Stanley Fish in The New York Times prints Dinesh D’Souza’s responses to reader criticisms of the film 2016: Obama’s America. (My review here.)
It is an excellent read, as D’Souza eviscerates the criticisms in a very methodical and polite way.
But what I loved the most was the post-script after Fish explained how he had come under criticism for being friendly with D’Souza (italics in original, bold by me):
S.F.: Finally a question more for me than you. I was chastised repeatedly for having you as a friend, for breaking bread with you (as I am about to do again), and for giving your “crackpot” arguments the time of day. One reader hoped that my criticism of the movie (which he thought too mild) might end a friendship that brought discredit to me. The idea is that you should choose your friends or spouses or partner by applying a political litmus test. Have the right (in this case, left) views and you can be my friend. It doesn’t work that way in the world — witness Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch, Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston, James Carville and Mary Matalin, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia — and, if I can borrow from one of my own titles, it’s a good thing, too. Let’s eat.
(Postscript: Our entry into the restaurant, in the heart of Greenwich Village, was delayed when people on the street recognized D’Souza and asked if he would pose for a picture with them.)
There’s something to that film which has touched a nerve, and not in a way liberals think.
When Dinesh D’Souza is stopped by passersby for a photograph in Greenwich Village, the skies are not as clear as they seem for Obama.
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Since the left is so super-serious about keeping strong a monolithic, arm-in-arm uniformity of thinking, one wonders if even Democrat supporters don’t unhappily realize how empty the Obama rhetoric and policies have become. Are they afraid of realizing the emporer wears no clothes?
And, Dinesh D’Souza as the “kid” who said as much!
Pix with Dinesh in the Village? Obama is history!
I am deeply encouraged by the vacuousness of liberal criticism of D’Souza’s 2016. They simply can’t do anything with it.
Factor that against docs like Inconvenient Truth and Michael Moore’s nonsense films, which were thoroughly debunked within days.
Fish reports that 99% of the comments to his piece on the movie in the NY Times objected to it or objected that Fish even took DiSouza seriously. Reading the comments to the subsequent interview in the Times linked above, the percentage holds up. I wondered, as I read the comments, why so many people operate with such a rock-solid certainty that America is an exploitive, greedy, imperialist, racist and deceitful country (and heap such scorn on the idea of “exceptionalism”) and that DiSouza is either a pathetic or conniving tool of its inherently racist masters? Why is this position and its handful of familiar semantic forms so tediously common to NY Times readers? Where does their bitter and unbudging certainty about America’s badness come from? How does this process work? How and why was I conditioned growing up (reading the NY Times like a sacred text) to believe all this too?
“Where does their bitter and unbudging certainty about America’s badness come from?”
That one is easy. Broadly, from Collectivism. More precisely, from decades of concerted propaganda, flowing from the Soviets through our institutions, and domestically from the Frankfurt School out into the intelligentsia.
raven…Yep, and the more breathtaking due to the Lib HQ of Manhattan being the site of such awesome carnage & mass butchery on 9-11-2001. Denial is so much more than a river-in Egypt,’Yo.
They hate America so much, but continue to live here. They enjoy the blessings of liberty and the comforts of free markets while condemning both. They despise the system that gives them so much and the people who defend it.
We need a leader to tell them to leave. Hate America? Fine. Get out, permanently. And don’t come back. Or be prosecuted: there’s a war on, and while spewing America-hate may be fashionable and neat-o in your degenerate circles, it’s still treason.
“I welcome Obama’s critique of the film. He has probably figured out that he cannot ignore it any longer. Obama’s response is a characteristic mix of name calling and false allegations. Some of the claims he makes refer to things that are not even in the film. Elsewhere Obama just gets it wrong.”
D’Souza
Sometimes, consistency is NOT a virtue.
You’d think that the smartest president evah could mount a supremely Churchillian, mordant critique in his own defense, but…not so much.
Today’s Greenwich Village ain’t the exclusive hub for beatniks and bohemians as it may have been when Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Dylan were trying to scrape by there.
Today, it’s as much a tourist trap as anything else. For sure, those who LIVE in the Village are predominantly left wing. But lots of the tourists who visit may not be.
I’d be more willing to draw a conclusion if I knew the person seeking to have his picture taken was not a visiting tourist.
Had to be tourists. Not simply on account of the political affiliation, but because it’s considered extremely tacky to bother a “celebrity” on the street here.
I recall reading an article written by an Italian (I think) in the early 60s who predicted that throughout the West, the next generation of the elite would be utterly hostile to the ideas of Democracy, Liberty and Free Speech, and they would turn to any and all movements hostile to those ideas. As I look at the statements of people in the NYT, Berkeley, Stockholm, Berlin, I think he was onto something.
These people are really hostile to what they say are their ideals…
Or as Devo said on their song “Freedom of Choice”
“freedom of choice
is what you got
freedom of choice!
then if you got it you don’t want it
seems to be the rule of thumb
…
freedom of choice
is what you got
freedom from choice
is what you want”
Dinesh got roundly criticized, even by conservatives for one of his books a few years back (I didn’t read it).
He is very articulate and has made a great comeback.