Baffling

I’d been repeatedly urged to read Dinesh D’Souza’s Forbes article about President Obama’s ideology. “It’s really weird,” I was told.

I had put it off, convinced it couldn’t be all that. Well, it was. And more.

To believe D’Souza, America’s extensive use of fossil fuels has nothing to do with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Allowing Muslims to build a mosque is not in any sense about religious freedom. (But it is, apparently a foreign policy question, the Muslims having colonized Lower Manhattan, I guess.)

Franz Fanon’s claim that “The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races” is — rather than merely and manifestly true — evidence of a secret ideology.

Unlike any other men in America, Barack Obama dreams about sex with women who aren’t his monogamous marriage partner, a bad habit that he (and he alone, I infer) receives from his polygamous father. He also dreams about wife beating, drunk driving, and manslaughter. And 100% marginal income tax rates.

Barack Obama spent 17 years in exotic locales including Indonesia, Pakistan, and Hawaii, which makes him less than fully American. D’Souza’s 17 years in India, however, qualify him, as a pure-blooded American, to complain about it.

I’ve written in the past about managed ignorance — the tendency to recognize that voters are predictably irrational and to tailor one’s message to these predictably irrational patterns. I completely fail to understand, however, how anyone could find this essay persuasive. The blithe assertion of non sequiturs from start to finish somehow far exceeds anything I’d thought possible in the genre. Particularly the 17-years-abroad bit caused me to wonder whether it was not some elaborate hoax.

Consider me completely baffled. Obama deserves better opponents than this.