Newt, Dinesh and the Season of Hate

Sept 12th, 2010

UPDATE: THIS COLUMN WAS REFORMATTED VISUALLY 12/23/2010 NO CHANGES WERE MADE TO CONTENT

by F. Grey Parker

Newt Gingrich has outdone himself. It wasn't enough that yesterday he chose to mark the anniversary of 9/11 by releasing his Citizen's United propaganda DVD at $19.95 a pop. Nope, there's further contribution to our national dialog in the form of verbal bomb throwing over at the National Review.

“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” Gingrich asks. “That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”

In the interview, he cites and seems to draw strength from a recent anti-Obama hit piece in Forbes by Dinesh D'souza. Although his own inflammatory comments are getting the most coverage, I think it is this alignment with D'Souza that is both more telling and more offensive.

The right has been doing a damn fine job all year of delegitimatizing discussions of race in America by shrilly repeating the phrase "race card" over and over and over. Well, that's a problem. It's a problem because D'Souza is a profoundly racist and revisionist historian against whom we must push back.

He's had quite a career. As editor of the Dartmouth Review, he published articles such as "Dis Sho Ain't No Jive Bro" which mocked the supposed speech patterns and slang of black Americans. He also stole correspondence from the school's Gay Student Alliance and published it, outing several gay students to friends and family and driving one to consider suicide.

In his book, "The End of Racism," he stated that "the criminal and irresponsible black underclass represents a revival of barbarism in the midst of Western civilization." Look it up. You will find it on page 527. On page 179, he posits that all of us do-gooders totally misunderstood segregation and that "segregation was intended to assure that blacks, like the handicapped, would be insulated from the radical racists and" ... "permitted to perform to the capacity of their arrested development"
There's also this quote regarding ethnic disparity in the work force "it seems unrealistic, bordering on the surreal, to imagine underclass blacks with their gold chains, limping walk, obscene language, and arsenal of weapons doing nine-to-five jobs at Procter and Gamble or the State Department."

More recently, in his book, "The Enemy at Home," D'Souza blames American liberalism for 9/11. His rationale? The liberal left has created a degraded and decadent culture that naturally drew the attacks. It reads like some unironic endorsement of a Margaret Atwood dystopia. He argues that we would be in less danger from radical Islam if we were more like them. You know, less free and tolerant?

His utter lack of understanding of our nation's core values is perfectly illustrated in the aformentioned Forbes piece. It is D'Souza's analysis of Obama's position on the Cordoba Center:

"He (Obama) supports a $100 million mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name of Islam brought down the World Trade Center. Obama's rationale, that "our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable," seems utterly irrelevant to the issue of why the proposed Cordoba House should be constructed at Ground Zero."

Utterly irrelevant? That we don't tell people where they can and cannot assemble on private property due to their religious orientation?

Newt and Dinesh. Together, they are two of the voices that are serving to tear our country apart. I don't know which one is more dangerous. I suspect that Gingrich doesn't mean half of the things he is saying these days because they so clearly contradict what he has said during other cycles. D'Souza, on the other hand, is a true believer.