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In an interview conducted as he awaits sentencing for violating campaign-finance law, Dinesh D’Souza reveals the inspiration behind the “documentaries” he’s produced, such as 2016: Obama’s America (trailer above) and America: Imagine the World Without Her:

I went back and watched Roger and Me, which I think is [Michael Moore’s] best film. It’s got an interesting premise: General Motors closes down a big auto plant that his dad happened to work at, and he’s going to go find the CEO of General Motors and demand to know why. Now, it fails intellectually, because there is an obvious reason why General Motors might want to close that plant—i.e., it’s not making money. And one possible reason it’s not making money is General Motors has been paying people like his dad way too much and can make cars much cheaper in North Carolina or other countries. You can’t proceed without confronting that argument. But Michael Moore’s presumption is that the CEO of General Motors, Roger Smith, is just a mean guy who wants to deprive working people of their livelihood. So intellectually, it’s ridiculous.

But visually, cinematically, narratively, it works. This clownish Michael Moore showing up everywhere, the cops in dogged pursuit. All of that works. What Michael Moore understands is that a movie traffics in the language of emotion. The intellect is subordinate to that.

On the Obama question, D’Souza is actually copying Moore’s intellectually ridiculous oeuvre.

He starts, as Moore does, with a crude reductionist idea of a public figure – Obama as seeking revenge on a colonial America – undergirded by nothing but D’Souza’s own pop-psychologizing of Obama’s relationship with his own father. Everything else needed to explain the actions of a center-left president (who has waged more wars in more places than most American presidents) is moot. For D’Souza, a crude narrative of racial revenge is all that’s really necessary to understand the Obama presidency – and he then simply adds layer upon layer to this caricature, which feeds paranoia and conspiracy theories and glib ideology as powerfully as Moore once did.

D’Souza once believed in making serious arguments for a more conservative view of the world. It’s telling about his own evolution – and the degeneration of public discourse in America – that he has largely given that up in favor of really lucrative propaganda designed to monetize the polarized red state masses. He’s another example of the power of the right-wing media-industrial complex. Its ability to reward its propagandists with fantastic monetary awards without any need to engage critics has transformed conservatism in this country – for the gridlocked, ideological worse.

It’s been a remarkable aspect of the foreign policy “debate” over the last month that I haven’t heard a single leading Republican express misgivings about a new Iraq war’s impact on fiscal policy. And yet, for a few years now, we have been subjected to endless drama about the mounting debt when it comes to anything the government wants to do. Cost was one (ludicrous) reason to oppose Obamacare; it’s behind cutting off 3 million long-term unemployed from any benefits; it has led to proposals to turn Medicare into a premium support system and for cutting social security. Some of this fiscal vigilance I find useful – if it weren’t so transparently  a way to dodge GOP responsibility for the debt and to blame Obama for all of it and if it weren’t raised as a matter of urgency when the world economy was deeply depressed (the one time when fiscal lenience is warranted). But it is hard to resist the conclusion, after the last few weeks, that it’s all a self-serving charade.

I mean: where are the fiscal conservatives now? The ISIS campaign is utterly amorphous and open-ended at this point – exactly the kind of potentially crippling government program Republicans usually want to slash. It could last more than three years (and that’s what they’re saying at then outset); the cost is estimated by some to be around $15 billion a year, but no one really knows. The last phase of the same war cost, when all was said and done, something close to $1.5 trillion – and our current travails prove that this was one government program that clearly failed to achieve its core original objectives, and vastly exceeded its original projected costs.

If this were a massive $1.5 trillion infrastructure project for the homeland, we’d be having hearing after hearing on how ineffective and crony-ridden it is; there would be government reports on its cost-benefit balance; there would be calls to end it tout court. But a massive government program that can be seen as a form of welfare dependency for the actual countries – Turkey, Iran, Jordan, Kurdistan – facing the crisis gets almost no scrutiny at all. And what scrutiny it gets is entirely due to partisanship and the desire to portray this president as effectively useless.

