Frum: In dissecting Dinesh D'Souza, Andy Ferguson debunks two years of Fox News messaging.

[Pirate Smile]

@davidfrum: In dissecting Dinesh D'Souza, http://bit.ly/c75dwE Andy Ferguson debunks two years of Fox News messaging.

I know, it's the friggin Weekly Standard. It's still worth a read for the smackdown on the crazies. Ignore (or simply roll your eyes at) the RW talking points (and there are plenty of them - it is the friggin Weekly Standard).

The Roots of Lunacy
How not to understand Obama
Oct 16, 2010, Vol. 16, No. 06 • By ANDREW FERGUSON

The Roots of Obama’s Rage
by Dinesh D’Souza



-snip-
“The central tenets of anticolonial ideology,” D’Souza writes, “are alive and well three decades later in the White House. .  .  . We are today living out the script for America and the world that was dreamt up not by Obama but by Obama’s father.”
From that set of radical ideas flows every policy of Obama’s that has annoyed Republicans and confounded the public: the bank bailouts, the takeover of the auto industry, the huge fiscal stimulus, the health care bill, the hostility to the rich, the feckless approach to foreign affairs, even NASA’s budget cuts. D’Souza applies his insight with a clever simulation of the scientific method, insisting on his own clinical detachment at every step. Sometimes he sounds like a lab technician holding up a petri dish to a classroom of third-graders. “The best way to verify a theory is to test its explanatory power,” he writes, pedantically. “If the theory can account for Obama’s major policies and .  .  . also explain the little details about Obama, details that otherwise seem puzzling or mysterious, that would give our paradigm a degree of confirmation that very few comprehensive theories enjoy in politics.”

Readers will not be shocked that D’Souza’s paradigm easily passes D’Souza’s test, thanks to the author’s misstatements of fact, leaps in logic, and pointlessly elaborate argumentation. The misstatements range from the very small to the very large. As “further evidence that this anticolonial reading is on the right track,” he cites Obama’s press conference after the Gulf oil spill.

“Time and again,” he writes, Obama “condemned ‘British Petroleum’—an interesting term since the company long ago changed its name to BP. Given our anticolonial theory, it’s no surprise that Obama wanted to remind Americans of what BP used to stand for.”
Right you are, Holmes! Except .  .  . I’ve read the transcript of the press conference, and Obama didn’t make a single reference to British Petroleum—a name which, in any event, is commonly used by many people of a certain age (including me) who are sworn enemies of anticolonialism. D’Souza makes many errors of this sort, citing facts that aren’t facts in support of an otherwise unsupported conclusion. He says that Obama, in his memoir Dreams from My Father, never mentions his father’s drunkenness. Obama mentions it often. Indeed, D’Souza misreads the entire memoir: Far from admiring his father and emulating him, Obama makes his disillusionment with his father one of the themes of his own life story.

And where facts are missing altogether, faulty reasoning bolsters the case. “Wonder why Obama went to Harvard?” D’Souza slyly asks. “Here is a clue: It is the leading academic institution in America. And here’s another: His father went there.” Forget that neither of these facts is a clue, technically. Surely the first assertion is enough to adequately answer the question without recourse to the second, which is simply gratuitous as well as conjectural. But D’Souza always sees absence of evidence as evidence of something or other.
Let’s linger at Harvard a moment longer. “At Harvard,” D’Souza writes, “his real mentor was Roberto Mangabeira Unger.” Unger is a brilliant crackpot who championed critical legal studies, a left-wing academic fad of the 1980s. I’ve never heard before that Unger served as the president’s mentor. How does D’Souza know it? “Obama took two of Unger’s courses,” he writes. Well, then. “Obama’s attraction to Unger’s work is obvious.” Obvious, but undemonstrated. “So what does Obama say about Unger in his speeches and writings? Nothing.” Aha! “Unger has simply disappeared from Obama’s official record, and not because his influence was minor; in fact, quite the opposite.” QED.
In this respect it’s worth mentioning the just-released Radical-in-Chief, a long, elaborately annotated study in which the writer Stanley Kurtz aims to prove that Obama is a socialist—a term that D’Souza, in his much less careful book, explicitly rejects in favor of “anticolonialist.” Yet Kurtz, in 485 pages tracing Obama’s intellectual geneology, never once mentions Unger. These guys have got to get on the same page.

Will this confusion—the uncertainty over whether Obama is an anticolonialist or a socialist, evil or merely deranged—unsettle the audience that D’Souza writes for? Probably not. A week after its release, The Roots of Obama’s Rage appeared at number four on the New York Times bestseller list. Buyers of partisan books know what they like, and D’Souza is happy to give it to them. Yet the most innocent among them, those readers not yet trained in the Pavlovian relationship between these authors and their eager customers, might want to consider how unnecessary D’Souza’s theory and its “explanatory power” are.

