Month: September 2010

This is a long overdue take-down:

The start of the D'Souza phenomenon came in 1995, when he published The End of Racism. Written to ride the wave of books and articles that called for white America to get over its racial guilt, it included lines like the "American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well." It was so sloppy and unconvincing that it killed the genre for a few years; it's a 700-page doorstop by a one-time AEI scholar that no one cites today. The next D'Souza implosion came in 2007, with the publication of another book that killed its genre. The Enemy at Home consisted of an argument that the "left" was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. That was an irresistible hook for a publisher, especially after the public had turned on the Bush administration and the war on terror. But D'Souza made such a hash out of it that the people who had danced around the left-and-9/11 idea realized how deeply stupid it was. Victor Davis Hanson joined the mob and pointed out, as politely as he could, that D'Souza's enemies list was "nonsensical."

So The Roots of Obama's Rage is D'Souza's third pseudo-academic swing for the fences. In the book, and in the Forbes article that Gingrich plans to spread far and wide, he strikes out.

Yglesias concurs and elaborates. Here's my review of D'Souza's last piece of excrescence, for what it's worth. Don't miss Robert A. George's D'Souzaing of D'Souza. And DiA echoes this theme. What still staggers me is that either D'Souza or Gingrich are regarded in any way as "thinkers". They are not. They are self-promoting charlatans, with not an ounce of decency, personal or professional, between them, who see ideas as weapons to be used, or sources for personal advancement and enrichment.

We're one step closer.

A reader writes:

I realize you're upset. But this:

[Weigel] insists that the Tea Party candidate who stole its Republican primary doesn't have a chance in the general election

… is uncalled for. O'Donnell did not "steal" anything, any more than Alvin Greene "stole" his primary win. People voted and this was the result.

Point taken.

"Aside from its genuflections to the liberating miracles of free markets, movement conservatism — which is to say, modern conservatism — requires only the catechism of "Obamian socialism," Big Brother thuggery, and some imagined Elysium of past Constitutional purity. Oh, you may of course toss in some cultural mention of the evils of, say, onanism, but that's optional. The surer path forward is a profound hatred of all things Other and a zealous love of bad, shadowy history," – PM Carpenter.

A reader writes:

In the spirit of vigilantly pointing out what is right under your nose I offer the following critique of this post defending Marty Peretz. With all these things said about Peretz, the fact remains that if anybody used the exact same language with any other group of people, they would be trashed unambiguously. I think that we may be too quick and harsh to judge in most circumstances, but if the part of the formulation that he didn't apologize for had been made with "Jews" or "blacks," then the person who said it would be persona non grata amongst the intelligentsia and forced into disrespectable retirement.

It wouldn't matter how many other good characteristics they had. Nobody like Jack Shafer would offer any sort of defense whatsoever and you wouldn't write a blog post on how torn you are over it. The condemnation would be clear and simple. I know you know this and have pretty much said so but still the answer to Jack is "yes WHY are we just worrying about this now? Why has this vileness not been taken head on before? Why are we holding back on this when we wouldn't in other similar circumstances?"

Some forms of bigotry are respectable and anti-Muslim bigotry is the top one. It won't even be a blip in his career while others have gone down for far less. Why should he have a better fate here than any of those people? Something is very wrong and that matters much more here than noting his otherwise good character and your long friendship with him.

Another writes:

I read your whole post on Marty Peretz three times and was really blown away by the cognitive dissonance of it.  Your assertion that Peretz is committed to openly airing debates is terribly unconvincing given his derision of rights that are designed to foster such debates.

In the span of one week, Peretz wrote two blog posts demonstrating his open contempt for the First Amendment.  He started out by saying, "I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that [Muslims] are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse."  Abuse?  It does not appear to occur to him, in this post or his apology, that there is no such thing as an "abuse" of the First Amendment.  An act is either constitutionally protected or it isn't.

Then, as if to balance out his hostility to one group's rights with hostility to another's, he suggested that the government get an injunction to stop the Qur'an burning at the Dove World Training Center.  Read this part:

But it is disgusting. And it is disgusting no matter how many people believe the act would be and should be protected by the First Amendment.

In fact, it is uncivilized. I believe that the Obama administration should go to the Supreme Court or maybe tactically to the most sensible and civilized appellate court and seek an injunction against this atrocity that 1. will encourage Muslim madmen to respond in kind and 2. will also encourage primitive Christians to extend and expand the auto da fé.  (Italics in the original, if you can believe it.)

Yes, burning the Qur'an, burning any book, is disgusting, but disgusting and "uncivilized" speech is still protected.  Could you imagine the Supreme Court just dismissing standards like incitement of "immediate breach of the peace" or "imminent lawless action" and saying, "But it's uncivilized"?

Goldblog is pessimistic.

Conor remembers Dr. Francis Everett Townsend:

Awash in the cult of the presidency, today’s liberals and progressives tend to see old age pensions as a triumph of FDR, while conservatives see it as a scourge born of his statist brain. Though it would be ahistorical to diminish the president’s influence, it must also be acknowledged that huge grassroots movements for old age pensions preceded their embrace by politicians at the national level.

And these movements weren’t an exclusively leftist phenomenon. There were FDR Democrats and Upton Sinclair socialists, to be sure, but the Townsend clubs tended to support Republican candidates, and were seen by contemporaries and some historians as right-wing populists — that era’s answer to Glenn Beck fans.

"But we also can’t make progress if we have candidates who got serious character problems … [O'Donnell] attacked [Castle] by saying he had a homosexual relationship with a young aide with not a bit of evidence to prove it," – Karl Rove.

I'm ashamed to say it's hard not to take some pleasure in Rove being Roved. Couldn't happen to a more deserving creep.

The NYT reports on the Empire State's GOP gubernatorial primary:

It put at the top of the party’s ticket a volatile newcomer who has forwarded e-mails to friends containing racist jokes and pornographic images, espoused turning prisons into dormitories where welfare recipients could be given classes on hygiene, and defended an ally’s comparison of the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, who is Jewish, to “an Antichrist or a Hitler.” Yet Mr. Paladino, 64, energized Tea Party advocates and social conservatives with white-hot rhetoric and a damn-the-establishment attitude, promising to “take a baseball bat to Albany” to dislodge the state’s entrenched political class. 

On the other hand, his wife threw a beer at him the first time they met, and she got to like him better.