Commenting on my preemptive strike on "Distort D'Newsa" (as he came to be known while editor of the Dartmouth Review, according to David Brock), Charles P. Pierce at Tapped reminds us that D'Souza's putdown of Tip O'Neill isn't even original:
"I feel it incumbent upon me to note that, if Dinesh D'Souza is passing off that cheap wisecrack about Tip O'Neill resembling the federal government (big, fat, and out of control') as his own, he's not only a disreputable intellectual vandal, he's a dishonest one, as well. The line famously originated with John Leboutillier, a crackpot rightist legacy millionnaire from Long Island who served one term in Congress before the voters fired him, apparently on the very simple grounds that he was a horse's ass."
Ah, yes, I recall Leboutillier. He was indeed a horse's ass. But a horse's ass who crapped out a semi-memorable phrase that D'Souza is now passing off as his own. Perhaps it lodged in his subconscious, and he innocently believes it is his own creation.
On page 294, we come to another nugget of intellectual refinement from D'Souza. Feigning reasonableness (a tactic we shall discuss in detail later), D'Souza concedes that not all lefties hate America or always "blame it first." He notes, "The left doesn't blame America for undermining the shah of Iran, getting rid of Ferdinand Marcos, or imposing sanctions against South Africa."
That's because it was the left that opposed apartheid and lobbied for sanctions. It was the right that resisted, with Dick Cheney not only supporting apartheid but refusing to vote for a resolution demanding that Nelson Mandela be freed. If it were up to hardline conservatives, Mandela would still be behind bars and lunch counters in the South would still be segregated, if that's what the locals wanted. Why would "the left" blame America for doing the right thing, when it was the left that wanted the right thing done?
At the end of the same graf, D'Souza summarizes the cultural outreach program that the left favors.
"The left would like to have Mapplethorpe's photographs and Brokeback Mountain seen in every country. In short, the left wants America to be a shining beacon of moral depravity, a kind of Gomorrah on a hill."
Leaving aside the fact that D'Souza seems to think that the rather chaste study in repression and renunciation, Brokeback Mountain, is a recruiting poster for buggery, it's revealing that his prime examples of "moral depravity" contain homosexual content that he finds abhorrent. He probably would have wanted to crack down on those Weimar cabarets too had he been around then and able to fill a fine pair of black boots. "Gomorrah on a hill"--such a foul accusation reminds us that D'Souza began his career as a rhetorical gay-basher. According to Brock, Laura Ingraham and D'Souza (who were gf-bf at the time) "participated in the infamous outing of gay students [at Dartmouth], who were branded 'sodomites.'"
He's cleverer at camouflaging it now, but homophobia is one of the pulse-points in The Enemy at Home, which seems to argue that we shouldn't let 'mos marry, not only because it'll help bring down Western civilization, but because it'll outrage Muslim fundamendalists and make them want to murder us even more. Something like that. Oh, for the good old days, when gays were gently ostracized. "In America, sad to say, we are inured to the debris of the broken family. We accept that the traditional family is no longer the norm, it is now something like an 'alternative lifestyle.' We invite Edgar and Austin to our dinner parties." But in letting Edgar and Austin clink silverware with the rest of us, we are only humoring them and harming ourselves. "Is the point of marriage to ensure that children have a father and mother, or is it to make Edgar and Austin feel more accepted by society?" Perhaps Edgar and Austin could be seated in the kitchen, until they got the hint and left. Or moved to Europe, that el grande Gomorrah across the Atlantic. "Appealing to a nondiscrimination provision in its charter," D'Souza notes with tacit disapproval, "the European Union has forced all member nations to admit homosexuals into the military. Many European countries have legalized gay unions."
What D'Souza proposes in The Enemy at Home is that American conservatives join hands with traditional Muslims to keep gays and women subjugated and subservient. D'Souza opposes radical Islam because they want to destroy us. But Muslim restrictions on sexual freedom and strict enforcement of patriarchal diktats--those he kinda likes. Those he can work with. "What disgusts them [i.e, devout Muslims]is not free elections but the sights of hundreds of homosexuals kissing one another and taking marriage vows." It clearly disgusts D'Souza too. Maybe he should convert.
