, Marxist, sinister version of a Joseph Campbell-style heroic journey, with its hero ultimately falling, like Anakin Skywalker, to the dark side of the force. [ed note: this came after my post using a similar term]

Emerging from his sinecure as president of a small religious college in New York,Dinesh D'Souza, who has been laundering the racism of the right through an "intellectual" filter since his days at Dartmouth, gets back to where his career began.

[...]

This is birtherism with big words. This is the witchdoctor sign without Photoshop, WorldNetDaily without the exclamation points...

[...]

...it's safe to say that someone self-identifying as an "anti-colonialist" would not be escalating an American war in central Asia or claiming the authority to use the entire planet as a target range for flying robots armed with cruise missiles.

If Obama is a Kenyan anti-colonialist for supporting financial regulation, thanScott Brown is a Kenyan anti-colonialist. If Obama is a Kenyan anti-colonialist for supporting the proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero, thenMichael Bloomberg is a Kenyan anti-colonialist...

All of which to say is there's no need to parse the ethnic origins or political philosophies of Obama's parents to understand the ideology of Barack Obama. He is a center-left Democrat who supports mainstream Democratic policies. But some conservatives don't want to talk about policy. They are unable to engage in an argument with liberalism on substantive terms; they know only argument by epithet. They want to talk about the fact that our blackety black president is blackety black.

Nice to know I'm not entirely alone.

Here's a very thorough takedown of the ridiculous and unremittingly false points D'Sousa made in his article, and of Newt for hawking it. But a small sample, of which there's much more:

I can’t begin to list everything wrong with the Forbes article, but here are some of the high points: (the quotations in italics are from D’Souza’s article):

The President’s actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: “Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling.” Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling–but drilling off the shores of Brazil.

With Obama’s backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro–not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil…Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world’s energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more.

This claim is completely false. First, President Obama had nothing to do with the decision of the Export-Import Bank (“ExIm”) to give $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Petrobas for offshore Brazilian oil drilling. When the loan was approved, ExIm’s board had five members- three Republicans and two Democrats. All five individuals were appointed by… President Bush. I have not located a single quote from President Obama saying anything about the ExIm decision (for or against). Furthermore, ExIm has a very good reason for the transaction: the loan proceeds are to be used to purchase US owned equipment and services (thereby increasing US exports- the very mission of ExIm).

So, D’Souza’s first example of Obama’s anti-colonial views is something that Bush appointees approved which will benefit the US and of which Obama had nothing to do. Off to a smashing start and we aren’t even to the third paragraph.

(This might be a good place to point something out. Not that logic has anything to do with it, but, looking back, was America founded on colonialism or anti-colonialism, by colonialists, or anti-colonialists? Just askin'.)

Quoting from another article connecting to the first, and once again reinforcing the central theme of this blog:

Gingrich was once the most powerful Republican in America and remains an influential figure within the party. D'Souza has done stints at the most prestigous conservative think-tanks. The line between man and kook is getting harder and harder to discern.

The insanity is so obvious. And yet, it's dipped and sipped as if it were the finest oolong. Oh, how we are screwed.

Mosque Deaf

As the usual RWS™ keep adding to the crazy over the Cordoba Initiative (which, by the bye, was just given initial approval), it's worth hearing the occasional voice of sanity. Information-based sanity. (I apologize for using those three words together, in a way that several of my readers -- and we all know who they are -- will be unable to comprehend. Sorry. I wish I could help.)

This seems like such an obvious point, but it is apparently not obvious to the many people who oppose the Cordoba Initiative's planned mosque in lower Manhattan, so let me state it as clearly as possible: The Cordoba Initiative, which is headed by an imam named Feisal Abdul Rauf, is an enemy of al Qaeda, no less than Rudolph Giuliani and the Anti-Defamation League are enemies of al Qaeda. Bin Laden would sooner dispatch a truck bomb to destroy the Cordoba Initiative's proposed community center than he would attack the ADL, for the simple reason that Osama's most dire enemies are Muslims. This is quantitatively true, of course -- al Qaeda and its ideological affiliates have murdered thousands of Muslims -- but it is ideologically true as well: al Qaeda's goal is the purification of Islam (that is to say, its extreme understanding of Islam) and apostates pose more of a threat to Bin Laden's understanding of Islam than do infidels.

I know Feisal Abdul Rauf; I've spoken with him at a public discussion at the 96th street mosque in New York about interfaith cooperation. He represents what Bin Laden fears most: a Muslim who believes that it is possible to remain true to the values of Islam and, at the same time, to be a loyal citizen of a Western, non-Muslim country. Bin Laden wants a clash of civilizations; the opponents of the mosque project are giving him what he wants.

To put it another way:

If Osama bin Laden were to write a script for what he'd like to see happen here, it'd be identical to the one Gingrich & Co. are following. This isn't intended to question their patriotism, but rather, their sanity.

I'd not be that kind. If one's so-called patriotism is so misguided; namely, where there is no religious tolerance, where (briefly to raise another issue) nativism trumps the Constitution, where a democratically-elected president doing exactly that on which he campaigned is seen as fascism -- in short, when that patriotism is directed at a country that doesn't exist -- then it's hard to know the meaning of the term.

