I was going to say something intelligent about Katha Pollitt’s review of Dinesh D’Souza’s The Enemy at Home, which I also panned. But her review kicks such major ass, that I am just going to excerpt it. Pollitt calls D’Souza’s attack on the American left
a secular version of Jerry Falwell’s contention that 9/11 was a divine rebuke to “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America.” Of course, Falwell got hammered; even George W. Bush had to distance himself. Besides the obvious objections, God’s aim seemed wide of the mark: Did He think the ACLU had an office in the Pentagon and that Windows on the World was a gay bar?
And as for Hillary, who D’Souza naturally includes in the Liberals Who Hate America category:
Hillary is a workaholic, so maybe she promotes America-hatred and child pornography in the wee hours, after her day job beefing up the US military.
The coup de grace is that Pollitt shreds D’Souza’s logic. He blames the left of allying itself with America’s enemies, while he more or less excuses the terrorist attacks by saying liberals’ slatternly ways brought them upon ourselves. Here’s Pollitt:
The idea that Americans are going to embrace the mullahs and ayatollahs out of a shared dislike of gays and working mothers is fairly fantastic. Besides, the Americans who come closest to sharing “traditional Muslim” family values are fundamentalists like, um, Jerry Falwell, who think Islam is the devil’s work. The minute they tried bringing their new best friends to Christ, they’d find out that a mutual obsession with female chastity can take you only so far.
Curtain.