Now take a look at the international disgrace that is the resilient torture and detention camp at Gitmo. It has been kept in operation – despite the huge damage it does in our campaign to restrain Jihadism – by the same people who have been hyper-ventilating about a British loser decapitating innocents in the deserts of Mesopotamia. Its cost? They don’t care. But ask yourself: if this were a domestic program, would there really be any debate? Some context:

At a cost of $2.8 million per prisoner per year, Guantánamo is the most expensive prison in the world. (The costliest prison in the U.S., the Colorado Supermax, at $78,000 per prisoner per year.) And the costs will continue to rise as facilities that were built to be temporary, like the Camp America Dining Facility, deteriorate. In addition to the dining facility repairs, the 2015 defense budget also calls for $11.8 million to upgrade a medical clinic that was never built to serve an aging population of prisoners. Congress earmarked another $69 million to renovate Camp 7, the top-secret facility that holds the 15-high value detainees who were tortured in CIA black sites prior to their transfer to Guantánamo. In March, The Miami Herald reported that the ground below the facility had shifted, causing the floors and walls of the building to crack.

Obama took office and proposed saving the US much of that $15 billion, by transferring the tortured detainees to super-max prisons in the mainland. The GOP blocked it – and continue to. Their only arguments are an appeal to irrational panic and fear of terrorists – which, come to think of it, is their only real response to the latest Sunni insurgency in Iraq as well. Some of us held out hope that the sheer fiscal drain of a perpetual, lose-lose war against a constantly replenishing Jihadism empowered by our intervention might temper some of this unreason. But we’ve just seen how a couple of videos can snap the GOP – and most of the country – into a fiscally reckless “do something whatever it costs” mindset, in which the debt is the last thing on any Republican’s mind.

They are frauds and hysterics. Anyone who cares about our fiscal future and believes the GOP is the part of our polity most able to address it is deluding herself. The past and the present definitively say otherwise.

(Photo:  Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) coming off the Senate floor after votes is asked by reporters about the situation in Iraq and the capture of a suspect in the 2012 Benghazi attack, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC Tuesday June 17, 2014. By Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images.)

Last week, Krugman contended that it can be done:

I’ve just been reading two new reports on the economics of fighting climate change: a big study by a blue-ribbon international group, the New Climate Economy Project, and a working paper from the International Monetary Fund. Both claim that strong measures to limit carbon emissions would have hardly any negative effect on economic growth, and might actually lead to faster growth. This may sound too good to be true, but it isn’t. These are serious, careful analyses.

He noted the “dramatic progress in renewable energy technology, with the costs of solar power, in particular, plunging, down by half just since 2010.” But Michael Levi points out that the “optimistic cost estimates have little to do with cheap solar.” Those estimates are possible only when you figure in the impacts of nuclear power, carbon capture technology, abundant bioenergy, and increased efficiency:

Krugman does an important service by rebutting those on both the right and the left who claim that serious climate action requires turning our economic system upside down. (It’s a good guess that this Wednesday column from Mark Bittman, which basically called for the end of capitalism in order to deal with climate change, provoked Krugman to write his latest.) But the sorts of policies you pursue if you think that serious climate action is mostly about wind and solar are fundamentally different from those you pursue if you believe otherwise. A central upshot is that if the modeling exercises that Krugman touts are correct, and countries pursue policies based on a belief in wind and solar, the actual costs of cutting emissions will be far higher than what Krugman claims. At the same time, if the modeling exercises Krugman highlights are wrong, he hasn’t given us particularly strong reason to believe that steep emissions cuts would be cheap.

