It's just a throwaway at the end of a lengthy New Republic interview of Dinesh D'Souza by Sam Tanenhaus, but TNR shrewdly turns that brief answer into a headline:
ST: So what happens if they send you away? What are you going to do?The headline is: "Dinesh D'Souza Is Planning His Prison Memoir" -- and, well, of course he is. The wingnut audience loves defiant martyrs claiming victimization at the hands of jackbooted liberals. He could spend a couple of months in the softest of county-club prisons and still turn out a memoir that makes The Gulag Archipelago seem like Jailhouse Rock. Hell, he'll probably write a whiny, self-pitying, angry memoir of suffering if he's sentenced to community service, just for having to go to trial. And the rubes will lap it up.
DD: I'm just gonna have to go to jail and write something about it.
To tell you the truth, I have problems with the fact that D'Souza's facing jail time -- far worse campaign-finance practices than his are perfectly legal, and far more appalling wrongdoers (Angelo Mozilo, George Zimmerman, Ray Rice) are walking around free. Don't get me wrong -- I have no sympathy for the guy. I just don't want to turn him into a guy whose imprisonment gives him, within his demimonde, some sort of mystique.
Then again, no matter what happens to him, apparently he's always going to land on his feet. He seems like an uncharismatic and not particularly clever guy, but as he pointed out in another recent interview, with National Journal, you can't get rid of him:
"My main goal through this is to annoy the Left, because you have all these guys railing on my Twitter," he says, grinning impishly. "They're just seething with envy. They're like, 'Shit!' "And yet D'Souza's crap still sells, and his "documentaries" still draw audience, because, as this quote makes clear, he has a huge ego to complement his unmitigated gall. He has will. Please, don't feed that. Don't hand him that much new material.
"We thought we'd buried him!" Schooley says, mimicking a seething liberal.
"Yeah, exactly," D'Souza says. "You should just see the number of times there are articles on 'Dinesh's career is over.' My career is apparently over every two years."
Such articles first began appearing with regularity around 2007, after D'Souza published a book heretical to people across the political spectrum, arguing that responsibility for the September 11 terrorist attacks lies with the "cultural Left." Three years later, the thesis articulated in The Roots of Obama's Rage -- that the president was a rabid "anticolonialist" acting out the wishes of his dead Kenyan father -- earned D'Souza even more scorn. Then, in 2012, came the mistress flap, which unsurprisingly damaged his credibility as an ambassador of the Christian Right.
"far more appalling wrongdoers [...] George Zimmerman"?!
ReplyDeleteI believe Mr. Zimmerman was found not guilty by a jury of his peers, or to put it another way, he is totally innocent of 'appalling wrongdoing'. Does that not count for anything these days?
David Duff
Zimmerman was found "not guilty". That isn't the same as being innocent.
ReplyDeleteHe killed an unarmed teenager. He has even admitted that he killed the unarmed teenager. He has even admitted that he caused the situation that escalated into a fight where he killed the unarmed teenager. He got off because of a technicality of Florida law that lets people provoke fights and shoot people and get off without penalty so long as the person is dead and not just wounded.
I mean if you want to go around defending killers that's your business. But don't pretend that being found not guilty in a court is the same as being innocent. That's naive to the extreme.
He's an English conservative, naivete and cluelessness are to be expected in someone from that intellectual tradition.
ReplyDeleteI imagine that after suffering a charley-horse on the 3rd hole of his country club prison, he'll title his book, "Mein Cramp."
ReplyDeleteMy main goal through this is to annoy the Left
ReplyDeleteIf you live your life with your main purpose of creating ill will, it will shape you. It has him. I don't care if he turns his prison experience into another mean-minded book - a better person would be humbled and turn it into a learning experience. If prison only makes Dinesh double down the bile, he'll emerge from it an even more miserable person than he is now. He may make a lot of money, but he'll eventually die a miserable, unloved, sour, lonely man.
duff - Mr. Zimmerman since his acquittal has embarked on a career of appalling wrongdoing, none of it illegal. He is not a man anyone, even you, would enjoy being associated with.
ReplyDeleteDuff: O.J. Simpson was also found "not guilty."
ReplyDeleteFolks it's September 2014 - haven't we learned yet not to feed trolls? Is it some kind of compulsive disorder?
ReplyDeleteI've tried to watch D'Souza's movie 3 times and never can finish it, because it's boooorrring. It's like a compendium of every conservative whine from the first Obama term, including all the usual misrepresentations and downright lies ("Obama returned the bust of Winston Churchill!"). Anyone likely to watch it would already be thoroughly familiar with it all, so why listen to D'Souza's annoying drone read it all one more time? Yet apparently there are conservatives who can't get enough of the stuff. People are strange.