And the Right's Crazy Talk Continues

Today's installment of "Crazy Talk" is brought to you by Dinesh D'Souza, whose new book The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, blames the Left for 9/11 and Islamic Terrorism. According to Newsweek, D'Souza takes "pains to insist that 'I am not accusing anyone of treason or even of anti-Americanism,'" yet he names figures such as Sen. Ted Kennedy, Toni Morrison and Sharon Stone as part of the "'domestic insurgency' that is 'working in tandem with [Osama] bin Laden to defeat Bush.'" Quoting again from Newsweek, "It's not just that they're working on behalf of bin Laden—they are also, paradoxically, responsible for bin Laden's hatred of America in the first place, by attempting to foist their decadent moral values on the rest of the world."

So, D'Souza's argument appears to ignore or discount the Israeli/Palestinian situation, which doesn't agree one whit with what Bin Laden said back in October 2004:

Although we are ushering the fourth year after 9/11, Bush is still exercising confusion and misleading you and not telling you the true reason. Therefore, the motivations are still there for what happened to be repeated.

And I will talk to you about the reason for those events, and I will be honest with you about the moments the decision was made so that you can ponder. And I tell you, God only knows, that we never had the intentions to destroy the towers.

But after the injustice was so much and we saw transgressions and the coalition between Americans and the Israelis against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it occurred to my mind that we deal with the towers. And these special events that directly and personally affected me go back to 1982 and what happened when America gave permission for Israel to invade Lebanon. And assistance was given by the American sixth fleet.

So, fine, ok, yet another Right Wing big mouth is spouting nonesense. Limbaugh and Hannity and O'Reilly and heck, Coulter have been doing this for years. All true. In fact, after reading about D'Souza's book I started to remember just how far back this particular brand of paranoid rhetoric goes.

A couple of years before the Oklahoma City bombing, after Bill Clinton was elected to his first term, Rush Limbaugh began opening his radio and television show by giving a count of Clinton's days in office followed by the phrase "America Held Hostage." His late night TV show had a graphic showing the White House surrounded by barbed wire flying a tattered American flag, as if the structure were a battered POW.

When I learned that Timothy McVeigh was a regular Limbaugh listener I was one of the many who called for Limbaugh to change his rhetoric and take some accountability, which of course he didn't. D'Souza won't either. I just wonder what twisted person might take him seriously and to whom he might cause harm.