Tim will be interested to learn that the most brutal and forceful refutation of D’Souza to date comes from the NRO’s own Victor Davis Hanson. A sample:
D’Souza writes: “Contrary to Hanson I am not blaming ‘millions of Americans,’ but rather am faulting particular liberal policies and actions taken by named individuals in power.”
Of course, he is. After all, millions of Americans support those policies of his “named individuals”—policies that may be wrongheaded, yet are hardly designed to lose the war against bin Laden as D’Souza alleges—and without any proof whatsoever. And I mean that literally when D’Souza, in his most reprehensible moment among many, identifies prominent Americans who, he says, are “domestic insurgents” (e.g., U.S. Senators Barbara Boxer, Hillary Clinton, Carl Levin, Patrick Leahy, Jack Reed, etc.) and “want bin Laden to win.”
When, for example, his treason list includes Salman Rushdie—for years in hiding as the target of a lethal fatwa—as one of the “domestic (sic) insurgents,” one gets a good indication of the level of D’Souza’s thinking. Note that he keeps reiterating that he is accusing the Left of wanting us to lose in Iraq, without mentioning that his charge is in fact far broader, in stating that the likes of the late Molly Ivins, Tony Judt, or Garry Wills “want bin Laden to win.”
Read the whole thing, as it is rather scathing. I am trying to figure out why D’Souza thinks he can get away with these blanket smears based on obvious falsehoods- maybe he is emboldened by the almost daily act of questioning the patriotism of Americans that has been standard practice for the past few years. Maybe he saw the faux outrage at Dick Durbin and thought he had a niche.
Who knows, but D’Souza has gone from a generally respected (in right-wing circles) columnnist to the chief conductor of the extremist wingnut choir. And he has done so faster than an LA stripper (a liberal, no doubt), can drop her knickers for a Franklin.
dreggas
Uh look at the public faces of the right these days. Coulter, Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Riley and honestly tell me you can’t figure out how he thinks he can get away with it. He knows his audience and knows damn well that the 28 percenters feel this way and he has joined them at the communal kool-aid trough. That’s all there is to it. Never mind the fact that the jihadists also hate his sorry ass for living lavishly in San Diego and more importantly being a freaking infidel.
He’s nothing more than overly rich trash with nothing to offer save the same shit over and over again like Coulter and Limbaugh. I consider being lumped in as an insurgent by that fucktard and honor considering I am fighting to get my country back and out of the hands of morons like him.
Need any more evidence? Just go read Greenwalds piece on Bush’s little luncheon with the neo-cons to see just what is going on. It’s even worse than imagined and after seeing 300 I can almost see where comparisons of bush to Xerxes come in.
ThymeZone
This is getting to be a regular thing now.
What’s the beef? D’Souza is basically just like Darrell.
I don’t get it.
Why don’t we invite D’Souza to post here? At least then Darrell would have some moral support.
Tim F.
Woot. I put so much emphasis on the topic of D”Souza and Coulter because the crowd that denounces the obvious crazies and the crowd that defends them will tell us quite a lot about themselves.
How, I wonder, will Hanson react when his pal Goldberg’s book comes out equating The Left with fascism.
ThymeZone
A rational and reasonable argument, I must say.
I hate when that happens …. when it goes against my own argument.
Andrew
I’d say that the odds are pretty good that D’Souza has a meth and gay hooker problem. No one hates liberals that much, unless they’re self loathing.
Zifnab
You just like writing the name “D’Souza”. Admit it.
Ellison, Ellensburg, Ellers, and Lambchop
Fixed.
ThymeZone
Well, he was a hell of a band leader, I’ll say that.
pharniel
and E^3L comes in with an obvious lie.
seriously man, people have printed out the quotes for you.
suck it up.
The Other Andrew
EEEL–if you want to be a spoof, you have to be more believable than that. If someone wanted to, they could have a 24/7 radio station that consisted of nothing but Hannity, O’Reilly, and Limbaugh declaring that liberals want the terrorists to win and/or aren’t really loyal to America.
Zifnab
Why’d they change “years” to “election cycles”? That doesn’t make any sense.
Fledermaus
Because it’s worked so well for the last 6 years.
Marcus Wellby
Ah, D’Souza — does he even realize even his most loyal readers think of him as nothing more than a useful “Macaca”?
His sanity is being destroyed by the same self-loathing that is consuming the Tranny Coulter and Junky Rush.
Marcus Wellby
He he! SO true. He’s like the Internet start-ups that launched right before the bubble burst. 5 years earlier and he’d have been the toast of crazy town.
Baby Jane
D’Souza reads like a terror appeaser. A chickenshit. And, a man possibly located in the wrong country, unless he was, say, part of a cell.
A proper response to someone(terrorists) who barge into your house and kill your kids would not include understanding the perps feelings. It would not involve the victim to soul-search. And, it certainly wouldn’t result in the victim adjusting their life to accommodate the will of the killer.
