Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
by Tim F| 48 Comments
This post is in: General Stupidity
Dinesh D’Souza on CSPAN2, roughly translated: Terrorists were right to attack America because people like me are in it. Also, what happened to civil discourse?
The last five years in a nutshell.
***
Direct quote: “I think that I am completely in the mainstream of American conservatism.” I guess he means that modern conservatism is entirely made up of craven Ann Coulterites happy to make common cause with terrorists. Is that true? It will be informative to see who d’nounces D’Souza.
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[…] You would think that rightwing pundits would take exception to terrorist sympathizer* Dinesh D’Souza’s claim that he is a perfectly mainstream conservative pundit. After all, the idea that terrorists are right to hate America isn’t just edging into Ward Churchill territory. It is exactly the Churchillian sin that got these same pundits worked up into such a frenzy not so long ago. If Churchill’s sins were so heinous then Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin ought to take far more exception when the next Ward Churchill claims to be one of them. […]
scs
Sorry, Ann Coulter would never have any common cause with terrorists. She seems to think the only good terrorist is a dead terrorist.
ThymeZone
America has to come to terms with the fact that a significant chunk of it population is just a bunch of crazy, ignorant people.
It used to be fashionable to think that the crazy ignorant people were funny looking hillbillies who lived in stilt houses in the bayou, or in the hills somewhere.
Now these crazy ignorant people have money, power, and political power.
They declared war on us, the ones who aren’t them.
So, we have to respond. We took a big step in November, but it’s just a baby step. Long way to go.
American Conservatism, as a product, is pretty much dead. What isn’t dead is this new hubris, this new arrogance and sociopathic outlook on the world. That is very much alive.
American Conservatism can come back, but not while the morons are running the institution.
It’s a cautionary tale for both sides, liberal and conservative. If you sell out to your crazies, you sell yourself out. The desire for power leads to deals with devils, and it isn’t worth it.
Are we ready yet for the revenge of the middle?
Nikki
No one on that side has so far.
Rome Again
So, what is your opinion of Ann Coulter, scs? It seems from your description here that you seem to think she’s a good member to have on your team. Do you agree?
Andrew
I think you’ve confused “terrorists” with “liberals,” because it’s the latter that Coulter wants dead.
She loves terrorists because without al qaeda, she wouldn’t be nearly as rich.
Rome Again
Who shakes a stick at the provider of their riches? Yup, you got a point there.
scs
AS for Anne Coulter, I’m not really religious so
I don’t agree with her religious angle and her anti-abortion stance, but I agree with her on her War on Terror stance. I think she tells it like she sees it and it is sometimes funny and insightful when she does. Other times she goes over the line – with her comments on the 9/11 widows and some comments I remember about killing this or that people, and other insults, etc. So on the whole, mixed feelings.
Rome Again
So you agree with her stance that certain SCOTUS justices should be killed?
ThymeZone
Wow, how heroic. So did Charles Manson.
You admire him too, then?
Evilbeard
Specifically, what do you agree with Ann Coulter about on the war on terror? I can’t seem to take anything at all she says seriously, especially after hearing her call for Americans to be killed because of their political beliefs.
In my opinion, her rhetoric makes her just as dangerous to the American way of life as any bomb-wielding terrorist.
Mike P
Did anyone see Law & Order on Friday which centered around a Coulter-like shrew? Ah, good times.
Rome Again
scs is an “Annabee”.
ThymeZone
Snap.
ThymeZone
Ooooh, QOTD.
Nice.
Bubblegum Tate
This is probably the funniest part of this whole stupid thing: Dinesh putting on airs of bewilderment. “Why’s everybody so mad? I only said that we deserved 9/11 because of all the damn dirty libruals who live here.”
The second-funniest part: That Dinesh doesn’t care that by his own formulation, conservatives like him are bedfellows with “teh terrists!” in cultural matters (see: abortion, gay rights, the role of religion in government, etc. etc. etc.)
ThymeZone
Bubble, they are actually bedfellows in demagoguery and manipulation. That’s the real common denominator.
Taking the ignorance and fears of people and harnessing them into a source of power requires that kind of rabble rousing. It doesn’t really matter what the issues, or who the targets, are. It’s non-believers and homosexuals, in this case. Perfect for splitting off your people from the herd.
