Rush Limbaugh Calls Obama a "Colonial Despot"

Posted by Ryan Powers, Think Progress at 12:00 PM on June 27, 2009.

 On his radio show Friday, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh quoted at length from a new article in the American Thinker entitled, “Obama, the African Colonial” by L.E. Ikenga who identifies herself as a “first generation born West African-American woman.” In the article Ikenga argues that Obama is best understood through his “identification with his father” and his adoption of a “political mindset rooted in post colonial Africa”:

Like many educated intellectuals in post colonial Africa, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. was enraged at the transformation of his native land by its colonial conqueror. But instead of embracing the traditional values of his own tribal cultural past, he embraced an imported Western ideology, Marxism. I call such frustrated and angry modern Africans who embrace various foreign “isms”, instead of looking homeward for repair of societies that are broken, African Colonials. They are Africans who serve foreign ideas.

 Ikenga concludes, “[U]nderstand this: the African colonial who is given too much political power can only become one thing: a despot.” Limbaugh took Ikenga’s argument and ran with it, declaring that Ikenga “nailed who the guy is.” “We’ve elected somebody who’s more African in his roots than he is American…and is behaving like an African colonial despot,” Limbaugh said. Listen here.

Tagged as: obama, limbaugh, rush limbaugh, colonial, despot, ikenga

Ryan Powers is a former intern of the Center for American Progress and a senior at the College of William and Mary.