THE VIOLENCE BEHIND THE SHAME
Outside his Johnsonian conservative critics, some bloggers find D'Souza carrying a big stick:
But D'Souza is a different kind of voice to emerge in the violent right.
Neither angry nor animated, D'Souza cuts a media image similar to that of a boring, middle school substitute teacher. He is a quiet, unassuming man using soft tones as he both writes and speaks about the need to battle and destroy liberals with the same ferocity as we kill terrorists:
MORE THAN WORDS
Although that writer seems convinced of the over-the-top implications and tone of D'Souza's writings, one of my own take-aways is plain: ulterior motives.
DD is breathtakingly afraid that the GOP is going to lose its self-pretended prominence, so much that he is scrambling for any thesis that pretends to re-clothe the Emperor. And he should be, because they arguably already have lost that claim, "win" or not:
DD to Papa-Culture-Warrior-In-Chief: "And that is that foreign policy has been a winning issue for the Republicans for a generation.If the left can turn that around, if they can, in a sense, saddle Bush with a humiliating defeat, this will pave the way for a return to the left wing dominance of American politics that we had for most of the 20th Century."
NOT SO FAST
Look, it's going to be a long road back for Conservatism on that issue, I think, if their political opponents are deft. There aren't any shortcuts. This writer goes the distance to show some of the reasons why:
For a Stanford fellow, D'Souza shows a surprising ignorance of the growing literature on jihadist ideology. One has to ask which is more likely: that such authors as Steve Coll, Lawrence Wright, Peter L. Bergen, Marc Sageman, Jessica Stern, Richard A. Posner and Bruce Hoffman could have scrutinized al-Qaeda ideology and somehow failed to notice that bin Laden's main beef was with America's corrupt cultural left, or that the grinding sound you hear off in the distance is D'Souza with an ax.
HOW TO SPEAK TO TRADITIONALISTS
Last, I couldn't help but marvel that Dinesh felt compelled to include this in his non-native defense (just think about it for a while, you'll get why ...):
I am from one of the oldest Christian families in India.
sullylink