Larry M
(1) D’Souza is the gift that keeps on giving – to the Dems. Let’s hope that he is given an even more prominent platform.
(2) Several conservatives have denounced him. However, from the perspective of the Democratic Party, the fewer who denounce him the better.
Rome Again
Neocon Republicans are much more like their Middle East counter parts than they could ever realize. Good point!
Rome Again
Tim? John?
TZ and I need some Open Thread so we don’t queer these discussions to much. How ’bout it?
cleek
She seems to think the only good terrorist is a dead terrorist.
and she loves them even more when they hit the right target. *cough*McVeigh*cough*
Rome Again
McVeigh isn’t dead, he’s in South America (I read it in the Enquirer).
j/k
jake
Mainstream? How about piss stream?
But of course he said he thinks he’s in the middle so when people again rise up to tell him to bugger off he can again assume the look of wounded innocence because he was only expressing an opinion.
grumpy realist
Someone did a fisking of D’Souza’s arguments and pointed out that the American Culture that whoever-that-Egyptian-Islamist went apeshit over was pretty staid 1950s culture. Guy was fulminating about dancing at a church supper.
D’Souza may wring his hands about how ‘orrible, ‘orrible present day US culture is, and how we have to get rid of all that 1960s feminism/gay rights/whatever but I don’t think there’s anything–aside from copying the culture of Saudi Arabia and converting to Islam–that would make Islamists happy.
There’s not much you can do about theocrats except put them in their own location with a large fence around them and make sure they don’t get out. If it weren’t for the oil, the Mideast would have remained a collection of camel herders and date gatherers. And when the oil runs out, that’s what they’ll lapse back to.
OCSteve
I’ll denounce him. The man is a whack job.
CaseyL
Both William F Buckley and George Gilder have letters in todays NYT Book Review d’fending D’Souza.
OCSteve, I think you’re out of step, not with real conservatism, but with ‘conservatism’ as it’s been redefined (i.e., date-raped, impregnated, and gave birth to a demonspawn) by today’s GOP. Don’t feel bad: you have lots of company. Including this blog’s proprietor.
PS and OT: For the last couple of weeks, this blog has appeared on my computer as pushed off to the right, with the ad banner column taking up the whole left half of the screen. Is anyone else having that problem? I’m on a Mac, running Safari.
tBone
Me too. I emailed John and Tim about it; not sure if there’s anything they can do though. The tags of a RealMedia link in the PJM sidebar are being mangled somehow, so the link shows up as text on the page and pushes the center column over.
tBone
Forgot to mention, this only happens to me in Safari as well.
Tim F.
CaseyL and tBone,
I do some of my blogging from Safari in OSX (not sure which version) and some from Firefox on PC, and neither has any problem for me. John sees some irregularities with IE, but I never use it and I don’t see them.
I don’t know whether the problem is OSX version-specific or what’s going on. John is the site manager so there isn’t much that I could do anyway.
demimondian
I repro tBone and CaseyL’s bug on Safari. The blog looks correct on IE or on Firefox, but it is pretty hosulated on Safari.
demimondian
By the way, I read teh original posting as ‘de-nuances D”Souza’. I’m kind of sorry that I was wrong; I liked the image of the flood of right wing “clarifications” of what he said as “de-nuancing” it.
CaseyL
Well. I’m glad it’s not just me.
I can still read and comment, so it’s no big deal. Just looks wierd.
TenguPhule
Poisoning a Supreme Court Justice.
This has been another edition of Scs needs to stop Sucking Cheney’s Dick.
demimondian
FWIW, I use Firefox 1.5.x on OSX. It’s better supported for most sites.
TenguPhule
Shorter Scs: Kill the Muslims and force them to convert to Christianity? A-okay with me! Torture and detain without trial? Fuck yeah!! It’s all shits and giggles here!
DWangerin
CaseyL and tBone,
The site renders fine for me with Safari, but I use PithHelmet to block most ads.
Richard 23
The only thing extreme right wingers hate more than al Qaeda (other extreme right wingers) are people to their left. If the terrorists were Christian rather than Muslim they would be allies. D’Souza just says things that his fellow travelers are too bashful to say in public.
