![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
♠
The Times has another review on the Dinesh D'Souza book. I thought that it was going to be a countering positive review, perhaps even in sympathetic response to D'Souza's own impassioned self-defense. Instead, I was relieved to see that the book was trashed anew, with D'Souza being put with the Ann Coulter set.
(Source: Michiko Kakutani for The New York Times)
xXx
The Times has another review on the Dinesh D'Souza book. I thought that it was going to be a countering positive review, perhaps even in sympathetic response to D'Souza's own impassioned self-defense. Instead, I was relieved to see that the book was trashed anew, with D'Souza being put with the Ann Coulter set.
His new book, “The Enemy at Home,” is filled with willfully incendiary — and preposterous — assertions that “the cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11”; that the left is “secretly allied” with the movement that Osama bin Laden and Islamic radicals represent “to undermine the Bush administration and American foreign policy”; and that “the left wants America to be a shining beacon of global depravity, a kind of Gomorrah on a Hill.”I imagine that D'Souza was tempted by the fame and money of the Coulter-type of pundit, and he pushed himself further to get in on some of that action. But he has neither Rush Limbaugh's personality nor Ann Coulter's legs. Now he has some work to do to reclaim his scholarly credientials, if he should care to do so.
He writes that American prisons at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib “are comparable to the accommodations in midlevel Middle Eastern hotels” in terms of cleanliness, food and amenities, and argues that abuse at Abu Ghraib did not reflect a disregard for human rights, but rather “the sexual immodesty of liberal America.” (“Lynndie England and Charles Graner were two wretched individuals from red America who were trying to act out the fantasies of blue America.”)
... In this shrill, slipshod book, Mr. D’Souza often sounds as if he has a lot in common with those radical Middle Eastern mullahs who are eager to subject daily life to religious strictures and want to curtail individuals’ freedoms and civil liberties.
It’s an interpretation he does not deny: “Yes,” he writes, “I would rather go to a baseball game or have a drink with Michael Moore than with the grand mufti of Egypt. But when it comes to core beliefs, I’d have to confess that I’m closer to the dignified fellow in the long robe and prayer beads than to the slovenly fellow with the baseball cap.”
(Source: Michiko Kakutani for The New York Times)