D’Souza clearly has no interest in America.
Rome Again
Pick that mess up right now! Don’t forget to put things back where they belong.
LLeo
I think the real question is: Is D’Souza’s level of argumentation how far you have to go before the other right-wingers start to go “Whao to far!”?
Specifically, D’Souza claims that the Speaker of the House “wants Al Quaida to win”. How far into crazy-land do you have to be to believe that level of crazy?
Could anyone imagine someone claiming that Tip O’Neil “wants the Soviets to win”? Maybe I am to young to remember anything like that. Maybe some folk claimed the Dems were “soft on communism”, but that seems as far as they went.
jenniebee
cross-applied
Vladi G
That assumes that the Pantload will stop watching the Simpsons long enough to finish it. We know he’s not actually researching, because he’s constantly either asking his readers to do his research for him, or claiming that he actually has no idea what he’s talking about.
At this point, the book, which has already been delayed by about two years, isn’t hitting the shelves anytime this decade.
jenniebee
damn, strikethrough didn’t work…
matt
This controversy has me scratching my head. Isn’t blaming the left for 9-11 and accusing them of the being the enemy/traitors pretty standard fare for the right? Why is D’Souza taking so much shit?
Jimitha
jenniebee, I think the result without strikethrough was even better.
Andrew
I thought that I explained this. Because he’s a dope smoking fag.
matt
The more I think about it, the more I think D’Souza must feel like he woke up in The Twilight Zone..not that I’m crying for the guy, but it’s like if a liberal wrote a book arguing for a higher minimum wage, only to find himself ostracized by the liberal community.
Maybe (hopefully) D’Souza just happened to be the guy who nudged all of this ridiculousness to finally jump the shark.
grumpy realist
I think D’Souza is Exhibit Evidence A for the theory that the far-right is the same as the far-left.
Qub was freakin’ out about a BLOODY CHURCH SUPPER as being evidence for the immorality and decadence of the West, for heaven’s sake. There’s not much you can do with that.
And D’Souza wants us to “sympathize” with people who think like that? Hell no.
If he really thinks that Western freedoms are worth so little and so easy to give up, he can bloody well go back where he came from. He’s not the one that would be shoved into a burka, denied employment or a drivers license, or hanged for being homosexual. And we’re supposed to say “ok, we should try to be more like these people”? Fuck that.
Cyrus
Well, there is a difference. O’Reilly, etc. say that liberals undermine the nation’s safety through devotion to pluralism, and deeply wrong strategies for national defense. D’Souza says that liberals undermine the nation’s safety mostly just by attracting the ire of religious fundementalists.
Limbaugh says that liberals hate the “real” America, which happens to give them something in common with terrorists. D’Souza says that terrorists hate America because it has liberals in it… and they’re right to do so!
cd6
Yeah but Deb Frisch and Ward Churchill said some crazy things
Jimmmm
D’lightful, D’lovely, D’souza.
Krista
I was surprise that the post title wasn’t “Beating D’own D’Souza”. You guys have had so much fun with his name on previous occasions.
An aside, but when I read this:
I read it too quickly, and thought that you were talking about an LA stripper dropping her knickers for Al Franken, which kind of made me throw up in my mouth a little.
Rome Again
The straw that broke the camel’s back? Let’s hope so.
Elvis Elvisberg
This is great to see. It’s fun when left and right can take a break from arguing to remember our points of agreement. And maybe it’ll help people like VDH refrain from saying bad stuff that they realize could bleed into support for D’Souzas.
I agree with Cyrus– I think that the president’s policies have been disasterous for our country and the world, but I don’t think he’s actually rooting for al Qaeda. Same as how people like O’Reilly think of Joe Biden and other Democratic foriegn policy mucky-mucks.
RSA
I think this is offered as evidence, but it’s weak to the point of non-existence. Let’s take a far-left opinion at random: “George W. Bush wants American soldiers to die.” I think that this is a reasonable equivalent to “Nancy Pelosi wants al Queda to win.” Now let’s see how much prominence people who publicly espouse these opinions have. On the right, we have a Fellow at the Hoover Institute, past Fellow at AEI, who regularly appears on national television and in print. Not a pariah. On the left, we have. . . nobodies. Anonymous commenters in blogs. Maybe a stupid Hollywood celebrity or two. And a third-rate college professor, perhaps. There’s really no equivalence. Sure, the opinions are out there on both sides, but look at who gets more support in the mainstream.
The Other Steve
D’Souza seems to simply be articulating the general opinion of the wingnuts. You go to any wingnut site, and it’s all about being pro-Bush. It’s got nothing to do with trying to do the right thing, or having an honest debate about the issues.
So he’s starting to attack Rushdie and others, no surprise. D’Souza is simply articulating the opinion of the modern Republican party.
The Other Steve
Oh yeah, and it’s clear why NRO is trying to distance themselves. It was ok to believe these things and talk about it amongst each other, but D’Souza had the gall to publish their beliefs and that threatens their ability to pretend to be moderates during electioneering season.
