D’Souza’s Rage as a Cover

The real Obama is a man shaped by experiences far different from those of most Americans; he is a much stranger, more determined, and exponentially more dangerous man than you’d ever imagined. He is not motivated by the civil rights struggles of African Americans in the 1960s — those battles leave him wholly untouched. He is not motivated by the socialist or Marxist propaganda that hypnotized a whole generation of wooly-minded academics and condescending liberals — those concepts also leave him cold.

What really motivates Barack Obama is an inherited rage — an often masked, but profound rage that comes from his African father; an anticolonialist rage against Western dominance, and most especially against the wealth and power of the very nation Barack Obama now leads. It is this rage that explains the previously inexplicable, and that gives us a startling look at what might lie ahead.

In The Roots of Obama’s Rage you’ll learn: Why Obama’s economic policies are actually designed to make America poorer compared to the rest of the world. Why Obama will welcome a nuclear Iran. Why Obama sees America as a rogue nation — worse than North Korea. The real reason Obama banished a bust of Winston Churchill from the White House and ordered NASA to praise the scientific contributions of Muslims. Why Obama would like to make America’s superpower status a thing of the past.

Stunning, provocative, original, and telling — no one has better diagnosed who Obama is, what he intends to do, and why he poses an existential threat to America than Dinesh D’Souza in The Roots of Obama’s Rage.

— From inside flap: The Roots of Obama’s Rage by Dinesh D’Souza

If many writers have already provided Mr. D’Souza’s racist pseudo-intellectual attack a thoughtful slapdown, my concern is the visual language.

Besides the obvious racist association to the angry black man, the use of the word “Roots,” beyond referencing the origin of a trait, also links Obama to Africa. The expression, though — with a complexity  beyond simple anger — suggests something more sinister.  There’s a hostile, furtive, diabolical quality to the expression, playing on fears of an Obama we really don’t know. Once again, it’s Obama the other. The sleeper agent. The Machiavellian mystery man.  The Islamic Manchurian candidate.

To the extent D’Souza’s words — like those of Glenn Beck’s — are directed not to reason but to a primitive emotional responses in the lower brain, this black-and-red cover is sinister all right. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage. Rage.  It’s that much being project onto Obama.