“The worst nonfiction book about terrorism published by a major house since 9/11” is what Warren Bass, senior books editor at the Washington Post (and, the byline notes, a former staff member of the 9/11 Commission), calls the latest from desi Talking Android nonpareil Dinesh D’Souza. The book is called THE ENEMY AT HOME: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, a title that begs little further explication. Indeed, Bass points out at the end of a sharp review that’s less blustering and more cutting than that of Alan Wolfe in the New York Times, the whole exercise of D’Souza’s book seems so plainly intended to cause a kerfuffle in the blogosphere that I feel tawdry even bringing it up here, despite the Desi Angle (TM). As Bass notes:
Either D’Souza is blaming liberals for 9/11 because he truly believes that they’re culpable, or he’s blaming liberals for 9/11 because he’s cynically calculating that an incendiary polemic will sell books. I just don’t know which is scarier. One has to wonder why his publisher, agent, editors and publicists went along for the ride, and it’s hard not to conclude that they thought the thing would cause a cable-news and blogosphere sensation that would spike sales — a ruckus triggered not despite the book’s silliness but because of it. This sort of scam has worked before (think of Christopher Hitchens’s gleeful broadside against Mother Teresa or the calculated slurs of Ann Coulter), but rarely has the gap between the seriousness of the issues and the quality of the book yawned as wide. This time, let’s just not bother with the flap; this dim, dishonorable book isn’t worth it.
And perhaps, indeed, it isn’t. Still, as the rituals of the publishing biz dictate, Brother D’Souza has been getting his publicity on since the book’s release last week. Yesterday he had an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle that begins with a piece of logical reasoning that might have done Descartes proud:
The Pelosi Democrats sometimes appear to be just as eager as Osama bin Laden for President Bush to lose his war on terror. Why do I say this? Because if the Pelosi Democrats were seeking Bush’s success, then their rhetoric and actions now and over the past three years are pretty much incomprehensible. By contrast, if you presume that they want Bush’s war on terror to fail, then their words and behavior make perfect sense.
The brother then moves from logic to anthropology, with this behavioral note on that strange specimen, “the leftist”:
First there is the ritual qualification. “I’m no fan of bin Laden” or “Bin Laden is not a very nice guy.” Having gotten these hedges out of the way, the leftist proceeds to lambaste Bush and the conservatives with uncontrolled ferocity.
We proceed to linguistics:
This is typical Washington doubletalk. What [White House spokesperson] Conant cannot say is that Pelosi no more wants Bush to succeed in Iraq than bin Laden does. Whether it realizes this or not, the Bush administration is facing a kind of liberal-Islamic alliance: a sympathetic relationship that leading leftists in America have with Islamic radicals around the world.
Of course, when D’Souza says “sympathetic,” he means they hate each other:
I’m not suggesting the two groups actually like each other. Actually, they despise each other. Leftists like Pelosi, Barney Frank and Michael Moore despise bin Laden and his fellow radicals because they are religious fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic holy law. That means goodbye to women’s rights and gay rights and, in all candor, goodbye to people like Pelosi, Frank and Moore.
In all candor. But does that mean that Michael Moore is gay, or a woman? Perhaps a lesbian? Moving on:
By the same token, Islamic radicals like bin Laden detest the American left because, as they see it, the left is the party of atheism, family breakdown and cultural depravity. The left is in the vanguard of imposing secularism, no-fault divorce, gay marriage and libertine social values not only in America but also abroad.
Forestalling the great conflagration between The Left and bin Laden (and one wonders why? surely this Armageddon would cleanse the world of both horrors) is one courageous little Dutch girl with her finger in the dyke:
But the man who threatens the Islamic radicals and the American left even more than either group threatens the other is Bush. Leftists don’t like radical Muslims like bin Laden but they absolutely hate Bush. Why? Because from the left’s point of view, bin Laden threatens to impose sharia in Baghdad but Bush threatens to impose sharia in Boston. Bin Laden is the far enemy but Bush is the near enemy.
Here is the battlefield where The Left and Bush are duking it out (and believe me, I’m not skipping any passages here; this is the brother’s logic in its full step-by-step exposition):
In the past generation, the left has gone from a party that mainly cares about working people to a party that mainly cares about sex. Labor unions are now a low priority, and abortion and gay rights have become the centerpiece of the left’s social agenda.
