FORBES controversial article: "How Obama Thinks"

[Maluco]

The President isn't exactly a socialist. So what's driving his hostility to private enterprise? Look to his roots.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0927/politics-socialism-capitalism-private-enterprises-obama-business-problem.html

[ck_taft325is]

Wow. Talk about some serious brass.

Kudo's.

[markseven]

I wish this country could hit 88MPH and head directly into 12:00PM January 20, 2013.

[87e30]

Very interesting.

Where we come from has MUCH to do with who we are. This makes too much sense, unfortunately.

[z31maniac]

Maybe we should elect people who have actually run successful businesses or companies, vs people who have spent their entire lives in the Academic sphere waxing poetic about how things should be.

[KenC]

You guys need to be a little more critical of op/ed articles. This guy is no better than Arianna Huffington ranting and raving. I'm not an ardent Obama supporter, but dishonesty isn't helping anybody (well, maybe Steve Forbes in this case). That article is NOT journalism.

"Obama's foreign policy is no less strange. He supports a $100 million mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name of Islam brought down the World Trade Center. Obama's rationale, that "our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable," seems utterly irrelevant to the issue of why the proposed Cordoba House should be constructed at Ground Zero."

- The quote is ABSOLUTLEY relevant. Restricting where one can build a house of worship is directly in opposition to religious freedom.


"Recently the London Times reported that the Obama Administration supported the conditional release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber..."

-If you've read the actual memo, you'd know this is false. The refute of this has been so well documented that I won't elaborate here.

"What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father . According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father . Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father."

- Too much inference based upon one word in the title of a book.


The NASA comments are comical at best.


That article is NOT Journalism.

[Bill 84 318i]

Dinesh D'Souza has long been an illogical lunatic - I can't believe Forbes even gave him the time of day for that pile.

[reelop19]

We should defend Obama and all the Democrats because they are doing such a great job. Lets see, it took 12 years (94-06) for the American public to be done with Republicans. The Democrats managed to completely alienate themselves in 4 (06-10). I say the math is clear. Americans are just stupid and don't understand that everything right now is super duper. That was sarcasm of course and Obama is a huge socialist no matter how that kenc dude wants to spin it.

[KenC]

I didn't defend Obama. I pointed out that the article is excessively misleading.

[z31maniac]

I didn't defend Obama. I pointed out that the article is excessively misleading.

It definitely has a lot of assumption and conjecture, but it's an interesting analysis of Obama nonetheless.

[CorvallisBMW]

It's an op-ed piece, pure and simple. It's this guy's opinion written in the editorial section. It's not news, it's not journalism, hell some of it isn't even true.

That's why it's called op-ed and not news. The purpose of the editorial section of any publication is for editors and writers to express their own personal opinions (except for the editor-in-chief, their job is to express the opinion of the paper/board of directors). It doesn't necessarily have to be based in any kind of fact or backed up by evidence. It's simply their own views and opinions.

[z31maniac]

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/howard-kurtz/2010/09/white_house_rips_forbes_articl.html?hpid=topnews

[CorvallisBMW]

Interesting that D'Souza claims that Obama's dreams, political ambitions, views and opinions all came from his father. Yet,

"The facts are also these: Obama Sr. abandoned the family when his son was 2, and the future president saw his father only one more time, during a visit in Hawaii when he was 10. Obama Sr. died in 1982." (from article in above post)

How could your entire political philosophy be based on someone you had spent no more than a few days with? (being under 2 yrs old doesn't count, toddlers can't even spell 'political', let alone know what it means)

There are all kinds of insinuations and shady implications, based on purely nothing:

"He took his father's dream, his vision, his ideology,"

The president "adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder.... He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West...Clearly the anti-colonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office. ..... The invisible father provides the inspiration."

If his father died in 1982, and no one ever interviewed him, how on earth can D'Souza claim that all of Obama's views are based on those of his father? D'Souza seems to be assuming that Obama Sr. was anti-western, anti-capitalism and anti-business based purely on, well, what? That he was Kenyan? Or that he lived outside the US for some time? How can you make such inferences based on where someone was born or lived? The whole article, far as I can see, is based purely in conjecture and offers not one shred of competent reasoning based on fact.

[Bill 84 318i]

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/09/obama_derangement_syndrome

I DON'T find it at all difficult to understand how Barack Obama thinks, because most of his beliefs are part of the broad consensus in America's centre or centre-left: greenhouse-gas emissions reductions, universal health insurance, financial-reform legislation, repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and so forth. Dinesh D'Souza, on the other hand, appears to have met so few Democrats in recent decades that he finds such views shocking, and thinks they can only be explained by the fact that Mr Obama's father was a Kenyan government economist who pushed for a non-aligned stance in the Cold War during the 1960s-70s. Since the majority of Democrats don't have any Kenyan parents and have no particular stake in the anti-colonialism debates of the 1960s-70s, I'm not sure how Mr D'Souza would explain their views. In any case, Mr D'Souza's explanation of Mr Obama's views doesn't make any sense on its own terms. This, for example, is incomprehensible: "If Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more." Come again? Progressive taxation is caused by...anti-colonialism? Message to American billionaires and the people who write for them: many events and movements in world history did not revolve around marginal tax rates on rich people in the United States.

http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2010/09/09/obama-anticolonial-hegemonist/

It is hardly necessary to delve deeply into the Kenyan past or trace the roots of anticolonialist thought to discern why Obama, a thoroughly conventional center-left Democrat, favors raising taxes on wealthier people. This is a standard part of the Democratic agenda and has been for the last decade. Having opposed tax cuts for wealthier Americans earlier in the decade, Democrats are continuing to be against them. This is not mystifying. What is a little mystifying is why so many conservative pundits and writers feel the need to construct preposterous, overly-complicated Obama theories to explain what is perfectly obvious and straightforward.

[z31maniac]

Only thing I can guess is he is claming Barry used the paper published by his father?