[Black Star News Editorial]
Professor Thomas Sowell has a new book called "Dismantling America."
We haven't yet read the book, but one can get a good sense of what it's about by watching an interview Sowell gave to his fellow Hoover Institution colleague Peter Robinson.
The Hoover institution is a Stanford University-based conservative public policy think-tank.
Sowell has his view of what America was and should be. So any change -- including the election of a Black president -- evidently amounts to "Dismantling America" in his eyes.
To hear some of his views, which are mostly anti-democratic and anti-dissent -- one wonders how Sowell qualifies to be viewed as a "scholar." And he actually also taught at Cornell, Harvard and UCLA?
Let's examine a few samplings of Sowell's "scholarly" takes from the interview.
After 9/11, Sowell says he visited the University of California's Berkeley campus in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he did not see a single American flag. Excuse us; is this the old Soviet Russia?
Sowell firmly maintains that President Barack Obama represents the culmination of the "dismantling" of America, stating that while Obama was not the "root cause," he nevertheless was the "embodiment and personification of dangerous trends that began decades ago."
Obama, according to Sowell, has "all his life has been associated with a group of people that don't believe in the fundamentals of this country."
Sowell said Obama's associations included Bill Ayers, the so-called radical scholar who once committed acts of domestic terrorism and Jeremiah Wright, whom Sowell refers to as a "ranting racist."
Sowell ignores the fact that Ayers long ago repudiated terror and has become a respected scholar and academic.
He also ignores the fact that Wright embodies many great positive attributes and that Obama eventually left Wright's church when the controversy continued to boil over.
But what makes Obama most dangerous in Sowell's view?
"He always sought out the most radical people," Sowell said. "He worked as a community organizer."
According to Sowell, Obama was "mobilizing all the resentment" to organize people for battle.
"Community organizers don't unify, they divide," the good professor added. "They polarize. That's how they get what they want."
Other examples of Obama's failure? He "rammed" two bills down the throat of Americans -- the stimulus package and the health care reform bill.
The president also abused his powers when he fired the CEO of General Motors after pumping money into the auto company, "expanding" presidential powers beyond its proper scope, according to Sowell.
Never mind that all the auto companies had collapsed, setting off a negative chain reaction as thousands of employees were laid off and dealers went out of business in droves. And never mind that the industry has now recovered as a result of the Obama administration's intervention and the auto companies are actually hiring again.
But of course there was no need for any Federal intervention in Sowell's world. After all, even in the 1930s the economy had recovered on its own!
One wonders where Sowell got his economics degree from, and which history books has he been reading? Even the staunchest Tea Party revisionists haven't distorted history to that extent.
According to Sowell, the election of Obama served as a lesson about the dangers of responding to "rhetoric" and "symbolism," instead of people using their minds when voting.
Asked what advice he would offer to Obama, Prof. Sowell's stunning response was: "Resign." Even Robinson, the show's host, who clearly shared many of the professor's reactionary views, was clearly taken aback.
Sowell maintains that the mid-term elections represent a good opportunity to start checking President Obama.
And in a far-fetched scenario only he could envision, Sowell forecasts that given the opportunity, Obama is going to get a substantial portion of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in this country to vote, thereby securing a second term, and at that point the country would be "at a point of no return."
The Tea Party-supporting professor's hatred of the president is all consuming -- he ominously noted of President Obama: "If he doesn't get stopped in this fall's elections I don't know how he will ever get stopped."
"Speaking Truth To Power."
