Dinesh D'Souza has a fascinating piece in Forbes tracing President Obama's policies and politics to his father's anticolonialism:
Who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. ...He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents.... In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself....
Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." Obama Sr. wasn't a doctrinaire socialist; rather, he saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective ...
As he put it, "We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now." The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that "theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed."
Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father's history very well, has never mentioned his father's article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.
One note in the article I found slightly off was Mr. D'Souza's remark: "Here is a man who spent his formative years--the first 17 years of his life--off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa." If Mr. D'Souza wants to argue for kicking Hawaii and Alaska out of the union he can (lose Sarah Palin along with Mr. Obama), but it's certainly possible to absorb mainstream American values while traveling or after age 17.
