For those who are not political junkies, you may have missed the recent dust-up following the publication of a book by Dinesh D’Souza. D’Souza is, for those of my readers who do not know, a conservative writer and scholar well-known for his association in his youth with The Dartmouth Review and later with he Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution. He’s written several books that have been well-received, among them Illiberal Education, What’s So Great About America, and Letters to a Young Conservative. His most recent effort, however, is The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. This, predictably, has met with some animosity from those on the cultural left, but also from those on the right. The critique from the right is not that the amoral aspects of our culture do not anger Muslims, but that it is foolish to assert that these things are the driving force behind the terrorism originating in the Islamic parts of the world. Rather, the conservative critics say, even if this were a nation of innocent Christian choir-boys, the Muslims who are willing to attack us now would continue to do so because they hate us for reasons beyond and greater than the morally bankrupt popular culture. Mr D’Souza has taken umbrage at this criticism and that leads me (finally!) to the point of this post.
In replying to a critical review in The New Criterion by Scott Johnson, Mr D’Souza has disparaged him as being a “Midwestern lawyer who blogs in his spare time” and pokes at The New Criterion by observing that “I thought The New Criterion went out of business years ago”.
Stefan Beck, an editor at The New Criterion, hits back on his magazine’s blog, Armavirumque.
I have returned to discover not one but two incidences of baseless invective directed at The New Criterion, and I would be no man at all if I let them go unchallenged.
The first insult issued from disgraced buffoon Dinesh D’Souza. Perhaps he’s been driven mad by the creeping realization that his career henceforth will consist entirely of entertaining drunken College Republicans at birthday parties for the Gipper. “I thought The New Criterion went out of business years ago,” wrote D’Souza. Ahem. I suppose when D’Souza was contacted by two New Criterion editors about the production of this book, he thought they were from, you know, some other New Criterion.
I’d say that last blow probably went home.
Neh 