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| Dinesh D'Souza smiles because stupid people get him PAID. |
An excellent piece in The Daily Beast has caught my eye and raised my nerves because of the following passage:
D’Souza argues that part of the reason Ann Dunham sent Obama to live with her parents in Hawaii was so she could pursue affairs with Indonesian men. “Ann’s sexual adventuring may seem a little surprising in view of the fact that she was a large woman who kept getting larger,” he writes. On the next page, he continues, “Learning about Ann’s sexual adventures in Indonesia, I realized how wrong I had been to consider Barack Obama Sr. the playboy … Ann … was the real playgirl, and despite all her reservations about power, she was using her American background and economic and social power to purchase the romantic attention of third-world men.”
The woman in this passage is Ann Dunham, President Obama's mother.
And the man who wrote those unproven and highly ugly comments about her is Dinesh D'Souza, a conservative writer and columnist. That passage came from the most recent entity in his anti-Obama trilogy, Obama's America.
In 2010, he wrote a nonsensical book called The Roots of Obama's Rage, which pushed the hilariously ugly theory that Obama fosters a secret hate of America. Thanks to conservative and right-wing hype, that book was a "success." This year, he published a continuation piece called Obama's America, which is a companion piece for a movie he produced called Obama 2016. Both of these entities, with more help from conservative and right-wing hype, are also successes. However they, like his original book on Obama, have been roundly condemned by mainstream media as crackpot nonsense with a phony intellectual glaze.
Now I try not to allow conservative so-and-so's like D'Souza or Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, and the other assorted denizens (I want to call them worse but it would ruin the integrity of this piece) to bother me.
I don't watch them. If any of them are on my television, I turn the channel.
These folks make a living off of wingnut welfare and think tank money. Their lifeblood is funding by mysterious wealthy individuals with Napoleon complexes and more money than common sense. And their food is resentment and chaos. Every angry American is like $100 in their bank accounts.
But this is going too far. To D'Souza, it's as if Obama is a succulent piece of meat on a dinner table which he has picked clean. However failing to be satiated, D'Souza now seems to be busying himself with breaking the bones of the meat and sucking out the marrow in loud, repulsive slurps.
One has to ask who else in the Obama family will he go after while under the false veneer of "pursuing the truth?"
Of course this is Dinesh D'Souza who makes his money as an "analyst" for various right-wing think tanks such as the Hoover Institution and the American Enterprise Institution. And he is the same man who wrote The End of Racism, a book so outrageous that it offended black conservatives because it claimed that "black culture" was inferior to "white culture," that segregation was misguided paternalism, "based on the code of the Christian and the gentleman" and intended to protect blacks, and that parts of the Civil Rights Act should be repealed.
So why should we be surprised with how low he has stooped here?
Also there is a HIGH degree of Obama Derangement Syndrome out there. The same Daily Beast article says that another film about the president, Dreams from my Real Father, not only pushes a ridiculous theory that Obama's real father was a black communist, but that his mother modeled in 1950s bondage and fetish porn. Allegedly, millions of copies of this film is being sent out to voters in several states including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Nevada.
So again, why should we be surprised when there seems to be a market out there for lurid beliefs about Obama.
It's understandable that many of us are desensitized to this stuff. In all truthfulness, these videos and D'Souza's books probably won't have any effect on the electorate who should be used to Obama being called everything including the Anti-Christ. At least let's hope not.
But consider this - D'Souza at the very least has been featured on legitimate news program such as CNN hawking his visual and literary firewater without any form of shame.
And all in the name of the false equivalency of supposedly presenting both sides of a "political argument."
When is the media going to dispense with this nonsense and call bullshit for what it is - bullshit. It would be nice to see D'Souza subjected to a moment not unlike the ending of the tale "The Emperor's New Clothes," when all it took was the innocence of a child to break through the pretext of nonsense which was going on.
Would it have hurt for someone with a mainstream news reputation to tell D'Souza the equivalent of the statement, "you know you are so full of shit, right?" (Editor's note - in all honesty, HBO host Bill Maher did actually do this but it really didn't resonate in the media like it would have if someone like Soledad O'Brien had done it)
I honestly feel embarrassed by asking this question but how does it feel to be members of the most powerful nation in the world and instead of discussing the pertinent issues which confront us, being forced to listen to idiots push ludicrous theories on whether or not the president's mother was either an overweight slut or a freak who engaged in fetish porn?
If you don't feel a little ashamed at this, then check your pulse because you may be dead.
EXTRA: It has been pointed out by Rational Wiki the distortion techniques used by D'Souza.
- D'Souza has an aggressive and rhetorical speaking and debating style, which makes him sound forceful and convincing. He uses the Gish Gallop frequently and effectively, rebuffing his opponent for not addressing every point he makes.
- He frequently employs caricatures and strawmen of atheist positions. He presents these positions so as to make them sound whimsical or silly, while presenting his own statements with an air of utmost gravity, no matter how lunatic or far-fetched they may be.
- He is a big fan of quote mining. Not content with simply taking his opponent's statements out of context, he will take a quote about a topic completely unrelated to the one under discussion and re-frame it to make it sound as if his opponent is uninformed or delusional.
- A main weapon in his debating arsenal is the emotional appeal, where he paint his opponent's position as false because some of its implications may be distasteful to certain members of the audience.
- He enjoys painting his opponents as vicious critics of innocuous policies and events, and himself as a paragon of intellectual virtue. While not going as far as character assassination (at least not in a face-to-face debate), he does subtly attack the character of his opponent.
- He often says that an assertion by his opponent, or even the opponent's entire position, is invalid because it is not intuitively or obviously true. He paints this as a "common sense" argument, where he calls upon the audience to evaluate an assertion using their own intuition. In reality, this is a denial of the obvious fact that many things are counterintuitive and require expertise beyond the experience of the average person (but don't take our word for it; ask your neighbor about quantum mechanics or the economics of sub-Saharan Africa). This is a particularly effective tactic, as it shifts audience opinion to his side.
- Thanks to his wide repertoire of tactics, he rarely is forced to allow a point by his opponent to pass unchallenged. This projects the illusion of competence, whereas most of his rebuttals are intellectually dishonest and completely invalid.
- When all else fails, he will spout outright lies and half truths, pulling facts and statistics out of thin air to give his argument some credibility. This amounts to an argument from authority, which he seems to derive from his public "reputation" as a political commentator, academic and writer.
- Lately, he appears to carry around a sizable library of books to debates, frequently flashing them at his opponent and at the audience, while stating that they completely prove his own, or disprove his opponent's points. These are usually self published works by fringe lunatics (which are not worth the toilet paper they are printed on). This is argument from authority on steroids, since no one except him has read the book. Therefore, his opponent cannot call him out on it, and is forced to let the point go without comment.