So it all comes down to sex, although, D’Souza admits on the Colbert Report, “I’m not an expert on the homosexual lifestyle.” This moments after putting forward “gay marriage” and “people eating maggots” as the image of America that TV beams to the world, even though, as we know, true Americans neither eat maggots nor do the gay.
By now you can see my brother’s logic come together, so I shall not insult your intelligence with further exegesis. You can read the Chronicle item or watch the Colbert clips (part 1; part 2) for additional gems, for instance when D’Souza, encouraged by Colbert, blames 9/11 not just on Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, but also — “indirectly, yes” — Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In his haste to rush to market his original and timely analysis, Bro D’Souza apparently didn’t bother to fact-check, Bass points out:
D’Souza … has no particular expertise on terrorism, which may explain why he writes twice that there are U.S. troops in Mecca (someone should probably alert Bob Gates) or why he thinks that President Reagan’s 1986 airstrikes on Libya “convinced Qadafi to retire from the terrorism trade,” despite the bombing of Pan Am 103 by Libyan agents two years later.
In the Chronicle piece, D’Souza also refers to Robert Fisk as an “American leftist,” which was news to me.
All in all, a command performance by a gentleman who remains, for all his ridiculousness, the most prominent desi in U.S. political debate, and certainly the one who’s made the most money peddling his ideas. Some of you might agree with Bass, that it’s a waste of space even talking about him. I don’t. The brother might be an embarrassing buffoon, but we can’t wish him away.
If D’Souza really believes there are US troops in Mecca, the guy has zero credibility–beyond even the obvious reasons why he’s just a stuffed shirt. And what useless and stupid editors he has! This is what passes for political debate in these United States . . .
Wow, this dude is so like a desi Michelle Malkin(minus the tits ofcourse).
more like an embarrasing, or THE embarassing macaca…
Dinesh’s website.
DÂ’Souza appeared on Glenn Beck’s show yesterday. Even Beck disagreed with him!
[btw, with no intentions of ‘threadjacking’, Hitchens’s arguments against Mother Teresa need more thought than sneaking it in as a parting shot (that’s what Bass does) to put down some other. Think why the extensive work done by Ramakrishna Mission (just click on the activities link listed under each centre) is never mentioned by the western media but Mother Teresa – everybody knows that name.]
Looks like Arundhati Roy has found a soul mate.
The scathing criticism and name calling of D’Souza by these leftist newspapers prove that they are intolerant to the point of ‘Nazism’ of anyone that dares to criticize their point of view. The criticism is vile if you happened to be a minority. It happened to Condi Rice, Clarence Thomas, and no surprise now its Dinesh D’Souza. I did not see where Colbert, ‘Owned’ D’Souza. D’Souza chose not to delve into a shouting match, or a debate that scores point by making faces and acting ridiculous…something that is symptomatic of Jerry Springer debates. His mistake was perhaps to show up on the show.
Awww. Help, help, I’m being repressed!
I hate claiming D’Souza as one of “ours” even though he’s Bombay born and bred, because he’s been annoying me with his nuttiness ever since I came to the States. This is the man who “outed” a female classmate at Dartmouth for having sex with her boyfriend, and her parents stopped paying her tuition as a result. He’s the lowest of the petty bullying sneaking low, mean-spirited and never saw a smearing opportunity he didn’t take. If these are the “values” the Right stands for, he’s their worst ambassador.
He really showed his warped weird reasoning on the Colbert Report, though unwittingly revealed that he and his ilk have more in common with Islamists like Bin Laden in their dislike for the American “culture of decadence” than most on the US Right would care to admit.
All in all, a command performance by a gentleman who remains, for all his ridiculousness, the most prominent desi in U.S. political debate,
No way. Fareed Zakaria is clearly the more promiment one. D’Souza doesn’t even begin to compare with the visibility/status/name-recognition of Mr. Z.
Heh… that was inadvertently funny after this image…
Well, bro D’Souza’s gotta eat… probably pasted together some old doodlings and rushed it to the publisher.
interesting that d’souza interprets abortion and gay rights as issues dealing with “sex,” because for many people (at least the people fighting for those issues) they are about civil liberties and personal freedoms. abortion issues are about personal privacy and a women’s right to control her own reproductive systems. gay rights are about recognizing homosexuals as equal under the law. neither is fundamentally about sexual behavior. they just happen to be hot button issues because they touch on sex somehow.
it’s a pitifully reductionist “argument.”
