WASHINGTON --- "2010 is 'Gone' for the Democrats" was a headline on Politico.com last Tuesday. Poll averages on RealClearPolitics.com the same day showed the Republicans picking up eight Senate seats in November and leading the national generic poll -- any Republican against any Democrat -- by 7.8 percent in House races.
Maybe. But maybe the Republicans have peaked too soon. They are certainly over the top. The party already has some pretty weird candidates out there talking about phasing out Social Security and Medicare. And their leader in the House, John Boehner, is for middle class tax cuts on Sunday and against them (unless the rich get theirs first) on Monday.
Those issues will pass (or rather, fail) after the mid-term elections are over. The true nuttiness of the Grand Old Party these days was the discovery by their philosopher who would be king, Newt Gingrich, that the president of the United States is a Mau Mau -- or thinks like one.
Said former history professor Gingrich on National Review Online:
"What if (Obama) is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan anticolonial behavior can you begin to piece together (his actions)? 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. I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating -- none of which was true. ... He was authentically dishonest."
Well, that certainly explains everything. Professor Gingrich, apparently a student of Kenyan anticolonialism, has to know that the African country of Obama's father won its independence from the British in 1963 after seven years of guerrilla war (1952-59) by a secret society called the Mau Maus. (The words in tribal language meant the harsh gobbling sound made by hyenas eating.)
So, by my reckoning, either Gingrich is nuts or I am. How could I have missed such an obvious explanation for Obama's governance? I had eliminated that possibility because Obama never actually knew his father and has visited Kenya only twice in his life. The Republicans obviously know better.
Gingrich's source for what he called "a stunning insight" is a former speechwriter for President Reagan named Dinesh D'Souza, who is a smart fellow, the president of a small school in New York, The King's College. He is the author of a long and truly weird piece in the current issue of Forbes magazine titled "How Obama Thinks."
In the piece, D'Souza, who was born in Mumbai, India, and came to the United States at the age of 17 to attend Dartmouth College, asserts that one key to the president's thinking is that for the first 17 years of his (Obama's) life, he lived "off the American mainland, in Hawaii Indonesia and Pakistan."
Writes D'Souza:
"The president's actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. ... The oddities go on and on."
Then D'Souza announces he has found the key. It is in the title of Obama's autobiography.
"Notice," he writes, "that his title is not 'Dreams of My Father' but rather 'Dreams From My Father.'"
The inherited dream, says D'Souza, is "anticolonialism." He defines it this way: "Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America."
And finally: "America today is governed by a ghost. ... Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial."
So D'Souza and now Gingrich believe that Barack Obama is on a mission, his father's mission, to destroy the West, beginning with the United States. I don't know how this year's campaign will end, but it certainly is going to be interesting to see how far the Republicans are willing to go to salve their fear, loathing and hatred of that man in the White House.
