So that Barack Obama seems like a pretty good guy, doesn’t he? He seems genuine, personable, good-humored in the face of constant attacks on his character and history. His off-the-cuff remarks on Labor Day were charming and he’s obviously an intelligent, shrewd politician. And most importantly for the average American voter, he passes the “but would you like to have a beer with him” test (sit down John Kerry, I wasn’t talking about you--not now, not ever). And Obama wouldn’t even buy you some awful pisswater Budweiser either—he’s a Goose Island man! So we’re settled: Barack Obama = decent fellow. Right?

BOOM! You’re wrong.

Not only is he a socialist (boo!) Muslim (double boo!) that wasn’t even born in this country (gasp!), but as Dinesh D’Souza recently explained, he is staunchly dedicated to postwar African anticolonialism!

Look, I’ve never been a tremendously huge fan of Obama’s candidacy or his presidency. Although he is a constitutional scholar, he has refused to repudiate and end blatantly unconstitutional and inhumane practices introduced by his predecessor; he is staunchly dedicated to protecting and furthering corporate power; and, for all his alleged “radical” progressivism, supports obviously homophobic policies. The list goes on. Really, the best you can say is that he’s not actively making shit worse, which I guess is something of an improvement considering his idiot predecessor and idiot competition. To sum: so far, not so impressed.

But these constant bullshit attempts to question Obama's allegiances or Americanism by fabricating ties to "un-American" ideologies really needs to stop. Like, really really. Because increasingly it seems that more and more conservatives have divorced themselves from anything remotely resembling reality and headed for the greener pastures of some collective cuckoo dreamworld where up is down, left is right, and black is racist socialist Muslim. Nothing positive has ever emerged out of a political discourse built on an increasingly tangled web of hateful fictions.

Bottom line: to call Obama (a free-market capitalist if ever there was one) a socialist is to defame socialists everywhere. And to claim that his political decisions are most strongly influenced by African anticolonialism is… well, it’s just so profoundly stupid. It's so ahistorical and so fabricated that it wouldn't even be worth talking about if it wasn't so obvious that it's going to catch on.

D’Souza’s argument doesn’t even make any internal sense. He begins by expressing complete bafflement over Obama’s support for center-left causes like progressive taxation or energy independence: “The President’s actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike.” So how could Obama (and, you know, hundreds of millions of other Americans) believe such bizarre ideas? Because (like millions of other Americans, apparently) he is an African anticolonialist, of course. Come again?

Even more obvious, though: if Barack Obama were an anticolonialist, would we really still be prosecuting a “war on terror”? Would we continue to have military bases around the world? Would we continue to treat the entire world as a personal unmanned drone playground?  In other words, would we continue to be--you know--a colonial power? Of course fucking not. I know that, you know that, and I bet Dinesh D’Souza knows that too, even if he preposterously concludes that “colonialism today is a dead issue.”

So why write an article that makes absolutely no sense and introduces historical ideologies well outside mainstream American thought?

Not only because it manages to combine already ridiculous, but widely believed claims, that Obama is a socialist and a dangerous foreign element into a tidy package. But also because, as Adam Serwer notes, it is reflective of the fact that conservatives “want to talk about the fact that our blackety black president is blackety black.” It lends itself nicely but somewhat subtly to the widespread belief that Obama is a radical black man that wants to expel white Americans from society, “that having a black president makes the United States somehow analogous to African Third World countries run by bloodthirsty despots.” It takes pre-exisitng fears and reconstitutes them into a new fabricated image of white anxiety: America under the rule of Robert Mugabe.

Once when I was little (went by "One Scoop" back then) I made fun of the dorky kid in school. It is my perpetual karmic retribution that I have to share a planet with these morons.