D’Souza is fast turning into a Pat Robertson. Pretty soon everyone will start ignoring him.
Holy shit I haven’t seen Colbert blast anyone this good for a while. This guy is an embarrassment to our whole community, almost like Clarence Thomas who ironically enough denounces Affirmative Action while being a product of it. According to the wikipedia article on him, he briefly dated Ann Coulter, go figure.
I think Rajiv Chandrasekaran is gaining on this guy. I see him on CNN all the time now.
“Criticism is vile” for obvious reasons. When was the last time conservatives preached what they practiced? Reagan called America, “the last best hope of mankind on earth” which I happen to agree with but if that’s so, we have done a lousy job of living up to our ideals around the world. D’Souza’s flaw is in that he assumes the rest of the world is as stupid as he is. Hollywood gets way too much credit by conservatives in claiming that it has somehow projected a very distorted view of Americans abroad. The all time highest grossing Hollywood movie abroad was Titanic. What kind of “vile”, deceitful and immoral philosophy was it trying to spread?
A girl succumbs to her lust for a young vagrant and leaves her rich fiance… poses naked for a vulgar painting too. God punishment was sending the ship crashing into a giant iceberg. There you have it…
no. he is not. he is stating his point of view and/or pulling in some coin. relax.
So they way he goes about pulling coin (by stating a point of view that is so jarring most conservatives are distancing themselves, fast) should not matter to us as a community?
There’s been enough drivel written by the right AND left in this country. Too many folks writing ‘expert analysis’ books, satire, and blaming the right or left for all ills of society.
I usually walk right past the ‘current events’ sections in bookstores because all displays are dominated by the bullshit artists such as coulter, moore, and everyone else trying to explain their beef with society and how they’re fighting with their backs to the wall.
Seriously, with the immature tone most of these folks take, you’d think they’re 17 year olds full of teenage angst, lashing out at society.
Criticism is vile” for obvious reasons. When was the last time conservatives preached what they practiced? Reagan called America, “the last best hope of mankind on earth” which I happen to agree with but if that’s so, we have done a lousy job of living up to our ideals around the world. D’Souza’s flaw is in that he assumes the rest of the world is as stupid as he is. Hollywood gets way too much credit by conservatives in claiming that it has somehow projected a very distorted view of Americans abroad. The all time highest grossing Hollywood movie abroad was Titanic. What kind of “vile”, deceitful and immoral philosophy was it trying to spread?
Criticism doesn’t have to be an exercise in using derogoratory adjectives. You called D’Souza’s flaw “is that he assumes rest of the world is as stupid as he is.” That’s plain name calling, and intellectually lazy. I grew up in India as did Dinesh, and Hollywood/TV does give a warped view of what a middle class life in USA is about. For every Titanic, I can name you a thousand Baywatch, etc etc. The general thought in the muslim world (and even in India) is that western women are easy sluts…thanks to hollywood/MTV to most part. Democratic party has been taken over by people whose agenda doesn’t click at all with the Islamist world..be it Gay rights to marriage etc etc. You can argue all you want about if the agenda has validty, but you cannot argue with the assertion that the majority of mullahs don’t care too much about gays, let alone about their rights. (Not my view….more gays the better as far as I am concerned…more women for me). The typical crticism being leveled at Dinesh is that he is a moron, simple etc etc because he actuallyy dated Ann Coulter, and thinks that Gay right issue is not the most pressing need of this nation. Oh well…his assertion happens to be true. You must be living in a cocoon , or not have travelled muslim world if you do not happen to believe that.
Agreed. Such logic, whoever it comes from, is an embarrassment to one’s self. I don’t think anyone goes around using D’Souza as a role model for Desi’s, and using him to shame the ‘community’. If anything, people are tuning him out with rest of the background noise.
It’s just an attempt to garner whatever attention capital he has left to make himself somewhat relevant, but in the process burn whatever credibility he has built up.
Colbert’s treatment of D’Souza was just classic. I flipped through the book when I was at Border’s yesterday. From the passages I read, not only are his arguments totally without merit, but they’re not even well written!!! Mr. D’Souza, if you are going to try to dismiss the majority of the populous that is against he war, then at least try to hide the circularity and sophistry of your arguments in decent prose.