Pb
Only if you focus on the word ‘wants’–judge them by their actions and list it all out side by side. What has George W. Bush done to result in the deaths of American soldiers? What has he proposed? What has Nancy Pelosi done to result in the success of al-Qaeda? What has she proposed? etc., etc. A fair and extensive comparison would be interesting.
The Other Steve
On a side note. I went to see the movie 300 last night. That’s an interesting one. After reading up on some of the history, I concluded that the real story was better than the movie. Which makes me sad.
Zifnab
But that’s just mainstream, corporate owned, right-wing dominated cable TV. The only time they bring out Michael Moore or George Clooney is when they’re publicly bashing them. The extreme left is marginalized today like the extreme right was marginalized 40 years ago, when “OMG! Nazi!” had a bit more weight to it.
Bubblegum Tate
Yes, but we’re dealing with diminishing returns here. Saying somebody is “soft” on [fill in issue here] just doesn’t have enough oomph in it to make a difference anymore. In order to make the statment hold any consequence, you have to constantly push it further toward the extreme. “Democrats are soft on terror?” Feh. “Democrats want Al Qaida to win?” Now you’re cookin’ with sweet, sweet wingnut gas!
KCinDC
The distance between those positions isn’t as far as you seem to think.
RSA
Unfortunately, it’s in a small, enclosed space with no venting.
grumpy realist
Oh, I wasn’t talking about the platform that the far-right and the far-left platforms get in society, simply that the stances they hold end up being the same thing.
Example: Far-left: Americans are hateful and deserve to have nasty things to happen to them (because they are evil capitalists, plunder the world, and fail to have enough guilt for every sin America committed since day one against the Indians and the Mexicans and all the poor third-world country dwellers.)
Far-right: Americans are hateful and should have nasty things happen to them (because they are degenerate evildoers who fail to have enough God in their life and believe in such horrible things as evolution.)
Frankly, there doesn’t seem to be much difference to me if someone is calling upon me to Repent Your Sins for being a meat-eater or calling upon me to Repent Your Sins for being an atheist. And the real nuts on both sides seem to enjoy blowing things up.
sebrendan
There is no more “right” and “left”
That idea has defined the political discourse for far too long, and its day is done.
It’s Bush and Not-Bush, it’s positions on the Iraq war. These are the defining characteristics of the next political generation.
If you want to know why D’Souza went from respected to not respected “right wing” writer, is that the movement he wrote for is dead.
Which is fine by me, it’s an old movement that first took control in 1980 and has had firm control until very recently. It’s time for new ideas.
A1
Lying republicans.
sure, the invasion was about “introducing democracy” yep. thats what it was. Not WMDs. Not AQ. Thats what we were sold.
And of course the complaint of the left is that it has a racist belief that democracy and islam are somehow “incompatible”. Not that it was the worst strategic mistake posible, executed as badly as possible. couldnt have been that.
I constantly look for signs of good faith on the right. Hanson isnt it.
Pb
grumpy realist,
But there’s still a matter of degree, direction and magnitude. I’d argue for equivalency if 35% of the country and much of the gov’t were controlled by rabid socialists and their followers who want to legislate their views on everybody else.
mclaren
John Cole mentioned: “I am trying to figure out why D’Souza thinks he can get away with these blanket smears based on obvious falsehoods.”
Because the Republican party has enjoyed fabulous success doing exactly that for the last 13 years, every since Newt Gingrich led the Republican Reovlution to power in 1994.
Newt Gingrich’s entire career? Blanket smears based on obvious falsehoods.
Rush Limbaugh’s whole reason for being? Blanket smears based on obvious falsehoods.
Ann Coulter’s entire shtick? Blanket smears based on obvious falsehoods.
Pam Atlas’ reason for waking up in the morning? Blanket smears based on obvious falsehoods.
John Hinderaker’s sum and substance? Blanket smears based on obvious falsehoods.
Glenn Greenwald’s sum total of life accomplishments? Blanket smears based on obvious falsehoods.
Tom Delay’s sole achivement as a legislator? Blanket smears based on obvious falsehoods.
Karl Rove’s political career? Blanket smears based on obvious falsehoods.
And how does the drunk-driving C student in the White House get through the day? His hand shakes…his vision blurs…he reaches for that bottle of Jack Daniels, but it isn’t there… So instead, he makes do with…blanket smears based on obvious falsehoods.
KCinDC
Glenn Greenwald?
Darkwater
Mary Hartman?
mclaren in absentia
I meant Reynolds.
jake
This post is a test.
(But thank gods you said “down.”)
Newport 9
Fixed.
mclaren
Yeah, Glenn Reynolds, not Glenn Greenwald. Instapundit. Mr. “Jacksonian Plan.” AKA “first we nuke the Saudis and the Syrians, then we set upa puppet government in the radioactive slag that used to be the mideast.” And the guy is a law professor. Sheesh.