McArdle also throws cold water in Krugman’s direction. She hesitates to draw too many conclusions from the New Climate Economy study he cites:

The details are a bit fuzzy so far (the report promises more in a forthcoming technical appendix). But most of the benefit seems to come from reducing respiratory diseases in the developing world and ending fossil-fuel subsidies, which are, no matter what you may have heard on the Internet, also concentrated in the developing world, not the U.S. tax code. …

This is not to say that the report is wrong. But many of the people who read it seem to have come away saying, “OK, great, it’s free, why can’t we do it?” Even if this is a free lunch over the long term, it is not a free lunch right now to the people who would need to make major changes in their lives. No matter how long you point to the equations, they will resist.

Over 300,000 turned out in NYC yesterday:

Bill McKibben isn’t holding his breath for an international climate deal:

The collapse of the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 was a signal event in diplomatic history, calling into question the ability of our societies to act cooperatively in the face of clear scientific warnings. There is no prospect of anything much happening next week at the climate summit, either. As Mark Bittman memorably put it in the New York Times: “The summit is a little like a professional wrestling match: There appears to be action but it’s fake, and the winner is predetermined. The loser will be anyone who expects serious government movement dictating industry reductions in emissions.”

Which is why McKibben helped organize Sunday’s climate march. His reasons for marching:

As individuals, there’s not much we can do. We can change our light bulbs—and we should—but doing so won’t change global warming. It’s a structural, systemic problem that needs to be addressed structurally and systemically. The most important rule for an individual in this fight is to figure out how not to remain an individual, how to join a movement big enough to change the politics. There’s no guarantee that we’re going to win, because it’s a timed test. In this case, if we don’t win pretty soon, it’s going to be a moot point.

Amy Davidson asks, “Whom did the march change?” She figures this is possibly “a more enduring question than what it changed, which, on an immediate policy level, might not be so much”:

Though the march was big, the coverage was fairly muted. Maybe it will still be effective; perhaps the numbers will persuade some politicians that more people care than they thought. But its less predictable legacy might be helping some people who were in the crowd, or who saw pictures of it, realize that they care more than they thought. Some might even become leaders, or—stranger things have happened—politicians. Marches like this may not be the planet’s last hope, but they may be a last chance to persuade a generation that the profession of politics is not entirely disconnected from the planet’s great problem.

Ronald Bailey takes issue with the marchers’ opposition to biotech, fracking, and nuclear. And with their hostility to capitalism:

[T]here is one placard with which I wholeheartedly agreed, “Enough, For All, Forever.” Sadly, many of the marchers oppose the only system that has ever enabled hundreds of millions of people to rise above humanity’s natural state of abject poverty.

Byron York also puts a negative spin on the march:

[T]he People’s Climate March was one long, loud, loosely organized demand that vast sums of money be taken from the wealthy and given to the clients of the coalitions and alliances and networks and task forces that make up today’s environmental justice movement. They’ve had enough of debating climate models. They want to start taking — now.

Juan Cole admires the marchers. But:

I just do have to point out that holding large rallies doesn’t always result in political change. It is by organizing at the district level, walking neighborhoods, and putting pressure on those running for Congress that we would get real legislative change. Some activists are such purists that they sniff at giving political contributions. Likewise, disinvestment from oil and gas companies is a great symbolic gesture but it doesn’t stop global warming.

He argues that “a single-issue Climate PAC, if well-funded, would make far more difference than standing in the street.” Sally Cohn is more upbeat:

The big greens “have to shift the way they do business, from being large top-down institutions to being accountable to democratic bases and practicing democratic decision-making,” said Ananda Lee Tan, representing the Climate Justice Alliance as a lead organizer behind the march. There are also still political rifts; the grassroots groups oppose big green support for corporate-backed cap-and-trade, and the big green groups refused to officially support the Flood Wall Street action the day after the march that will connect climate change with structural inequalities in capitalism.

These rifts may not be resolved any time soon. But for the first time in recent memory, grassroots organizations have been equal partners at the table with national groups, working in coordination, cross-racially, to organize a massive event. Whatever the outcome of the march, this process — and the relationships built as a result — will hopefully transform and strengthen the movement for the future.