“Criticism doesn’t have to be an exercise in using derogoratory adjectives.”
and lumping all those on the opposite side of the political spectrum (the cultural left) as the “enemy at home” and making them responsible for 9/11, brutal, cowardly acts that resulted in the deaths of thousands of people, is not derogatory? is it really that black and white?
p.s: i’d rather be called lazy and stupid than be held responsible for the deaths of thousands of people.
Nice post Siddhartha, A note to people who want to ignore the brother. This dim, dishonorable book is at #223 on Amazon. More DÂ’Souzase here.
Totally unrelated comment:
Has anyone read the article about Vikram Chandra’s book on Wpost today? Our buddy Amardeep was quoted a few times in that article. I almost felt as I knew him from my childhood days 🙂 Funny what online-reality can do to us 🙂
This is all Allan Greenspan’s fault.. !! Stay with me – If only he had not drove the Fed interest rate to historic lows. – There wouldnt have been a housing bubble – The houses in D.C would have been more affordable. – People would not have to do extreme things to sell books, to make money so that they can afford decent housing. There !!! Its all Greenspan’s fault. He is the real “enemy” at home 🙂
From the link that Shodan provided:
“Lopez: Could someone come away from your book think youÂ’re more indignant toward Ted Kennedy than Osama bin Laden?
DÂ’Souza: No. Certainly I prefer a tipsy incoherent Irishman to a Muslim mass murderer.”
looks like d’souza isn’t above using deragotory adjectives for those with whom he disagrees 🙂
DD is rabid. He is giving us Bombay Catlicks a bad name.
Interestingly, the ghost of Macbeth reviewed D’Souza’s book in the Edinburgh Post:
“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Speedy
Siddartha,
Thanks dude! Collective response to this ‘worthless’ piece of “fiction” has been largely -DISDAIN!
However,the structure of your post made it quite hilarious – especially the sequence of ‘editorial comments’!!!
……can perfectly emphathize!…go get a shot of ‘Glenfiddich’…it might soothe your nerves & bring back your spirit.
One of the best posts, I have come across at SepiaMutiny.
Dinesh is espousing the neo-con POV perfectly: Preach personal responsibilty and blame the libs for everything that goes wrong without taking personal responsiblity for it.
too many ABCD jackasses prefer arundhati over d’souza???
why is that??
“too many ABCD jackasses prefer arundhati over d’souza??? why is that??”
there’s a third option: to care for neither one of them at times. i think the shrillness and hysteria of some of their writings reflect two sides of the same coin.
In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones and Gods of Small Things are good reasons to love Arundhati Roy. She’s a better fiction writer than DD. Just to be clear, I’m not AB or C. Rather proud of my jackassery though.
Are you kidding me, Baka, that you’d even mention her next to Dinesh D’Souza?
She’s a really great fiction writer but her political writing is grounded by facts, unlike D’Souza’s thinly veiled homophobia, Islamophobia and leftist-phobia.
Obviously her passionate style doesn’t resonate with everyone, but even when she rants, she rants in style, and based on hard facts. She obviously gave up a fat fiction-writing advance to write political books that are catered to a niche audience.
D’Souza on the other hand, clearly did this for the paycheck he’d cash from sympathisers. But if you tried to criticse him for that, I guess he’d say that’s what the American dream is all about.
eiled homophobia, Islamophobia and leftist-phobia.
i am not sure that dinesh has any phobias, only a benjaminphilia….
Publisher’s are quite sensitive to public opinion – witness harpercollins yanking the OJ book and firing the editor who acquired it.
If you have something to say about dear Dinesh, let Random House know: visit the homepage for the book and click the little “feedback” icon all the way at the bottom right, by the Bertelsmann Media Worldwide logo. Popup feedback box will have space to vent.
Um, at the end of the day, everyone wants a bit of the paycheck. I don’t think A. Roy is so ‘goody two shoes’ as to not benefit from a paycheck or have the desire to earn one from her writing and books. Books are written to be read. Politial, fiction, whatever. Plus, she’s already cashed in big earlier. It’s like other artists who’ve had commercial success doing things, but not exactly how they wanted to. When they’re secure enough, doing less commercially successful ventures is feasible for them.
So yea, and there are those that don’t really hold A. Roy in all high esteem either. The third category of “we don’t care what either do” exists. But I’m not going to rehash my arguments against A. Roy here, again.
