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Dinesh D’Souza. |
I’ve never liked Dinesh D’Souza.
I didn’t
like him when his Illiberal Education came out (though I
agreed that PC was putrid); I didn’t like him when he tried to
mimic William F. Buckley by channeling Rilke in Letters to a
Young Conservative (though I admire both Bill and Rainer);
and I didn’t like him when he beat The Bell Curve in
The End of Racism. In fact, so much did I not like him, I
put him in the box where the square belonged and ignored him
completely.
When
D’Souza’s monstrously absurd The Enemy at Home: The Cultural
Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 came out earlier this
year, I kept my vigil, figuring no one would fall for his
claptrap. And, if they did, they had the likes of Stephen
Colbert to set ’em straight.
And if
by chance the gullible happened to miss Colbert’s brilliant
bitch-slapping of the bully boy, there was always Vanity Fair’s
James Wolcott (who called D’Souza a “ratfink”), Slate’s
Timothy Noah (who said DD had “Mullah envy”) and The Nation’s
Kathy Pollitt (who branded the half-man “a surrender monkey”).
And,
most infamously, they had Esquire’s Mark Warren.
See,
when DD unleashed his illfully conceived and downright
preposterous Enemy, Warren not only tore the book to the
shreds that it was made of, he challenged the Right’s favorite
minority reactionary to a fight.
Yeah,
you heard me correctly, a fight. Needless to say, DD never
accepted the challenge. But being the kinda coward who would
rather pick on those with bigger ideas than him from the comfort
of his rather overrated byline, he did respond with two cowardly
mentions in a crybaby Washington Post editorial.
Well,
DD’s back with another spineless collection of idiocies called
What’s So Great About Christianity (Regnery $28), which,
unsurprisingly, tells neither what’s great about the Christian
faith, nor why we should even read to find out. And in this
month’s Esquire, Warren again strips the dolt down to
size.
“As a
Christian raised in a Christian country during a Christian
epoch,” Warren writes, “I can only say that nothing makes me run
into the waiting arms of Satan faster than your soul-killing
pseudo-academic cant.” Your book is “vulgar,” and “your use of
God for the most tawdry and temporal of purposes… [is]
pathetic.”
Oh, and
as for that fight: “The offer still stands.”
Listen,
I’m not a Christian, I’m not a Muslim, I’m not a Jew; I am,
however, appalled that anyone would listen to a nitwit like
D’Souza, let alone read his sorry excuses for books.
And I am
appalled that what passes for “scholarship” these days is really
nothing more than think tank-sponsored entertainment — and bad
entertainment at that. You are a clown, Mr. D’Souza, and you are
a puppet, and each and every one of your kowtowing screeds only
reaffirms those facts. That you stoop to sensationalism and
spectacle to get out your message but fail to rise even to their
lowly parameters makes you a clown with no clothes. Why not go
all the way, wimpy? Put up your dukes and take on Mark Warren;
I’ve got a thousand dollars that says you get your ass kicked.
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