D'Souza has REALLY worn out his welcome

Over on NRO's 'Corner' blog, the single most conservative blog I read, Dinesh D'Souza gets no respect anymore. Which is odd for a onetime wunderkind of the Right. However, Andrew Stuttaford doesn't waste much time smacking him down for interjecting his religious arguments into the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

This confirms that D'Souza has officially jumped the shark (a new term I just learned!). His last book, Enemies at Home, is so intellectually appalling that if his friends at NRO do not distance themselves they will look like fools, at best.

I picked up the book from the library and read the intro and conclusion and a few other pieces here and there. The negative reviews are right. The guts of his argument is this: everything about liberals that he and the Religious Right dislike is exactly what the terrorists don't like about America. This is why the liberals are responsible for 9-11. They drove the terrorists to it by being so provocative. Consequently America needs to mend its ways and change its institutions, religious attitudes, and social mores to create a society that won't offend Muslims around the world and then we would not have this little problem. You may think that I am reducing his argument to absurdity, but it really is his argument. Go read it yourself.

And when you are done, please explain why Conservatives think that it is the Democrats who are defeatists.

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.

D'Souza once again.

Another review of Dinesh D'Souza's The Enemy at Home, this one by Scott Johnson in the New Criterion. Worth a read, especially if you are not going to read the entire book itself (and I probably won't). It is easy to mischaracterize a book with some selective quotes, but the sentence “The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11," is about as clear a thesis statement as I have ever seen.

More on D'Souza's "The Enemy at Home"

As I said, Dinesh D'Souza's The Enemy at Home is getting roundly trashed almost wherever it is reviewed. Now Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online gives his take. It is by far the most sympathetic and nuanced review of the work, and the more damning for all that. The review is worth a read, though, because Kurtz uses D'Souza to spin off some interesting ideas about Islam, Muslim society, and the roots of the violence that he promises to develop in more depth.

Dinesh D'Souza's latest book gets a hot reception

Dinesh D'Souza, whose first book or two I rather liked, has now come out with The Enemy at Home. In it he concludes that the main reason the jihadists hate America and want to attack it, or rather 'us', is because we have become so disgustingly immoral. I could say a lot about that general premise, but it has been said a lot better by Bruce Bawer, who I am told, is a conservative.

At any rate, check out his review. Here's a sample about the reaction to 9-11:

Leftists railed that America had gotten its payback for imperialism; Jerry Falwell insisted that pagans, abortionists, gays, and others of that ilk had “helped this happen.” This claim was elaborated in an unpublished text later sent to me by a retired member of the Norwegian Parliament who blamed 9/11 on the stateside degenerates—principally “homosexual heroes and anal addicts” (yes, “anal addicts”)—who offend Muslim family values. Now right-wing hack Dinesh D’Souza makes this same accusation in a jaw-droppingly repulsive screed, The Enemy at Home. Charging that “the cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11,” he wants good Christians to recognize that Islamic values resemble their own—and that the real enemy is those fags next door. If only they’d retarget their rage, thereby showing their respect for “traditional values,” Muslims would stop hating the USA.

I guess he didn't like it.

Notice that D'Souza's basic take is that we were attacked for something wrong in our society and that we should change immediately. It's hard to interpret this as anything other than saying the terrorists have a point and we should follow their commands. Lots of people have hated this book, but conservative magazines and journals. while defending D'Souza, have not reviewed it. Which is a little odd.