In Defense of Newt Gingrich's 'Anti-Colonial' Comments

What was Newt trying to convey with his comments? I had a difficult time understanding his point. You are correct, I would want my president to be anti-colonial but I think Newt's comments were made to discredit the president. Newt's past personal behavior is so abhorent, I don't understand how he continues to receive so much attention. It is sort of like Sarah Palin -- what they have to say is not important.

Wow. We were not being anti colonial when we rebeled aqgainst Britain, We were being anti opressive. Our forefathers felt that, colony or not, we were being denied our "natural rights". Our Declaration of Independence is an amazing document at the very soul of who we are. Beware treading upon it lightly in order to deliver a political one liner.

I am not a President Obama supporter but, the newt is a joke if there ever was one. Also, the people who even write the news articles are becoming more and more useless. They need a history lesson: You can put the Mau Mau's and the english in to the same boat - murderers! Excuse me, my wife is dying of cancer, about 3 months to live, and need to ask her for a divorce. Thanks for the mentoring newt!!!

Mr. Lewis, Are you ignorant, an apologist for Newt, or do you just like to disagree for the sake of disagreement? How can the President exhibit "Kenyan...behavior" if he is not Kenyan? Isn't this just plain grammar interpretation? I tried to stop reading the column after that point in your story but I couldn't resist to see how far you would go in your efforts to stretch stupidity (Gingrich's comments) into somthing rational. You failed miserably. How do you keep your job??

I've read both articles now, and find them each academic, though with good points. As a thesis, d'Souza offers an explanation of events as he sees them. That's it. And while there is some attractiveness in his observations and in the way he presents them, it misses as an explanation of Obama as an American politician in this time, under these influences. To excuse or to explain him as merely throw-back anticolonialist is to ignore the environment brought us by the seditious passages of NAFTA, GATT, the latest security acts, the earlier invasions of Grenada, Panama, and Iraq, and the later incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan. This list is nowhere near complete. To marginalize d'Souza with witticism doesn't add to a discussion which is rather pointless one in any event. Gingrich jumping on the bandwagon is to be expected; his relevance has been in decline since his outburst in the 80s.

The original article by d'Souza that Gingrich references in his talk gave a credible hypotheses about why Obama seems to have very negative feelings about England - as evidenced by his cursory return to them of the great Churchill bust they gave to us shortly after 9/11, by his sometimes hostile and certainly always very disengaged treatment of their representatives, by his very unsubtle insult to them when he exchanged traditional Christmas gifts with them (they gave him a number of very valuable, historical items, he gave them a late-night-TV-offer-type 25-DVD-set of old American movies that was incompatible with the British DVD system and couldn't even be played there), and by his choice to no longer treat England as a long-time friendly nation. First, understand that d'Souza considers himself to be an anticolonialist. He belongs to the first generation of Indians born after India achieved independence from England. He's not saying anything bad about Obama in this article. We can't critique Gingrich here without understanding what d'Souza's article said. According to d'Souza, Obama's father was a major influence on Obama: - - - "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 of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa. For Obama Sr. this was an issue of national autonomy. "Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?" 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." . . . While the senior Obama called for Africa to free itself from the neocolonial influence of Europe and specifically Britain, he knew when he came to America in 1959 that the global balance of power was shifting. Even then, he recognized what has become a new tenet of anticolonialist ideology: Today's neocolonial leader is not Europe but America. As the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said--who was one of Obama's teachers at Columbia University--wrote in Culture and Imperialism, "The United States has replaced the earlier great empires and is the dominant outside force." "From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage. For a while, U.S. power was checked by the Soviet Union, but since the end of the Cold War, America has been the sole superpower. Moreover, 9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to seek political and economic domination in the same way the French and the British empires once did. So in the anticolonial view, America is now the rogue elephant that subjugates and tramples the people of the world." "It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet." "For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for." - - - - - All in all, it's not the irrational putdown of Obama that seems to have been perceived here.

No, this is not a stretch at all! Of course, Mr. Gingrich meant exactly what he said! He caters to a faction that feels that President Obama was born in Kenya, so what do you expect? He would not have said it or made that reference to Kenya if he did not mean it. Do not apologize for the man's ignorance. He has catered to the right "fringe" for decades now, even when he was Speaker of the House. And your reaction, Mr. Lewis, is the real shame of it all. This faction (Tea Party, perhaps?) is the darling of the press and has been granted amnesty from being attacked for its complete ignorance of the facts and for making up such incredible lies about this administration. When will they be held accountable for their irresponsible behavior? It is so sad when people are not held accountable for thier reckless, and seditious, remarks. The press needs to become a better steward for the public good and point out inaccuracies when they are uttered. This man himself is totally irresponsible and needs to be censored. He is such a hypocrite and should not be allowed to comment on matters he knows nothing about.

What can you expect from a man who started dating his first wife when he was 16 and she was 25......and his high school geometry teacher? He asked her for a divorce to marry someone he was having an affair with while she was fighting cancer.His first wife had to get a court order to make him support his family. He left his second wife to marry a staff member he was having a affair with. He was convicted by the House of Representatives of ethics violations and fined $300,000. Convicted by a republican House of Representatives. What a man of character?

Most of you are missing the point. It is NOT that it's ironic because "we are all a nation of anti-colonists " (given our country's history of rebelling against England). What he is claiming to be Obama's thinking is that Obama views our current country as a country of "Modern" repressive White colonialism keeping down all of the disadvantaged and "little people" of the country. And, that Obama's fathers dreams of freeing Kenya from this type of rule is exactly what he believes Obama believes he is doing today, in this country. This is what Newt Gingrich is attempting to say, whether he is right or wrong.

Gingrich is simply playing on the underlying racist sentiments many Americans feel towards Obama. Like the birther movement and the not surprising minority number of americans- small a on purpose- those racists have been struggling to put their hatred for The President-capital T and P on purpose- into a workable and inteliigent sounding argument. Gingrich is simply doing his best, as a southern man who probably sees his ultimate duty duty to return the escaped slave to the plantation, to bring The President down. He is a man who has never been able to gain the office and cannot abide by the fact that someone he sees as his inferior, sentiments hidden behind partisan politics, sit in the Oval Office.