The Whore At Home

The continued employment of Dinesh D'Souza is a clear demonstration that Stanford University really needs to tighten up its "scholar" quals.

As a conservative author, I'm used to a little controversy. Even so, the reaction to my new book, "The Enemy at Home," has felt, well, a little hysterical.

No, "hysterical" is subtitling your two-ply manifesto with the oh-so-subtle scud "The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11".

Look, asshole, you want to play BMOC at conservatard college and flash your wingnut welfare, fine. But how gutless is it to come out with a deliberately, overtly provocative title, and then whine about the incivility of the responses? And it certainly does not go unnoticed that nowhere in the entire article is this "intemperate" (his pearl-clutching term for the mean meanies who don't respect his "scholarship") secondary title.

Say the whole thing, chump: the full title of your book is The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. Now tell me again why that's not supposed to piss people off.

Why the onslaught? Just this: In my book, published this month, I argue that the American left bears a measure of responsibility for the volcano of anger from the Muslim world that produced the 9/11 attacks. President Jimmy Carter's withdrawal of support for the shah of Iran, for example, helped Ayatollah Khomeini's regime come to power in Iran, thus giving radical Islamists control of a major state; and President Bill Clinton's failure to respond to Islamic attacks confirmed bin Laden's perceptions of U.S. weakness and emboldened him to strike on 9/11.

These are thin assertions, to say the least. While the Shah's White Revolution did make some strides in modernizing Iran and consolidating an entrepreneurial middle class, it came at a high price. People get funny when you overthrow their freely elected leader to protect your own oil interests, and then your puppet dictator keeps his power by employing some of the most brutal torture methods imaginable. Does D'Souza realize that by the end, SAVAK was torturing dissidents by jamming broken glass and pouring boiling water into their anuses?

The regime was no longer supportable; Carter, an actual (rather than merely political) believer in Christ's teachings, could not sit idly by anymore, and continue to squint at the Shah's repulsive despotism. Continuing to "support" Pahlevi would have meant more secret police death squads rounding up dissidents by the hundreds, and murdering them. None of that excuses the mullahs, but no one could have predicted that blowback anymore than they could have predicted that Reagan's Afghan freedom fighters would one day knock down the World Trade Center. Blowback is a tricky thing to parse through the prism of recent history; it cuts in a multitude of directions, and does not redound completely to one side or the other.

The rest is the thin gruel of conjecture that wingnut welfare queens like D'Souza keep their jobs with, and is not even worth discussing. Suffice to say that the one real military action Clinton undertook, the Kosovo war (which, for the record, I disagreed with at the time), was met with predictable hostility and profound disrespect by many of the very same Republican lawmakers who haven't been able to resist the shopworn "politics ends at the water's edge" line since then.

There is no reason to believe that, had Clinton initiated serious military action in Somalia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or any other hot spot D'Souza might conjure, there wouldn't have been a barrage of "Pomeranian grenadier" harrumphing at Clinton's careless disregard for troops' safety, which is precisely what they did during Kosovo. That is pure speculation -- but then, so is the entirety of D'Souza's argument, for which he inexplicably gets paid. Well.

Here is everything you need to know about how these people function:

The reaction I'm eliciting is not entirely new to me. As a college student in the early 1980s, I edited the politically incorrect Dartmouth Review and was frequently accosted by left-wing students and faculty. They called me names back then, too. And at the time I didn't care. I often informed them that taking on our iconoclastic paper was like wrestling a pig: Not only does it get everyone dirty but the pig likes it.

Get that? This clown is as establishment as it gets, a shameless rent-boy to moneyed hucksters who manipulate power structures from behind the scenes. But he, like most of them, posture themselves as outsiders, rebels, mavericks, taking on the political correctness of The Man.

Because, as we all know, American government and its policies are now completely overtaken by godless atheists. No? You missed that part too, considering that an actual atheist has absolutely zero chance of getting elected to high office in this country? Well, guess you're just not a Rishwain Scholar then, bunky, 'cause here's the Real Deal from the noted leopard-print iconoclast:

I also argue that the policies that U.S. "progressives" promote around the world -- including abortion rights, contraception for teenagers and gay rights -- are viewed as an assault on traditional values by many cultures, and have contributed to the blowback of Islamic rage.

Okay, and that's really what tears it for most people, I think. This is what is deliberately provocative, and inflammatory, and just plain stupid about D'Souza's tiresome little culture battle, and why his plea for civility is so patently hypocritical. The policies championed by American "progressives" -- which is to say, the majority of people that view the treatment of women as chattel to be, well, wrong -- probably do piss people like Osama bin Laden off. So fucking what? The practical application of D'Souza's thesis, which he doesn't seem to have quite enough guts to just come out and say, would be to crack down on the libertinism in American culture, and put it back in the closet where it belongs.

This is such a tremendously stunted view of human nature, it's impossible to be sure just where to begin. The problem with the moralists is that they act as if nobody started fuckin' and suckin' until they took Leave It To Beaver off the air and replaced it with cheerleader porn to placate the dirty fucking hippie crowd. Or something; it's really difficult to tell exactly what their fundamental understanding of humanity is. It seems to be something along the lines of "if you people would just do what we tell you to do, everything will be great." Well, right back atcha, Chief. We're a great big planet of benevolent dictators, for the most part. True fanatics and ideologues are actually fairly rare; they just exert more cultural leverage because most people have lives.

If supporting the notion that a 24-year-old woman in Bangladesh, who already has six kids she can't feed, should have the right to determine whether or not she wants to carry a seventh hungry mouth to term, and the access to exercise her freedom of choice, if supporting that "caused" 9/11, then it shouldn't even have to be said that the problem is with the fanatics of "traditionalism", the people who have irretrievably perverted longstanding cultural and religious mores to achieve their own political ends.

It shouldn't have to be said, but because professional ninnies like D'Souza are inexplicably allowed to publish and pimp their nonsense, it still bears repeating.