THEY STILL DON’T KNOW THEIR ENEMY…. The right’s preoccupation with President Obama’s upbringing seems rather pointless — what’s that old saying about fighting the last war? — but I suppose conservatives’ old habits die hard.
I do wish, however, that the right-wing attack dogs would at least brush up on the basics. David Koch, for example, the far-right financier behind a massive Republican attack operation, offered this assessment of the president’s youth.
“His father was a hard core economic socialist in Kenya… So he had sort of antibusiness, anti-free enterprise influences affecting him almost all his life. It just shows you what a person with a silver tongue can achieve.”
Now, Koch’s vast wealth proves that one need not be intelligent to get rich, but remarks like these are still just embarrassing.
For one thing, the whole “anti-business” talking point is just stale. After two years under the Obama administration, corporate profits have soared, the private sector is where nearly all of the new jobs are being created, and all of the major investment indexes are way up. The president is reaching out to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, he’s pushing trade deals that the business community wants to see, and he’s even raised the prospect of reforming the corporate tax code. Hell, he even brought in a White House chief of staff from the corporate world. It’s time for a new area of criticism.
But even putting reality and pesky facts aside, the president wasn’t raised by his father. He barely knew his father, and wrote a best-selling book about this. To argue that Obama’s father’s ideology “affected” the president “almost all his life” is to prove that one knows very little about Barack Obama.
And I guess that’s what rankles most here. David Koch is going to attack the president, and that will simply be a daily occurrence so long as Obama is in the White House. But is it too much to ask that those suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome at least learn a little bit about the guy?
