I am not a fan of Heather MacDonald. But her evisceration of Dinesh D'Souza is epic:
D'Souza argues that Obama's policies are motivated by a hatred towards American power absorbed from his Kenyan father. He offers exactly zero evidence for his hackneyed psychological theory. But the most laughable weakness in D'Souza's thesis is the fact that the policies which D'Souza presents as the “dreams of a Luo tribesman” have a decades-long American pedigree and are embraced by wide swathes of the American electorate and political class. If support for progressive taxation, greater government regulation of health care, stimulus spending, and conservation make one the tool of the African anticolonial movement, then Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, John Kenneth Galbraith, FDR, and the Sierra Club are all Third World agents provocateurs.
[...]
In fact, there is not a single policy that Obama has pursued since taking office that does not grow out of the American tradition of left-wing liberalism or more immediately out of the Bush Administration, the latter including bailouts of Detroit and Wall Street, drone strikes in Pakistan, continuation of the doomed Freedom Agenda in Afghanistan, and invocations of the state secrets act to protect anti-terror actions from judicial scrutiny.
Here's what I find particularly damning about D'Souza's piece -- and it's not that D'Souza is a hack. It's that he sensed a need for a racialist narrative that allowed those conservatives who do hate Obama because he is black to do so with some kind of thin intellectual pretext giving them plausible deniability while nevertheless communicating the source of their hatred at the right high pitch. If it's a good sign that a number of conservatives have distanced themselves from the piece, and that others have simply ignored it, it's definitely problematic that the theory has found a sympathetic ear among some of the movement's more distinguished and influential figures.