The funny thing about the reviews is that even the right has been savaging his book. This is a good example. My favorite quote from a review titled “A Wretched Stew”:
Random Dinesh D’Souza story. Some 16-17 years ago, I sat next to him in the Frankfurt airport during a layover on a flight to India. I had no idea who he was at the time, but we talked for a good while. He asked where I was in school (I was in college at the time), and he said that he was writing a book about college campuses and that he’d visitied my campus a few times. Months later, I saw a copy of “Illiberal Education” in a bookstore and figured out that this was the same guy.
Hmm..seems I agree with some people that I thought I wouldn’t agree with here; but, yes, D’souza whole career has been promoting himself via controversial statements so that he can make more dough. What has really accomplished in the last 20 years? A lot. People (by people, I mean the right ideologues) used him to promote their views and made their straw men into realities. And launched a lot of other careers as a result. For those who think this is just another innocuous book look again. D’souza is successful at looking, acting, and talking like valid intellectual who knows what he is talking about; this often lends more credence to his “views” to those who really want to believe this more then anything else – similarly for many extreme leftist. It’s amazing that he’s considered an actual scholar without and really scholarly work – or that he even really cares. I’ve found some articles and sites I think that really reflect who and what D’souza really is:
A great review of his former books and his methodolgies follow up that a explains a lot. Opinion on colonialism
It’s similarly funny that D’souza often says how terrible the civil rights act was, but without it he wouldn’t have been able to (liberally) date blonde white women and then be able to marry them. Think he had pre-marital sex?
Clearly, you have never read her work on dams… or crops, or nuclear weapons, or…
Roy and D’Souza are practically blood siblings, united in their opposition to reason and free will.
Messed up the article link..here it is
Obviously, Roy writes about these issues in a certain fashion to garner attention. Because these are urgent issues, the context is Indian politics, she has to SHOUT to get heard. She baits powerful people with her over-the-top rhetoric. I think she is even willing to be seen as a caricature. As long as she draws attention to these burning issues.
Whoa. That was weird…Karuna’s comment just simply disappeared. Damn man. You sure are a rock star.
On another note…This isn’t the first time I’ve heard of the blame for 9/11 placed on leftists (whatever leftists are these days).
I shared a meal with the parrot of Rumsfeld a coupla years ago (not by choice). He also blamed the Clintons, Hollywood, atheists and enviromentalists for 9/11. Interestingly, he was kicked out of the house for suggesting genocide for muslims, was reduced to babbling after I pointed out that Milosovich had already attempted that with only nominal success.
I always thought the bin Laden hatred of america had less to do with leftist ideals and more to do with the history of US allegience with the house of Saud. I’m no history head though, so I’m open to reading suggestions.
Roy’s articles make a lot of sense. Her articles – e.g. The Greater Common Good’ – talk about the internal displacement of people within a country. She is fighting to repeal the 30 year old 44th amendment act of 1978 that deleted the right to property from the list of Fundamental Rights. The government can anytime confiscate private property (of poor people only) and give it away to industrialists. Seen in this light, she is actually a right-winger. She is arguing to let the market decide the price of the land. Let the companies bargain with the property-owner directly. The government has no right to rob its own people.
And whatever she says about ‘power and powerlessness’ is very true.
[Link]
There never was and never will be a ‘free market’. Read Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales’s ‘Saving capitalism from the capitalists‘. Sorry for the digression, but Roy was being bracketed with D’Souza for no reason.
Haha…if that does not sound like a logical proof, I don’t know what does. No wonder they wouldn’t give him a Ph.D. — in Princeton, or even in Stanford 😉
DTK – Did you find DD to be a very polite, soft spoken and almost humble sorta guy? He may be spewing a lot of garbage but when I met him earlier this year and spent a couple of hours with the guy, he did not strike me as your typical angry, o’reilly-esque, right wing nutjob type. Not defending him but he was suprisingly very likeable.
And thats my two cents on DD.
Man, D’Souza couldn’t even come up with FRESH ways to call his political enemies terrorist sympathizers. All of this ground has been covered again and again by Coulter, Hannity, and Mike Savage for years now. It’s not only idiotic, mindless, partisan polemicism, it’s boring and dated too. This isn’t fucking 2002.
So what is D’Souza saying that other talking heads on the right (your Coulters, Hannitys, Michael Savages and Hugh Hewitts) haven’t already said? Old hat.
The funny/ironic thing is that the more outrage this “incendiary polemic” causes, the more unwarranted publicity the book and it’s author get. D’Souza’s laughing all the way to the bank.