Dinesh D'Souza Docks In America's Safest Harbor For Lackwits [UPDATE]
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What is there left to say about Dinesh D'Souza, who, weeks after his Forbes piece ruminating on President Barack Obama's supposed "Kenyan anti-colonial" DNA, has been basically discredited by everyone not currently participating in the "America's Next Top Piece Of Randian Filth" reality show?
Well, let's just review! The notion that President Obama is some sort of "anti-colonial" radical is, as they say, demented, considering the fact that the White House has largely accepted the Rubinian diktat that rescuing America from its financial decline can only be achieved by re-enabling the same rogue financiers to get back to their business of bamboozlement. Allow me to quote Ken Feinberg, "Pay Czar":
Feinberg tackled the dilemma by deploying a doomsday scenario of his own to win over the TARP Seven: "I told them it wasn't Citi or Bank of America or the others against me, it was Citi and me or B. of A. and me, against them" -- "them" being the public.
And yes, one also wonders how the actual Kenyan anti-colonialists would have fared if they had an army of robot drones at their beck and call!
Beyond that, there is D'Souza's loose grasp on factual reality, which, naturally, Steve Forbes -- along with everyone else who is benefitting from the ivory-tower gloss D'Souza is whitewashing their own bigotry with -- is willing to let slip. Where to begin? At the top of the list, please see D'Souza's nonsensical Petrobras conspiracy theory. But don't stop there! There's the curious manner in which Obama has expressed "his hatred for the French" by "courting their adulation." There's his insistence that Obama constantly used the term "British Petroleum," during a set of May 14th remarks in which the words "British Petroleum" were uttered precisely none times. Related to that, there's D'Souza's mewling about how Obama "never speaks of entrepreneurship in a positive way."
Additionally, can we consider D'Souza's paucity of ambition? Far stupider men have dared to be stupid in a bigger way. Consider all the targets D'Souza just leaves on the table!
D'Souza argues that Obama's policies are motivated by a hatred towards American power absorbed from his Kenyan father. He offers exactly zero evidence for his hackneyed psychological theory. But the most laughable weakness in D'Souza's thesis is the fact that the policies which D'Souza presents as the "dreams of a Luo tribesman" have a decades-long American pedigree and are embraced by wide swathes of the American electorate and political class. If support for progressive taxation, greater government regulation of health care, stimulus spending, and conservation make one the tool of the African anticolonial movement, then Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, John Kenneth Galbraith, FDR, and the Sierra Club are all Third World agents provocateurs.
In short, you should have no problem picking a equally potent right-wing intellectual out of your stool this afternoon. Or you could do the equivalent and open your Washington Post, where destiny has been achieved: Fred Hiatt, the proprietor of America's Worst Opinion Page, has done what he does best, invite a mendacious lackwit to gussy up his surplus of dead tree-pulp to the detriment of his rapidly declining readership. I suppose I would have more respect for Hiatt and company, had they managed this feat back when D'Souza was, at the very least, a search-engine optimization gold mine but, in this, Hiatt shares D'Souza's internalized poverty of ambition.
Today's piece, by the way? Well, it's essentially a regurgitated digest of the original, in which D'Souza stamps his itty-bitty feet and insists that Obama's following in his father's Kenyan footsteps in his "determination" to "confiscate" the "wealth" of "those on top." I guess this is happening through the financial reform package authored by banking industry fellatio-artist Chris Dodd and supported by noted New Black Panther Senator Scott Brown.
This is why I fronted this comic lamentation with Feinberg's "It's you and me against the rabble, Zombie Banks!" quote. Unlike Hiatt, I actually prefer to immunize readers against what they call "TEH STUPIDZ" right from Jump Street.
UPDATE: Media Matters has Hiatt defending the decision to run D'Souza's piece, basically on the grounds that no matter how stupid or dishonest or objectively untrue something is, it becomes an interesting point of view if enough people talk about it. What's more, stupidity and dishonesty and objectively untrue things become even more awesome if the "potential presidential candidates" the Post wants access to and who Hiatt hopes to mingle with at fancy Beltway cocktail parties talk about them. One of the ironies here is that columns written by Jonathan Capeheart, Richard Cohen, and Eugene Robinson, which only sought to demonstrate the stupidity and dishonesty and factual untruth of D'Souza's original are cited by Hiatt as the reason he was spurred to give D'Souza a platform. So, it's not just the open contempt for his own readers on display here. Hiatt seriously wants to undermine his own stable of writers, for kicks.
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First Posted: 10/08/10 02:44 PM ET Updated: 05/25/11 07:00 PM ET