Convicted felon and mean asshole
More from the Moral Vacuity Files – Dinesh D’Souza on Twitter:
Obama's dad dumped him at birth & his mom got rid of him at age 10–did they know something we didn't when we signed up for this guy? pic.twitter.com/owhOt6IAwB
— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) October 21, 2016
It’s worth noting that D’Souza was considered by many conservatives to be a respectable figure in their movement for many years now. Long before Trump came along, conservatives were praising D’Souza for his insight into Obama’s supposed “anti-colonial Kenyan mentality.”
Likewise, Marco Rubio is being held up as the “sane Republican” who would totally be beating Hillary right now, if only the evil liberals hadn’t connived to help Trump get the nomination (no, I’m not sure how that’s supposed to have happened, either). Yet recall what the RubioBot 2016 was sputtering out when it had its malfunction during that debate: a wacky conspiracy claim that Obama doesn’t simply happen to be a “bad” president with policies that have had a bad effect, but that Obama is deliberately implementing bad policies because he hates America and wants to bring about a socialist revolution or whatever.
Oh, and D’Souza is also the guy who was praised by Michael Shermer for his many contributions to American intellectual life.
“Anti-colonial Kenyan mentality?” Are Americans not meant to have an anti-colonial mentality? I have always had the impression that Americans have a big celebration every year to commemorate the point at which America stopped being a colony. Clearly I was wrong.
I should add that even in Britain, being in favour of colonialism is generally considered very bad. Apologists for colonialism usually just argue that things were already bad before the British came so it didn’t make much difference or that lots of other countries were doing it so not doing so wouldn’t have made much difference.
Hmm. I think Niall Ferguson for instance argues that colonialism did more good than harm overall.
I can confirm Screechy Monkey’s claim re: “Trump is the fault of liberal shennanigans.” The claim is that liberals flocked to Trump’s banner in open primary states in order to shoot down the ‘legitimate’ candidates like Rubio and Cruz.
The problem, of course, is that Trump did about as well in open-primary states as he did in closed-primary states. He swept the Deep South and Midwest (mostly open primaries) by a relatively narrow margin, but he also took New England strongly, and that’s mostly closed primaries. On the West Coast, all the primaries Trump cakewalked are closed (at least, on the GOP side–some of them have open primaries for the Democratic Party).
Trump Victory map: http://www.nytimes.com/elections/2016/national-results-map
Open/Closed/Mixed Primary map: http://www.openprimaries.org/primaries_by_state
Here’s a WaPo article that explains the argument a bit.
In a nutshell, it’s a simplistic view that:
Colonialism = Capitalism
Anti-colonialism = Communism
Obama’s father was anti-colonial, therefore Obama’s father was a communist, therefore Obama is a communist, too. (Obama was not raised by his father, but I guess communism is supposed to be genetic.)
And yet, D’Souza sold a ton of books on that thesis, and it was referenced by such mainstream GOP figures as Gingrich and Guiliani.
Liberals didn’t want him to win the nomination, because that would make him the potential next President. Even though most people were saying he wouldn’t be able to win in a general election, I think there were a lot of us that were saying “never say never”. The margin between them is closer than it should be in a fully aware, educated, and reasonable electorate (mind you, I am not suggesting that our electorate is any of those things; I think this election calls any such premise into question).
Freemage:
I think the other pillar of the “liberals made us nominate Trump” claim is that the evil librul media gave Trump a ton of free air time which took all the oxygen away from the other GOP candidates.
And, well, it’s fair to say that Trump got a lot a free air time, and not unreasonable to speculate that this helped him a great deal in the primaries. But ultimately it was Republican voters who supported, and still by and large support, Trump. And more importantly, cable networks gave Trump a lot of air time not out of some masterful liberal plot to saddle the GOP with a weak nominee, but because the non-Fox cable networks were interested in getting ratings, not pursuing a particular ideological agenda, and Trump was big ratings. The best evidence for this is the fact that Fox News couldn’t get enough of Trump, either: he was allowed to phone in to shows and get on the air immediately, and his rallies were covered live by them, too, whereas other GOP candidates never got those privileges unless they were attacking Trump. Even supposedly liberal MSNBC mostly gave air time to Trump on the decidedly not-liberal Morning Joe show, on which Joe Scarborough fawned over Trump for months before finally getting over it.
Meanwhile, very few conservative voices really spoke out strongly against Trump during the primaries, and the ones who did, like Erick Erickson, paid a high price in terms of losing ratings, followers, and speaking opportunities — because their own conservative audiences were outraged and rejected any suggestion that Trump was not a True Conservative. (And, to be clear, Erickson is not a “good guy” in my view. But he wrote a surprisingly and commendably candid piece recently of the pressures that came with being an anti-Trump conservative, and admitted that even he went a little easier on Trump than he should have.)
Screechy Monkey: Excellent points re: the media coverage of Trump and the primaries. I can’t count the number of times I’d walk past a TV set in my workplace set to CNN and they’d be showing an empty stage with the banner at the bottom reading, “Minutes away from new Trump statement”–and it would be just that, with occasional cuts to talking heads rambling about what they’d been told Trump was going to say, before going back to the empty stage. If they had just done without the pre-game hype, even, that could’ve allowed coverage of other candidates, or even just real news.
For sport, ask non-Trump Republicans who use this argument if that means they’d now support restoring the Fairness Doctrine (which would’ve forced the networks to divvy up their candidate coverage among the sixteen contenders from the start).
I know you said “for sport,” but please let the Fairness Doctrine rest in peace. The government should not be in charge of deciding whether media coverage is “balanced” or not. It outlived any useful purpose that it might once have served, and I strongly suspect that today’s Supreme Court — and I don’t just mean the conservative justices — would rightly strike it down. (In a nutshell: in 1969, the FD was upheld as constitutional on the theory that the public airwaves are a scarce public resource, so the government is entitled to ensure that they’re not monopolized by any particular party or viewpoint. Attempts to apply that principle in other contexts where the scarcity rationale does not apply, e.g. newspapers, were later rejected. In a world of hundreds of cable channels, internet streaming, social networking, etc., I can’t imagine the Court signing off on the notion that there is a compelling public interest in having the government order that Republicans get to speak on MSNBC and Democrats on Fox News.)
@Freemage
You know, even if they did–and as you point out, there’s no evidence that they did, but for the sake of argument, say they did–so what? Open primaries do, in fact, get gamed in that way–by both parties.
But only one party routinely engages in deliberate voter suppression aimed at disenfranchising likely opposition voters (eg, voter ID laws.) That party has no moral standing to object to open primary shenanigans.
Lady Mondegreen: The point that folks making that claim want to make is that the GOP never would’ve nominated Trump without the influence of all those spoiler libs. Which, of course, is patently ridiculous.
My point is, fuck ’em.