More on the D'Souza book

I think that D'Souza has become a bit toxic for conservatives. National Review, the news organ that gave his latest book The Enemy at Home its most respectful hearing has also featured several blistering attacks on it, which leads me to believe that they have decided that it is filled with so much nonsense that not treating it negatively would call their own intellectual bona fides into question. This must be hard for them since D'Souza has in the past been one of their favorite house intellectuals. At least they have allowed the author extensive space to answer his critics which he did in a four part piece labelled 'the Closing of the Conservative Mind.' It's one of those things you have to appreciate.

I have mentioned several times how much I respect the historian of ancient Greece Victor Davis Hanson, even while I vehemently disagree with some of his views. He was one of the critics D'Souza lambasted for criticizing The Enemy at Home. Now Hanson has written his own response to D'Souza (so have some of the others, but Hanson's is the only one worth reading).
You can find it here. Here's a taste of it:

[I]t is the singular achievement of D’Souza that his bizarre writ has for a moment earned universal condemnation from those who can agree on little else. But that rare consensus represents not a “closing of the conservative mind” so much as it reflects the moral vileness of much of what D’Souza writes. And pathetically, the more frequently conservative magazines, media, and institutions offer D’Souza a megaphone, the more apt he is to play the wounded fawn.

Inimitable Hanson.

I think it is an interesting question as to why the right wing has turned on D'Souza like this, and what it will mean for D'Souze in the future. As I've said, in the past I have enjoyed his work and was always amused by the fact that liberals had a hard time trashing his views on racial politics in America by the usual, 'oh, just another white guy defending white privilege!'

Since the book sounds so idiotic, I will have to check it out of the library and read at least the core of it so I have some basis for sneering. And to see if it has any redeeming qualities, as some conservative critics have despairingly maintained.