FOX, BREITBART, AND RICKETTS TRY TO BRING BACK D'SOUZA'S PSEUDO-BIRTHERISM

Remember the Dinesh D'Souza book that charged Barack Obama with getting all his ideas from a father he met only a couple of times? The one that made the cover of Forbes, and that Newt Gingrich was quoting for a while?

Well, now we learn from The New York Times that D'Souza has a fan and financial patron for this work -- Joe Ricketts, the guy who for whom that Jeremiah Wright attack ad was being prepared until the Times wrote about it last week:

... the billionaire investor Joe Ricketts ... is involved in another effort slated for this summer, a documentary film based on a widely criticized book, "The Roots of Obama's Rage" by Dinesh D'Souza, which asserts that Mr. Obama is carrying out the "anticolonial" agenda of his Kenyan father.

Mr. Ricketts's aides said he was one of roughly two dozen investors, providing only 5 percent of the film's budget. But ... Mr. Ricketts's aides also said that he had helped pay for newspaper and Internet advertisements promoting Mr. D'Souza's book in late 2010, one of which called it "the book the White House doesn't want you to read," and warned, "The real Barack Obama is even worse than you think." ...

A spokesman for Mr. Ricketts said that he had supported the book and the movie only because of his friendship with Mr. D’Souza, whom he has known for several years. The two men became acquainted through the American Enterprise Institute, a spokesman said....

The Times doesn't post the film's apocalyptic trailer, or a link to the film's Web site, but you can get those right now from -- where else? -- Fox Nation. Here's the trailer:





And here's Breitbart.com joining this axis of evil, with a column from the film's producer, Gerald Molen (he also co-produced Schindler's List, as he and others involved in the film never tire of reminding us). Molen's column is also apocalyptic, as he talks (somewhat incoherently) about the consequences of the 2008 election:

...We failed to hear that horrific sucking sound of our falling into the vortex of calm voices pushing us ever so gently but with assured and deft platitudes, into the hell of our own making.

... We can never lose our awareness that those who perpetrate the lie and the hate by using their best tools of fear and envy and class warfare are alive and well and doing their very best to take our basic freedoms away from us....

Another part of the ongoing dilemma is that the President surrounded himself with self-proclaimed Marxists, socialists, communists and progressives. Why? Is the answer that he embodies some or all of those ideological characteristics? I think so. Each of them arrived with an agenda to turn America into the vision of themselves and the despicable goal of changing America into a European style state of fear and class warfare....

Molen sounds a bit like his patron Joe Ricketts, as quoted in the Times today:

An early glimpse of his views on Mr. Obama can be found in a June 2010 graduation speech he gave at Bellevue University in Nebraska, for which he is a leading benefactor. Lamenting the banking and auto bailouts, he declared, "Our Republic is under assault from our government," adding the historical note that "most of the past threats have come from outside our borders."

He called this "a most dangerous time," when "people begin to second-guess the American experiment" and "flirt with dead-ends like socialism."

Back when Forbes was excerpting D'Souza's book, Adam Serwer looked at his "Kenyan anticolonialist" thesis and wrote:

This is birtherism with big words. This is the witchdoctor sign without Photoshop, WorldNetDaily without the exclamation points. D'Souza doesn't need to stare at Obama's birth certificate for hours to come to the same conclusion as the birthers, which is that the president is a foreigner.

True enough -- but I think the talk of all these guys going beyond birtherism to literal Antichrist-ism. I know right-wingers get this way every time there's a Democrat in office -- D'Souza, in a CPAC video linked at the films site, says Obama isn't "a traditional Democrat" like that nice Bill Clinton, but, of course, the right thought Clinton was the Antichrist when he was in office. I'm just pointing it out because Antichrist-ism is as crazy and conspiratorial as birtherism, yet it isn't denounced the way birtherism is. It wasn't in Clinton's time, and it isn't now. It should be. Ricketts, Molen, and D'Souza are exactly as crazy as Orly Taitz.