There is, indeed, a name for the beliefs that motivate President Obama, but it’s not anticolonialism; it’s not even socialism. It’s liberalism!
Nearly everything that Obama has done as president, including the policies that D’Souza cites as proof of his inherited anticolonial ideology, would have been as eagerly pursued by President John Edwards or President John Kerry. And the points where they might differ—in the escalation of troops in Afghanistan, for example, or energetic education reform, or the push for nuclear power—mark Obama as more moderate than either of them. Come to that, many of the policies that D’Souza identifies as anticolonial were advanced by George W. Bush, who doesn’t (I’m guessing) have an anti-
colonialist bone in his body. Bush began the auto bailout, approved TARP, vastly increased federal spending, expanded entitlements, pushed through a large and probably unnecessary fiscal stimulus of his own, and often chided Americans for their “addiction” to foreign oil.

Trained as a young man by Jesuits, D’Souza must be familiar with the principle of Occam’s razor: The simplest explanation is always the best; if it fits the case at hand, there’s no need to go looking for more complicated theories. Yet there’s a cramp in the mind of the committed party hack, a terrible need to believe that one’s adversaries are more ominous or sinister than observable reality suggests. Thus Bill Clinton wasn’t merely an opportunist; he had to be a committed leftist and a criminal to boot. George W. Bush wasn’t merely a well-meaning, incompetent conservative; he had to be a Falangist. What Obama truly represents—unchecked liberalism, genus Americanus—is worrisome enough without dragging in the sad, gin-soaked carcass of his father or the hypnotic power of Roberto Mangabeira Unger.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/roots-lunacy_508809.html?page=2

[BootinUp]

1. So the Weekly Standard occasionally

prints well written stuff that makes sense. I'll give them that.

[Pirate Smile]

2. kick

[emulatorloo]

3. It is a pretty good article, I like the part describing the Clinton era Republican insanity-Hysteria

being transferred Obama as well as the mincemeat he made of D’Souza.

[Pirate Smile]

4. I agree. I like it when they bring back up the RW insanity against Clinton because it shows how

idiotic the RW Republicans truly are - and they just do it over and over again.

[emulatorloo]

5. Which I had another "rec" vote to give it. Guess I will kick it instead! n/t

[Pirate Smile]

6. Thanks

:)

[Pirate Smile]

7. Kick for Monday - Andrew Sullivan mentions this today:

Demolishing D'Souza
18 Oct 2010 10:05 am

Andrew Ferguson writes, "On the evidence of his new book, we can’t be sure if Dinesh D’Souza is a hysteric or a cynic." That's just one line from a satisfyingly brutal review in, yes, The Weekly Standard. The piece works best when it situates D'Souza's hallucinogenic hate-fest in the larger pathologies of current American politics:

How did the left-wing, coke-snorting Manchurian candidate become the fondly remembered Democrat-you-could-do-business-with—“good old Bill,” in Sean Hannity’s phrase?

Barack Obama is what happened. The partisan mind—left-wing or right-wing, Republican or Democrat—is incapable of maintaining more than one oversized object of irrational contempt at a time. When Obama took his place in the Republican imagination, his titanic awfulness crowded out the horrors of Bad Old Bill; Clinton’s five days in Moscow were replaced by Obama’s three years in that mysterious Indonesian “madrassa.”

...
We should probably be grateful for this psychological limitation. Without it the negativity of our politics would be relentless. Like Ronald Reagan before him, George W. Bush was reviled for eight years by Democrats driven mad by a sputtering rage—the “most right-wing president in history”!—but it’s only a matter of time until they rediscover him as a mild-mannered figure, the signer of campaign finance reform, funder of African AIDS relief, would-be grantor of amnesty to illegal aliens; an able if sometimes misguided man whose public service stands in stark contrast to whatever revolting Republicans have come after him. The Dubya renaissance will begin the moment President Christie takes his hand off the Bible and begins his Inaugural Address.

It’s in this light that the anti-Obama hysteria of recent months should be seen. Among professionals, political loyalties and hates are as changeable as the weather, bearing no relation to the plain evidence that normal people try to rely on. Taking the long view means never taking them seriously. Lucky for us, the hysterics make it so easy not to take them seriously.

I may one day find it possible to pity Bush. But Cheney? Not until he is in jail. But what a relief to find such a brutal review of a right-wing apparatchik in the neocon press. Ferguson is no fool.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/10/oversized-objects-of-irrational-contempt.html