The decline and fall of the despicable Dinesh D'Souza

By Michael J.W. Stickings

He really is one of the most reprehensible conservatives in all the land, and that's saying something.

And so it's a real pleasure seeing him caught up in an embarrassing sex scandal:

Dinesh D'Souza spends most of his time purveying hate and nonsense and obsessing about the failings of black people in addition to producing the anti-Obama (anti-colonial Kenyan mentality) movie showing in theaters around the country this season.

But as we noted a few days ago, he seems to have just gotten engaged.

While still married to his current wife.

While also being President of The King's College, a small evangelical college here in New York City.

Well, after "a marathon meeting to decide his fate", the College's board of trustees has decided that it's time for Dinesh to hit the road. And he's now tendered his resignation.

This after his lame excuse that he didn't know that getting engaged while still being married was frowned upon by Christians (like the ones at his own college, where he made an astonishing $1 million annual salary, suggesting that the college's board is as stupid as he is):

The thing I will admit: I did not have any idea that it is seen as wrong in Christian circles to be engaged prior to being divorced even though separated... That was a true error of judgment, but it was truly a case where I didn't know better.

Umm... really? Then he really is an even bigger moron that we thought. (But I don't buy it one bit. He surely knew what he was doing, and it was all about getting some much younger ass, specifically the ass of a big-time D'Souza admirer.)

And did he also not know that his much younger mistress, Denise Odie Joseph, was also married? Oh, how amusing.

(What wonderful values this Obama-hating evangelical theocrat has! Such a glorious hypocrite!)

Couldn't be happening to a more deserving guy. Enjoy the Schadenfreude.

Conservative desperation

Guest post by Frank Moraes 

Ed. note: This is Frank's third guest spot for us. You can find his first, on the recent 60 Minutes interviews with Obama and Romney, here, and his second, on European monetary policy and Spanish austerity, here. -- MJWS

Frank Moraes is a freelance writer and editor with much too much education. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where it is really hard to be a liberal, and writes the blog Frankly Curious. 

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I feel old, but that isn't always a bad thing. One of the benefits is that I have a long memory. And whether it is on the national level or the micro level, I know desperation when I see it.

Michelle Goldberg uncovers some startling goings on deep in Conservative World, "With 'Dreams From My Real Father,' Have Obama Haters Hit Rock Bottom?" It discusses a new documentary that has reportedly been sent to over a million voters in swing states, and that may eventually be sent to two million more. The DVD, Dreams from My Real Father, is a riff on Barack Obama's memoir Dreams from My Father. But in the tradition of other conservative propaganda like The Real Anita Hill, this film pretends to provide you with the truth that the mainstream outlets won't tell you.

In the case of Dreams from My Real Father, this truth includes the fact that Obama's real father was journalist, poet, and political and labor movement activist Frank Marshall Davis. Apparently, because Davis was married to a white woman, he must have seduced all white women. Hence, Davis and Ann Dunham are the true parents of the 44th President of the United States. But there's more.

Davis was known to be a avid photographer. Therefore, he took pornographic pictures of Dunham and sold them to girly magazines in the early '60s. I swear I'm not making this stuff up about them making this stuff up. This reminds me of this guy who hung around my college in the early years. He believed that Stephen King was a homicidal maniac who was used as a hit man by the CIA. This is kind of like Chuck Barris' autobiography (!) Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, but a few years earlier. Coincidence? I think not!

In all seriousness, these claims are more nutty than offensive—and they are very offensive. But they are indicative of the current state of conservatism in America. Goldberg notes that this film is being "promoted by several Tea Party groups and by at least one high-level Republican." What's more, "Tea Party groups and conservative churches are screening it." And perhaps most incredible, Dinesh D’Souza — a loon, but one who is taken very seriously by the mainstream — says in his book Obama's America that his documentary 2016 is based on:

Ann's sexual adventuring may seem a little surprising in view of the fact that she was a large woman who kept getting larger... Learning about Ann's sexual adventures in Indonesia, I realized how wrong I had been to consider Barack Obama Sr. the playboy... Ann... was the real playgirl, and despite all her reservations about power, she was using her American background and economic and social power to purchase the romantic attention of third-world men. [quote entirely from Michelle Goldberg's article]

This is what comes from calling centrists socialists. This is what comes from insisting that black presidents must be foreigners. This is what the conservative movement has reaped for what they have long sown.