Also, Feisal Abdul Rauf is Sufi.

[Far be it from I to go on and on. So let me refer the reader to a knowledgeable and thorough response to the Newt-onian (and we all know what onanism is) lies about Cordoba, which have taken root in the dung. A significant sampling:

The problem is, in order to give that impression of immediacy, Newt elides three-hundred years of Christian and Muslim history. Three-hundred years. The Muslims conquered Cordoba in 712... and the mosque only became "the world's third-largest" late in the tenth century, after a series of expansions by much later rulers, probably around 987 or so.

[...] Muslim historians writing about the Great Mosque don't point to it as a symbol of Muslim triumph over Christians; rather, they treat it primarily as a symbol of Muslim victory over other Muslims.

[...]

The mosque was indeed begun in the wake of a Muslim conquest--just not the conquest of the Christians. Rather, it was ordered built by the Umayyad emir Abd-ar-Ramman I, probably in part to commemorate his successful conquest of Cordoba in the 750's, fought against otherMuslim chieftains loyal to the rival Abbasid Caliphate, and his successful repulsion of subsequent Abbasid attempts to dislodge him by force throughout the 760's.

[...]

Muslim historians of the late tenth century tell that Abd-ar-Ramman bought the church from the Christian congregation after sharing it with them for fifty years "following the example of Abu Ubayda and Khalid, according to the judgement of Caliph Umar in partitioning Christian churches like that of Damascus and other [cities] that were taken of peaceful accord". The Christians, we're told, took their money and relocated their church to the outskirts of Cordoba. Now obviously, these are Muslim historians writing two-to-three-hundred years after the events they describe, so we must always take their accounts with a grain of salt (as we would with any historian's work, Muslim or not) and consider the political motivations responsible for their histories.

[...]

This is the important fact that Newt hopes those who read his polemic will be ignorant of: for a ruler to be legitimate in Muslim eyes in the tenth century, during the time when the Great Mosque was being expanded into its present-day dimensions, it was important to emphasize the peaceful succession of Islam from the other religions in the area. A caliph was expected to have arrived at an accord with the Christians and Jews over which he ruled. Far from "symboliz[ing] their victory" the Mosque was held up by Muslim historians a symbol of peaceful coexistence with the Christians--however messier the actual relations of Christians and Muslims were at the time.

[...] So it's easy to see why a group of Muslims creating a community center in the heart of a majority Christian country in a city known for its large Jewish population might name it "The Cordoba House" They're not, as Gingrich hopes we would believe, discreetly laughing at us because "Cordoba" is some double-secret Islamist code for "conquest"; rather, they're hoping to associate themselves with a particular time in medieval history when the largest library in Western Europe was to be found in Cordoba, a city in which scholars of all three major Abrahamic religions were free to study side-by-side.

Newt is as screamy a RWS™ as they get. His bullshit just smells a little better at first whiff, because he drapes himself in academe like a bacon-wrapped date stuffed with Boursin. Which is delicious, by the way, and can be done over a campfire as my wife recently demonstrated.]

The Man Who Would Be King

Newt Gingrich, the purported intellectual of the presumed Republican presidential aspirants, has this to say:

There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.

Brilliant. By that logic, we should stop allowing freedom of the press until they allow it in Tehran, stop having open elections until they have them in Pyonyang, and should ignore the molesting of kids until they stop doing it in the Catholic Church.

This is the guy who'd have us believe he's the cranial cream of the conservative crop, the guy with ideas, the once and future leader of the right wing. Taking his cues from Sarah Friggin Palin.

Unsurprisingly, I see it more like this:

For America to endorse the construction of the Cordoba House would be a reminder to the world of how we, unlike less-free countries, celebrate our diversity and refuse to treat our neighbors as second-class citizens. It's genuinely sad that Gingrich and his ilk prefer to see us aim lower as a nation.

What a bereft bunch they are.

[Update, 7/23: just to add a little more, oh, reality, I'll copy a couple of paragraphs from Andrew Sullivan (and add a little emphasis here and there)]:

A reader writes:

Did Newt really claim that the Cordoba House mosque would "overlook" the World Trade Center site? Rubbish. It is three blocks away and has no line of sight.

And 3,000 Americans? 3,000 human beings, mostly but by no means entirely American, as anyone in reality-based discourse knows. Another writes:

I live two blocks from Ground Zero in a six-building apartment complex with an active tenant association. As best I can tell, Cordoba House is a non-issue among local residents. I haven't heard a word from anybody on the subject - not in the elevators, not in the lobby, not at the neighborhood bars or restaurants. Nada.

Here are the facts. The proposed Cordoba House is not a mosque. It's to be a community center modeled after the YMCA and the Jewish Community Center, with most of its 13 floors devoted to classrooms, fitness and recreation - open to the entire downtown community, not just Muslims. There is to be a "prayer space" that can hold up to 2,000 people. I'll aver that "prayer space" could just be a PC term for "mosque," though I confess no knowledge of what procedures must take place to consecrate a facility as an official mosque. The group's leader, Imam Abdul Rauf, has held services in a small mosque in the neighborhood since 1983. It isn't as though the group materialized out of nowhere or has no history in the neighborhood.