Newt Is Nuts!

Why is Gingrich pushing Dinesh D'Souza's crazy theory about Obama's "Kenyan anti-colonialism"?

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Ooo, ooo, I know! I know!     
Because Newt doesn’t know when to remain MUTE? Like a Mute Newt?

That was my best guess. Editor                                     

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By David Weigel

Getting Newt Gingrich to endorse your article is, in the year 2010, a nuclear trigger. Within a few hours, Gingrich was condemned by every Democrat with blogging software. The D'Souza thesis became the latest conservative idea denounced by Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman who likes to defuse grenades by jumping on top of them.

And that's the answer to the "Why publish D'Souza?" question. It should be obvious by now that there is literally no conservative argument too "crazy" to be obsessed over by liberals. Every time a new one surfaces, they try to run it out of the mainstream by drawing extra attention to it.

In 2008, Obama campaign's strategy was to refuse to comment on rumors or conspiracy talk—until the campaign launched a Web site in June devoted to debunking all of it. In 2010, the Democratic strategy is to freak out, all the time, about everything. It's not going so well, but that's largely because the economy isn't going so well, either.

Still, it's jarring to see D'Souza making the latest attack. His book, The Roots of Obama's Rage, is a mess. His most memorable previous books were messes, too. Every time he publishes a new mess, it gets the full Pastor Jones treatment in the respectable press.

That has had basically no effect on his ability to get published or his ability to get onto the stage at conservative conferences. But it is good for liberals. 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.

The downside comes for the people who may agree with your politics but not your argument.

The start of the D'Souza phenomenon came in 1995, when he published The End of Racism. Written to ride the wave of books and articles that called for white America to get over its racial guilt, it included lines like the "American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well."

It was so sloppy and unconvincing that it killed the genre for a few years; it's a 700-page doorstop by a one-time AEI scholar that no one cites today. The next D'Souza implosion came in 2007, with the publication of another book that killed its genre.

The Enemy at Home consisted of an argument that the "left" was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. That was an irresistible hook for a publisher, especially after the public had turned on the Bush administration and the war on terror.

But D'Souza made such a hash out of it that the people who had danced around the left-and-9/11 idea realized how deeply stupid it was. Victor Davis Hanson joined the mob and pointed out, as politely as he could, that D'Souza's enemies list was "nonsensical."

So The Roots of Obama's Rage is D'Souza's third pseudo-academic swing for the fences. In the book, and in the Forbes article that Gingrich plans to spread far and wide, he strikes out. D'Souza's point is that Obama's Dreams From My Father and his father's 1965 report on socialism tell us all we need to know about why his love for America is a little limp, but he pads out the book and the article with a lot of meandering and dross about how he came to this conclusion. As in The End of Racism, he performs a pre-emptive ad hominem rebuttal to critics.

"I'm a native of Mumbai, India," D'Souza writes in the new book, "so I grew up in a different part of the world, as Obama did. I'm nonwhite, as he is. He had a white mom and grew up in an inter-racial family." (In 1995, he wrote: "I feel especially qualified to address the subject of multi-culturalism because I am a kind of walking embodiment of it. I was born in Bombay, India in 1961.") This is the literary equivalent of putting on eyeglasses so a bully won't hit you.