What he says isn’t that much different than what Falwell and Robertson said about 9/11. It’s the fault of the secular humanists, lesbians and gays, teh left, etc.
Richard 23
Hmmm, it’s called email or chat software. If you sign up for Gmail and get GoogleTalk (or use AIM), you can banter to your heart’s content! ;-)
Peeperkorn
Andrew Stuttaford has a critical response to the new D’Souza book here: http://www.nysun.com/article/47948
I came across it via The Corner at NRO, which I read from the left. No comment on the whole, but I like this part:
“Poor, peculiar Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian philosopher whose writings have been a major inspiration for many of today’s Islamic radicals, was disgusted by the “animalistic behavior” he claimed to have witnessed on a visit to America. That disgust clearly played a part in shaping his increasingly fundamentalist worldview, and Mr. D’Souza naturally sees this as important evidence in support of his case. In fact, it’s the opposite. Qutb’s visit to America took place in the Truman era, a time not usually remembered for its wild abandon. The event that appears to have shocked him the most was, wait for it, a church social.
You see, Dinesh, there really is no pleasing some people.”
A Truman-era church social. Dinesh should respond on this point. I can’t imagine how he can, but he’s a professional sophist, so anything’s possible.
grumpy realist
Thanks–yes, that was the review I was thinking of.
Pb
No, you two just need to get a room. :)
Jimmy Mack
I’m pretty inclined to agree with her. But I also think D’Souza has a point — that part of what drives Islamic terrorists is the “Girls Gone Wild” aspect of our culture. That doesn’t excuse their terrorism of course but it may help to explain it.
Richard 23
Yeah, Jimmy. But part of the liberty that we enjoy, allows, nay, demands that “Girls Gone Wild” and “Cum Dumpster” and other fine American titles be available to any patriotic American who desires them.
You may think D’Souza has a point (he doesn’t except to say that he sympathizes with the enemy) but whatever. We sacrifice freedom and liberty in order to appease them at our peril.
Doesn’t it scare you that the right wing here and the right wing there have common cause on a number of social issues? They speak the same language. And I thought it was supposed to be the Islamofascists cribbing left wing talking points (anti-war), when really they’re borrowing from the religious right talking points on social issues (anti-freedom).
Richard 23
Sorry for the length of my comment, but there’s so much juicy goodness in the quoted post, I just found it impossible to pick and choose. (There’s more, so read the whole thing.)
Mark Noonan at Blogs for Bush seems to wholeheartedly agree with D’Souza:
So far so good. That’s D’Souza’s basic thesis.
Aha, so who is the enemy you might ask?
I bet you guessed right. And for the record, I do believe that the ability of a person to do as he pleases (so long as it harms nobody else) is to be defended. It’s called freedom. Give me liberty!
This should be basic and supported by all Americans. But to Mark, this seems to be a dirty and depraved concept.
Islamofascists and a “leftist” (or leftists) both want to destroy the west!
Mark, you are such a coy moderate. External threats first, leftists next. So does he want to force the Islamofascists “out of power and influence” and kill the leftists. Or is it the other way around? If both groups are trying to destroy the “Judeo-Christian west” don’t they both deserve the same type of punishment?
Bubblegum Tate
Heh, Mark Noonan is the exact sort of idiot D’Souza wants to hit up for book sales. That he’s enough of a simp to actually buy D’Souza’s idiocy comes as a surprise to no one, I would think. My favorite bit is his hand-wringing that a 15-year-old could come out of the closet and, possibly, NOT get persecuted for it. The horror!
TenguPhule
Shorter Jimmy Mack: I sing in high octave for a reason.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
We must capture these girls, and allow the terrorists to tame them. If we should falter in this endeavor, they will undoubtedly destroy us- yes, and be fully justified in doing so. Taming these wild girls is the first order of business. Send them to Guantanamo at once, and let each inmate select those seeming comeliest to his gaze! And let us celebrate our national liberation from this feral phenomenon by burning the coastline of California to the ground, yea, burn it unto the ground and into the dust from the streets of Oakland unto the outskirts of suburban San Diego.
Then, and only then, shall we know peace. Selah.
Jimmy Mack
Funny.