The Fall of My Friend Dinesh

From CounterPunch:

Poor Dinesh D’Souza. He was hoisted on his own “petar,” Shakespeare’s little joke in Hamlet, substituting the old word for flatulence in place of petard, the spear. There he was on Rick Scarborough’s windy conference call pillorying President Obama for “attacking the traditional values agenda.” It was the typical stuff: Gay Marriage and Abortion are bad, Obama like them, so ergo “Obama doesn’t like traditional Christianity because he identifies it with colonialism.” This is all material that appears in his soporiferous movie, 2016: Obama’s America. It is not new. It is a cliché.

Then, from World Magazine, the Christian publication that tries to be “salt not sugar,” came a story on October 16 that D’Souza arrived at a conference in Spartanburg, South Carolina in late September, and checked into a Comfort Suites motel with his partner, Denise Odie Joseph II, a right-wing blogger. Joseph, it turns out, is not D’Souza’s wife, and nor could she be his fiancé. Not only is D’Souza married to someone else (although he says they are separated), but that Joseph herself has only recently been married. In any other planet, this would be a non-story: two consenting adults should be allowed to do what they like. But the world of conservative Christianity is not that planet.

More here.

Like the writer of the essay linked above, I don't give a rat's ass who D'Souza is sleeping with.  But I must admit being extraordinarily pleased with his downfall.  He's the worst kind of conservative, or, rather, the kind of conservative who gets under my skin the most, the pseudo-intellectual that I'm supposed to take seriously because he's an "intellectual."

This is the guy who came up with what many conservatives consider to be the Rosetta Stone for understanding President Obama's deepest and most personal motivations, that he is, above all else, powerfully influenced by his father's socialist "anti-colonialist" philosophical views.  Never mind that this is completely unsupported with actual facts: to me, as an actual socialist in the Bernie Sanders tradition, this is just plain offensive.  Obama is a neoliberal, a corporatist who is just about as far away from socialism, and the mid twentieth century developing world's sense of "anti-colonialism," as one can get without moving into bizarre xenophobic right-wing psychopath territory.

In addition to offending actual socialists around the world, D'Souza's thesis insults pretty much everybody's intelligence, too.  I mean, really, Obama rolls like Che Guevara?  Just because he idolizes his departed father with whom he had almost no contact at all?  This is like saying I support a return of the Confederacy because my father supported George Wallace for president back in 1968.  Needless to say, I do not support a return of the Confederacy, nor do I even look to my father these days for political philosophy.

So yeah, I'm dancing on D'Souza's political grave.  He's a piece of shit scum bag who deserved to go down in flames.  The only bad aspect of this is that he might make a comeback someday, given the nuttiness of contemporary conservatism.  All he has to do is beg forgiveness and talk about Jesus; it's been done before by his ilk countless times.

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