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Sunday, October 15, 2006

James Wolcott reads Dinesh D'Souza, so you don't have to
Posted by Jill | 11:56 AM
Every now and then I get just a little bit of hubris and feel at least partially responsible for the rise of neocon hacks like Dinesh D'Souza, because of that period from 1981 to 1983 when I was an editorial assistant at Simon & Schuster for one Erwin Glikes, a very sweet, lovely man who for reasons that had his liberal staff reports scratching our heads, had decided he was a neoconservative. We were tempted to think that he was just tapping into the zeitgeist of those heady Reagan years, when being invited to Bob Bartley's cocktail parties was the height of in-crowdness, were it not for the fact that after leaving Simon & Schuster for Macmillan, where The Free Press was essentially created for him to run, he continued to publish right-wing screeds, most notably David Brock's Anita Hill hatchet-job. This is one reason why, when after finding himself once again under the loathsome Dick Snyder's umbrella as a result of Viacom's purchase of Macmillan, Erwin succumbed to a massive heart attack, I couldn't help but feel just a wee bit of schadenfreude. And this is also why I to this day have a hard time forgiving David Brock, despite his yeoman work for our team since his atonement.

While D'Souza's rant about political correctness on college campuses, Illiberal Education, was published by The Free Press, I do remember having to field calls from D'Souza while I was employed in that not-so-glorified secretarial job. So in keeping Erwin's expense accounts up-to-date, and getting coffee for the Kristols and Podhoretzes and Wills and other neocon lunatics who would visit the office, yes, I confess, I aided and abetted the enemy.

So now it seems that Dinesh D'Souza has decided that if only this country were run more like Taliban Afghanistan, the 9/11 attacks wouldn't have happened. Here, in a country in which even as big a fascist as George W. Bush has used the "They hate our freedom" meme in explaining why Al Qaeda has it out for us, here is a guy who, in the guise of patriotism, is saying that Al Qaeda is right.

This kind of audacity would be amusing if one could believe that D'Souza doesn't actually believe it. But his history indicates that he does, and who better than James Wolcott to deconstruct what is undoubtedly a waste of perfectly good trees?

But this is a special book, deserving special mistreatment. With The Enemy at Home, I prefer to do the irresponsible thing and declare war on Dinesh D'Souza and his stinking mackerel of a book starting now. I intend to pound this scurrilous piece of scapegoating at every convenient opportunity. It is long past due that the likes of Ramesh Ponnuru (Death Party A-Go-Go), Jonah Goldberg (Hillary Clinton Was Himmler's Mistress), and now D'Souza be put on notice that they are not going to get away with vilifying liberals, mainstream Democrats, radical thinkers, academics, and entertainers as traitors and terrorist sympathizers. They want to wage culture war? Then, to quote Nabokov, they should brace themselves and prepare for the next crash. They want to practice character assassination? They've picked the wrong time, the wrong adversary.

It's one thing when Michael Savage or Ann Coulter denounce liberals as heathen traitors. One spouts halitosis on the radio, the other is an exhibitionist hag; both cater to their fan base. But D'Souza isn't some low-grade, high-volume performance artist. He's a research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, which he thanks in the acknowledgments "for providing me with the institutional support to do my work." D'Souza writes, speaks, and thinks like something hatched in a think tank--a careerist toady.


And if that isn't enough, there's more here.
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