Washington Times op-ed: Obama lacks ‘blood impulse’ for what America ‘is about’ due to his ‘Kenyan father.’
"Washington Times op-ed: Obama lacks ‘blood impulse’ for what America ‘is about’ due to his ‘Kenyan father.’"
In a column today criticizing President Obama’s bow before the Japanese Emperor, Wesley Pruden, the editor emeritus of The Washington Times, claims that President Obama “seems never to have studied much American history” because he apparently doesn’t know that “the essence of America is that all men stand equal and are entitled to look even a king, maybe particularly a king, straight in the eye.” Pruden then claims this lack of understanding of America’s “essence” is “no fault of the president” because Obama’s father was Kenyan and his mother was “attracted to men of the Third World”:
But Mr. Obama, unlike his predecessors, likely knows no better, and many of those around him, true children of the grungy ’60s, are contemptuous of custom. Cutting America down to size is what attracts them to “hope” for “change.” It’s no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of “the 57 states” is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.
Pruden has a history of writing racially-charged items. In 2005, he wrote a column criticizing the Senate for passing a resolution that apologized for never enacting an anti-lynching law. As Media Matters noted at the time, Pruden had previously made numerous “sympathetic statements about the Confederacy” and employed “a neo-Confederate activist in the Times newsroom.”