I’ve received a few emails noting that the New York Times Book Review gave Dinesh D’Souza’s “The Enemy at Home” a pretty rough go of it. It’s my way to viciously wield a sort of velvet hammer. Even when I’m being mean, I tend to leaven the festivities with jokes and wisecracks. Writing for the Times, Boston College professor Alan Wolf offered D’Souza no such charity:
At one point in “The Enemy at Home,” D’Souza appeals to “decent liberals and Democrats” to join him in rejecting the American left. Although he does not name me as one of them, I sense he is appealing to people like me because I write for The New Republic, a liberal magazine that distances itself from leftism. So let this “decent” liberal make perfectly clear how thoroughly indecent Dinesh D’Souza is. Like his hero Joe McCarthy, he has no sense of shame. He is a childish thinker and writer tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism. His book is a national disgrace, a sorry example of a publishing culture more concerned with the sensational than the sensible. People on the left, especially those who have been subjects of D’Souza’s previous books, will shrug their shoulders at his latest screed. I look forward to the reaction from decent conservatives and Republicans who will, if they have any sense of honor, distance themselves, quickly and cleanly, from the Rishwain research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Admittedly, this is a little over the top. An obscure book by an obscure scholar isn’t significant enough to be a national disgrace. Now Rosie O’Donnell – there’s a national disgrace.
But stem-winding rhetoric aside, Wolf’s larger point is right on the money. The project is indeed an embarrassment to anyone affiliated with it. What’s more, as Scott Johnson points out, it’s a particular black-eye to the publishing industry. While I’m tempted to compare certain precincts of the publishing industry to a crack whore that would turn any trick for money, that would be unfair to the crack whores of the world.
That disgusting O.J. Simpson project is instructive in this regard. While the project did eventually get scotched, it almost made it into wide circulation until some bad publicity sunk it at the 11th hour. That little episode provides a neat little state of the publishing industry’s union.
Wolf also brings up another interesting point regarding the necessity and moral responsibility of conservatives to disown “The Enemy at Home.” Generally speaking, I hate it when people tell me what to write about. I get about 20 emails a day saying I have to write about so-and-so, and each one makes me bristle.
But Wolf is right. D’Souza is a prominent conservative, and a man that many fellow conservatives, myself included, came to respect over the years. The tendency will be for conservatives to handle him with kid gloves. When K-Lo interviewed him and he repeated the obnoxious theses of his book, the gang at the Corner was loath to point out just how completely he had jumped the shark and put himself in a disreputable intellectual neighborhood.
There is every likelihood that the media will give D’Souza tons of publicity. That’s the way it goes – a single putative conservative behaves badly and he earns himself media stardom: Al Sharpton organizes a pogrom in New York and the media yawns. A Mitt Romney-hating gadfly (who is rightly considered by Boston locals to be a notorious homophobe) releases a pamphlet and the Boston Globe gives him fawning front page treatment for “raining on Romney’s parade” while ignoring his pamphlet’s overt reliance on homophobia.
Conservatives who don’t want D’Souza as their de facto spokesman better read his book and speak up. It’s a sad necessity.
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