Michael Hastings Slams ‘Hack’ Anti-Obama Author Dinesh D’Souza

Original Link: http://www.mediaite.com/tv/buzzfeeds-michael-hastings-slams-hack-anti-obama-author-dinesh-dsouza/

By Tommy Christopher

Although it’s been bubbling in the bowels of the right-wing slime-o-sphere for quite some time, the attack on President Obama as a “Kenyan anti-colonialist” (really, just a junior college way of calling him a “mau-mau”) is coming to a boil in time for the election. On Tuesday night’s The Young Turks, Buzzfeed‘s Michael Hastings slammed author Dinesh D’Souza, whose The Roots Of Obama’s Rage is the basis for the upcoming hackumentary 2016: Obama’s America.

The film, allegedly coming to theaters in August, is partially financed by TD Ameritrade billionaire Joe Ricketts, who infamously commissioned a strategy memo that sought to launch a race-based attack on the President by resurrecting the Rev. Jeremiah Wright story.

After a chummy introduction that included the re-dubbing of Hastings as “The Notebook” (I just call him “the Rolling Stone guy with the General), host Cenk Uygur cut right to the chase, mostly, observing that “D’Souza thinks he’s going to go get Obama and prove he’s an angry black man. Except Obama appears to be the least angry person in America–I wish he’d get angry every once in a while.”

Hastings said, of D’Souza, “He’s a hack, but he’s a bestselling hack, so I’ll give him that,” adding that “he lives in a fantasy world. If you look at his work, this is a guy who blames Hollywood for September 11th, wrote a book saying why there is heaven…there are these sorts of things that he pushes.”

“So he comes along and wants to push this narrative that President Obama is obsessed with this idea of being anti-colonial,” Hastings continued, “and that somehow has shaped our world view, which will somehow lead us to this socialist dictatorship in 2016. That’s the kind of level we’re dealing with, but as you said, Obama is not an angry guy and his half brother, George, comes across quite well. He seems pretty cool. He doesn’t seem very upset by the whole situation.”

He later concludes that “what Dinesh D’Souza is tapping into, and this is very real, is that there is such hatred for President Obama–a lot of it centers around his race–a lot of it centers around his background–we see it with the birther controversy– that there’s essentially there’s this alternative narrative that the right has built up against President Obama that will not change no matter how many facts or how many different arguments you put in front of it.”

Hastings is being generous, of course. The genesis of the Birther conspiracy, and all of the many forms of this Kenya attack, is racial resentment, and a cynical attempt to harness it. What’s sick is how it has penetrated every level of the conservative stratosphere, from the low-flying likes of Matt Drudge and the Breitbart.com “Big” sites, on up to mainstream Republican Party presidential candidates like Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee (and former frontrunning jokes like Donald Trump).

It’s a simple message, and one that serves only one political purpose: to turn out the angry white vote. They needn’t have gone to the trouble, though, since these folks would turn out for an Alda/Garofalo ticket if it meant defeating Barack Obama and taking back the country for Whitekind. As a side-bonus, though, it’s good for business, if you like that kind of business.

Here’s the clip, from The Young Turks: