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Chasing Ghosts

Via Andrew, Jonah Goldberg confirms once again that he isn’t very good at making important distinctions. It is telling that he makes the criticism of Gingrich and D’Souza into another episode of conservative victimization and unfair treatment, but it is more significant that Goldberg describes an extremely sloppy, embarrassing, anti-intellectual argument as “meticulous.” More to […]

Via Andrew, Jonah Goldberg confirms once again that he isn’t very good at making important distinctions. It is telling that he makes the criticism of Gingrich and D’Souza into another episode of conservative victimization and unfair treatment, but it is more significant that Goldberg describes an extremely sloppy, embarrassing, anti-intellectual argument as “meticulous.”

More to the point, Goldberg doesn’t seem to understand what D’Souza was arguing. D’Souza wasn’t merely “taking seriously what his [Obama’s] father believed” and he wasn’t just examining Obama’s psychology by looking at his relationship with his father. He was directly imputing what Obama’s father believed to Obama with nothing in the way of evidence to support it, and then using this to explain Obama’s supposedly “inexplicable” policy decisions, which he further declared were intended to wreak anti-colonialist vengeance on the Western world. Goldberg says that such caricatures have a kernel of truth in them, but this one doesn’t, and it isn’t hard to see that it doesn’t.

These decisions happen to be ones that Obama either never made or made for reasons that are entirely conventional and not very interesting. D’Souza proposes instead a nonsensical fantasy, and Goldberg thinks it was a “good piece of reading” and an “interesting bit of the puzzle.” Later in the conversation, Goldberg amends his description by saying that the article was “provocative” before launching into another one of his irrelevant diversions about what the other side has done and said. He believes it is fair game to do what D’Souza has done because Obama refers to his father’s influence in his writings and speeches. This misses the rather crucial point that, as Tim Cavanaugh says, “Dreams From My Father is in fact a narrative of Obama’s non-relationship with his father.” At one point, Goldberg mentions the Cairo speech, so it’s worth noting that Obama’s father is mentioned just twice by way of saying that his father came from a Muslim family and received a scholarship to study in America. That was it. Yes, the anti-Western rage was really coming through there.

Weigel puts it more bluntly:

He hated his father! People, the man’s memoir has been on sale for 15 years, and he had his much love for his drunk of a father as Ronald Reagan had for his drunk of a father.

If one insists on psychoanalyzing Obama instead of just looking at his actual policies and public statements, it would be a lot more productive to think about how Obama made himself into the accommodating, establishmentarian, conventional politician and monogamous family man he is as a complete repudiation of his father’s life and political failures. People who insist on trying to see Obama as a left-wing radical, closeted or otherwise, will simply be chasing after ghosts and making themselves look inexcusably foolish in the process.

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