Every time I think I have heard the worst thing imaginable, that the wingnuts couldn't get any lower, someone comes along and hits a new low. This time, it's Dinesh D'Souza, with his new book that will claim that 9/11 was the fault of ... get ready for it ... the left wing of America. Luckily, we have James Wolcott to eviscerate him.
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I guess some people will just say anything to make a buck... and some people are so crazy that they'll buy it.
Wolcott does an excellent job of tearing into D'Souza, that yclept Portuguese facist. The most morally bankrupt charge ever leveled at the left, from the conservative bastions, is that their indulgences and freedoms have a necessary reckoning in the world, a fatalistic semi-religious addiction to demand symmetry. The root of this charge, that the left in its idolatry of pleasure and loose morality enervated the legions of angry Muslims to anoint their exponents and unleash them against us on September 11th is related quite profoundly to that joke that puritanism is the suspicion that someone, somewhere is having fun.
The right has long held that the freedoms of our nation as practiced by lefties or more simply artists and their abettors are tantamount to treason. There are 'correct ways' to practice freedom according to this world view, and deviance from that hath fury from hell as its retribution. That D'Souza has dressed this charge up and lobbed it in 9/11's clothing is a new low, but not unexpected nor original. That toothpick, Anne Coulter, leveled that charge to her sympathizers and again against the widows of that day.
It is, though, a shameful excercise to utilize a searingly powerful memory for the utility of political expedience. The simplistic notion that we, in America, with our 'views' inspired terrorism is not only indefensible, more importantly, it's stupid. The reasons for 9/11 are varied, comples, irreducible on examination and not perpetrated by the 'muslim world'. Those attacks are the actions of crypto-Islamists, radicalized hateful fanatics.
D'Souza would do better to examine whether our dim and poorly researched foreign policy of seventy years toward the middle east might be the inspiration for Muslim and particularly Arab rage. Have we not bought oil at our preferred price at the point of a bayonet? Have we not placed thugs and gangsters in charge of oppressive regimes so that we might nurse at the nipples of their spigots? Isn't some of the stupid pseudo-racist, impossibly blind forays into the region (like our troop basing in Saudi which pissed millions off) or our invasion of Iraq on the dumbest excuses cause for their rage? Isn't their disposability by the executors of war, the dismissal of their cultural inquiries (they have asked, 'can you not insult our prophet, please? Just because you can, you do not say the n word, maybe you could not call our prophet a pedophile? please?')
The inanity of blaming the left for the actions of those we do not know, espouse, fund or sympathize with is bewildering and baseless. The tactic is an age old form of projection. Perhaps Mr. D'Souza should lie down on a couch and confess his cultural nervousness and his over-insistence on his American identity as promulgated as racial sellout. At university some knew him as Dinesh, distort the news-a. How right they were.
The Acting President
// posted by The Acting President
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