But there is an upside to all this. It shows just how desperate and devoid of ideas the conservative movement is. For decades, I haven't thought much of conservative thinking. But at least there was thinking going on. Now it is nothing but the dark id of fear and hatred.

According to Nate Silver, Romney now has a 16% chance of winning the election.

[From Karen Finney tweet to Hollywood Reporter article.]

Update:

I just realized. If Frank Marshall Davis is Obama's father, then the President really is an American citizen. Yea!

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

I love the smell of desperation in the morning

By Carl 

So, how bad is it for Republicans supporting Mitt Romney?

The best they can do is claim it's still a horse race:

Want to start a business? Democrats laughed at the idea that a young man or woman might borrow money from his or her parents. The consensus at this convention was that they were entitled to take money from other people's parents. Delegates cheered at opportunities to take profits and property from the remaining, benighted, few Americans who still pay taxes instead of take taxes. 

In Charlotte, people who would never break into someone's home and take what was not theirs celebrated a government that uses tax law to do it for them. Then Clinton took the stage and, in a temporary expression of sanity, lectured Democrats about overindulging. You have to appreciate the irony in that.

Clinton said, "Don't you ever forget, when you hear them talking about this, that Republican economic policies quadrupled the national debt before I took office, in the 12 years before I took office, and doubled the debt in the eight years after I left, because it defied arithmetic. President Obama's plan cuts the debt."

The comparison was poignant: If Obama had similarly embraced Simpson-Bowles or any kind of bold deficit reduction in his remarks the following night, he would be wiping the floor with the Romney campaign. 

As if he isn't already. The only poll that shows Romney with even half a chance of beating Obama is Rasmussen, and Rasmussen is practically the house organ (heh!) of the GOP. Indeed, Rasmussen shows Obama winning handily in three key battleground states Romney must win -- Florida, Ohio, and Virginia -- thus negating the "national" polling.

More desperation: Dinesh D'Souza calls out President Obama for using the "N" word in describing his father. There's the pot calling the kettle "house." His film having tanked miserably at the box office when compared to, oh, a re-release of a film from twenty years ago, D'Souza is now reduced to rolling his hat around his hands, stamping his feet and screeching, "LISTEN TO ME!!!!!!"

According to John McCain, Obama has weakened America. I'm sure Osama bin Laden agrees, and this is good news for the McCain campaign.

The New York Times editorial board has had to try to revitalize the Romney campaign using backhanded complimenting.

They're even making up countries that stopped existing twenty years ago!

The whole "apology tour" thing has been revived in the wake of Mitt Romney's comments that President Obama has been appeasing terrorists, or some such wording, spoken just as Ambassador Stevens was being beheaded in Benghazi.

Well, I guess we now know the definition of "putting lipstick on a pig."

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Newt and Dinesh, crazy together

By Michael J.W. Stickings

"Why is Gingrich pushing Dinesh D'Souza's crazy theory about Obama's 'Kenyan anti-colonialism'?" Because, as the title of David Weigel's Slate piece helpfully explains, "Newt is Nuts!"

And so is Dinesh, of course, who's pushing yet more unfounded idiocy in his new book, The Roots of Obama's Rage, just as he has in everything he's ever written. It's like he's desperate to shock, desperate for attention, and desperate to be accepted as one of the leading conservative minds of the day. Writes Weigel, "D'Souza was the first modern conservative author to discover -- the hard way -- that if you want to be a pundit, there is no downside to making a reprehensible argument." Needless to say, countless many on the right have followed in his footsteps.

And it's all ridiculous nonsense -- as if Obama can be explained away, written off, as an angry, bitter, Marxist anti-colonial (and hence, in D'Souza's view, as a radical anti-American leftist).

Newt is full of such bullshit himself. It's hardly any wonder these two are linked together in common cause, both crazy to the core.

(For more, see Mustang Bobby's post from yesterday, which suggests that Gingrich is "insanely jealous" of Obama.)