Wealthy businessman Joe Ricketts, founder of TD Ameritrade and owner of the Chicago Cubs, may have been stopped in his tracks with his plans to use Rev. Jeremiah Wright against President Obama, but that hasn’t stopped him from funding another effort with racist undertones: A movie in the works that’s based on a book claiming Obama is motivated to undermine America by a Kenyan “anti-colonial” agenda..
The movie is scheduled for release this summer. It is based on the book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage” by right-wing critic Dinesh D’Souza. Aides for Ricketts told the New York Times that he provided only 5 percent of the funding for the film, but the Times story does reveal that Ricketts isn’t letting up on his efforts to use his millions to try to take down the president.
When the Times exposed his plans last week to possibly spend $10 million to fund an advertising campaign linking the president to his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the backlash was so loud and hostile—with calls to boycott his companies and growing opposition to his hopes of getting public funding for upgrades to Wrigley Field, where the Cubs play baseball—that Ricketts quickly backed off.
But he didn’t go away. We can stay tuned for an illuminating expose throwing a spotlight on the president and the Kenyan impulses that he got from his father—a man that he saw for only a few days in his entire childhood.
He 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 his involvement shows how the more strident attacks against Mr. Obama, which Mr. Romney’s aides view as counterproductive, continue to find backing even as the Republican Party and the Romney campaign seek to keep the focus on the economy.
