The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/books/06kaku.html?ref=artsWith this book, Dinesh D’Souza, the Rishwain research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has officially become the Ann Coulter of the think tank 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.”
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.”)
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Mr. D’Souza’s central thesis is an absurd one, constructed around two clashing arguments: 1) that the American left is allied to the Islamic radical movement to undermine the Bush White House and American foreign policy; and 2) that “the left is the primary reason for Islamic anti-Americanism as well as the anti-Americanism of other traditional cultures around the world” because “liberals defend and promote values that are controversial in America and deeply revolting to people in traditional societies, especially in the Muslim world.”
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For that matter, Mr. D’Souza leaves out anything that might reflect poorly on the current Bush administration, while zeroing in on anything that might reflect poorly on Democrats or liberals. He excoriates Bill Clinton for not doing enough to get Mr. bin Laden, but says little about the failures of the Bush White House to bear down on Al Qaeda in the wake of early 2001 warnings from the counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke and an Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily brief titled “Osama bin Laden Determined to Attack the U.S.”
Hoo Boy. They don't give up do they?
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