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Authors: Dinesh D'Souza
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focus of Obama’s agenda. I backed up the article with telling facts and telling quotations from Obama himself. The article landed like a bombshell. It was virally circulated on the web, and resulted in a flurry of inquires to the White House. Then White House press secretary Robert Gibbs went on the attack. He denounced my article as a revival of the so-called birther controversy, the issue of whether Obama was born in Hawaii or in Kenya. But the birther claim was nowhere discussed in the article, and it is specifically repudiated in this book. My book was confirmed, not refuted, when Obama finally produced his birth certificate. So the birther allegation was pure distortion. Then Gibbs suggested that the article was somehow racist, because it raised the issue of Obama’s African background. But again, the article specifically noted that Obama’s ideology has nothing to do with race. The whole point is that Obama is not a race guy, he is an anti-colonial guy, and anti-colonialism is only peripherally about race. (The British didn’t conquer India because the natives were brown; they conquered it in order to benefit themselves and rule the place.)
Not content to attack me before the media and in his blog, Gibbs then called in representatives of Forbes and berated them for publishing the article. Under White House pressure, the magazine agreed to internally fact-check the article. Turns out that it contained two very minor errors. In one case I suggested that Obama went to Pakistan before he was seventeen years old, while in fact he went a couple of years later. In the second case I cited Obama saying America has 2 percent of the world’s energy but uses 25 percent. In fact, Obama said America has 2 percent of the world’s oil but uses 25 percent. None of this detracted from the central thesis of the article. Forbes ran a correction on its website, but stood by the article.
The effect of Gibbs’s mania, probably directed by the man who was the subject of my book, activated the Obama Choir. This group interrupted its unceasing songs of praise for Obama to savagely attack my article and book. Out of the gate came Media Matters, the left-wing watchdog group, with a flurry of accusations. Most of it was rhetorical humbug, but the multiple press releases from the group did contain a couple of specific allegations of falsehood. First, I had quoted Obama faulting “British Petroleum” for the BP oil spill; Media Matters noted that Obama didn’t use the company’s former name “British Petroleum” in his original speech. True, but he used it more than once in his subsequent comments on the issue. If Media Matters had bothered to Google-search “Obama and British Petroleum,” the group would see multiple references, from the New York Times to the BBC to the British press, of Obama using the term “British Petroleum.” In fact, Obama’s own ambassador to Great Britain, Louis Susman, is quoted by the BBC saying that Obama used the term but intends to stop doing so in the future.
Media Matters also faulted me for saying that the Obama administration had approved, through the Export-Import Bank, a $2 billion loan guarantee to the Brazilian company Petrobras for oil-drilling in Brazil. The group protested that there were Bush appointees on the board who approved the transaction. Yes, but left-over appointees at government agencies are often eager to go along with the policies of a new administration. Moreover, the Export-Import Bank decision had to be cleared by the Obama White House. So obviously Obama bears the responsibility for policies proposed by a federal executive agency and signed off on by the White House. In its customary obfuscating way, Media Matters was trying to clear Obama of accountability for the decisions of his own administration. In March 2011, six months after this book came out, Obama went to Brazil and openly praised the Brazilians for their U.S.-subsidized oil drilling program.
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Not content to attack me before the media and in his blog, Gibbs then called in representatives of Forbes and berated them for publishing the article. Under White House pressure, the magazine agreed to internally fact-check the article. Turns out that it contained two very minor errors. In one case I suggested that Obama went to Pakistan before he was seventeen years old, while in fact he went a couple of years later. In the second case I cited Obama saying America has 2 percent of the world’s energy but uses 25 percent. In fact, Obama said America has 2 percent of the world’s oil but uses 25 percent. None of this detracted from the central thesis of the article. Forbes ran a correction on its website, but stood by the article.
The effect of Gibbs’s mania, probably directed by the man who was the subject of my book, activated the Obama Choir. This group interrupted its unceasing songs of praise for Obama to savagely attack my article and book. Out of the gate came Media Matters, the left-wing watchdog group, with a flurry of accusations. Most of it was rhetorical humbug, but the multiple press releases from the group did contain a couple of specific allegations of falsehood. First, I had quoted Obama faulting “British Petroleum” for the BP oil spill; Media Matters noted that Obama didn’t use the company’s former name “British Petroleum” in his original speech. True, but he used it more than once in his subsequent comments on the issue. If Media Matters had bothered to Google-search “Obama and British Petroleum,” the group would see multiple references, from the New York Times to the BBC to the British press, of Obama using the term “British Petroleum.” In fact, Obama’s own ambassador to Great Britain, Louis Susman, is quoted by the BBC saying that Obama used the term but intends to stop doing so in the future.
Media Matters also faulted me for saying that the Obama administration had approved, through the Export-Import Bank, a $2 billion loan guarantee to the Brazilian company Petrobras for oil-drilling in Brazil. The group protested that there were Bush appointees on the board who approved the transaction. Yes, but left-over appointees at government agencies are often eager to go along with the policies of a new administration. Moreover, the Export-Import Bank decision had to be cleared by the Obama White House. So obviously Obama bears the responsibility for policies proposed by a federal executive agency and signed off on by the White House. In its customary obfuscating way, Media Matters was trying to clear Obama of accountability for the decisions of his own administration. In March 2011, six months after this book came out, Obama went to Brazil and openly praised the Brazilians for their U.S.-subsidized oil drilling program.
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