A passage in a recent article in The Daily Beast illustrates just why Americans are weary of Washington and the media in general:
D'Souza argues that part of the reason Ann Dunham sent Obama to live with her parents in Hawaii was so she could pursue affairs with Indonesian men. "Ann's sexual adventuring may seem a little surprising in view of the fact that she was a large woman who kept getting larger," he writes. On the next page, he continues, "Learning about Ann's sexual adventures in Indonesia, I realized how wrong I had been to consider Barack Obama Sr. the playboy ... Ann ... was the real playgirl, and despite all her reservations about power, she was using her American background and economic and social power to purchase the romantic attention of third-world men."
The woman in this passage is Ann Dunham, President Obama's mother.
And the man who wrote those unproven and highly ugly comments about her is Dinesh D'Souza, a conservative writer and columnist. That passage came from the second part in his anti-Obama trilogy, Obama's America.
In 2010, D'Souza wrote a nonsensical book called The Roots of Obama's Rage, which pushed the hilariously ugly theory that Obama fosters a secret hate of America because of his father -- a man who Obama met only briefly. Thanks to conservative and right-wing hype, that book was a "success." This year, he published a continuation piece called Obama's America, which is a companion piece for a movie he produced called Obama 2016. Both of these entities, with more help from conservative and right-wing hype, are also successes. However they, like his original book on Obama, have been roundly condemned by mainstream media as crackpot nonsense with a phony intellectual glaze.
In other words, this is what conservative political commentary has been reduced to since I was a child. It has gone from the high-brow, but sometimes coherent ramblings of William F. Buckley to deleted lines from a fifth-rate bitchy version of the famous Clare Booth Luce play, The Women.
Now usually, I try not to allow conservative so-and-so's like D'Souza or Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, and the other assorted denizens (I want to call them worse but it would ruin the integrity of this piece) to bother me.
I don't watch them.
If any of them are on my television, I turn the channel.
These folks make a living off of wingnut welfare and think-tank money. Their lifeblood is funding by mysterious wealthy individuals with Napoleon complexes and more money than common sense. Like some strange character from a Stephen King novel, these conservative pundits thrive on resentment and chaos. Every angry American is like $100 in their bank accounts.
But D'Souza's attack on President Obama's mother is going too far.
To him, it's as if Obama is a succulent piece of meat on a dinner table which he has picked clean. However, failing to be satiated, D'Souza now seems to be busying himself with breaking the bones of the meat and sucking out the marrow in loud, repulsive slurps.
One has to ask who else in the Obama family will he go after while under the false veneer of "pursuing the truth?"
Of course this is Dinesh D'Souza who makes his money as an "analyst" for various right-wing think-tanks such as the Hoover Institution and the American Enterprise Institution. And he is the same man who wrote The End of Racism, a book so outrageous that it offended black conservatives because it claimed that "black culture" was inferior to "white culture," that segregation was misguided paternalism, "based on the code of the Christian and the gentleman" and intended to protect blacks, and that parts of the Civil Rights Act should be repealed.
So why should we be surprised with how low he has stooped here?
Also there is a HIGH degree of Obama Derangement Syndrome out there. The same Daily Beast article says that another film about the president, Dreams from my Real Father, not only pushes a ridiculous theory that Obama's "actual father" was a black communist, but that his mother modeled in 1950s bondage and fetish porn. Allegedly, millions of copies of this film is being sent out to voters in several states including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Nevada.
So again, why should we be surprised when there seems to be a market out there for lurid beliefs about Obama.
It's understandable that many of us are desensitized to this stuff. In all truthfulness, these videos and D'Souza's books probably won't have any effect on the electorate who should be used to Obama being called everything including the Anti-Christ. At least let's hope not.
But why in the world do members of the media entertain these notions and the people pushing them as if there is nothing wrong here. Consider the fact that D'Souza has been featured on various legitimate news programs and channels such as CNN hawking his visual and literary firewater without any form of shame.
And all in the name of the false equivalency of supposedly presenting "both sides" of a political argument, many newscasters are allowing him to get away with it.
When is the media going to dispense with this madness and call D'Souza out for pushing what they know are horrible lies?
Wouldn't it be nice for D'Souza to be subjected to a moment not unlike the ending of the tale "The Emperor's New Clothes," when all it took was the innocence of a child to break through the pretext of nonsense which was going on.
And to hell with being nice. I'm talking about a loud and long tongue-lashing. I'm talking about a reprimand so severe that D'Souza's body would shrink a few inches for daring to push such nonsense on the American public.
Would it have hurt for someone with a good mainstream news reputation to tell D'Souza the equivalent of the statement, "you know you are so full of it, right?" (In all honesty, HBO host Bill Maher did actually do this, but it really didn't resonate in the media like it would have if someone like Soledad O'Brien had done it)
But it's not happening and it bothers me tremendously.
And I ask am I the only one who feels this way?
Am I the only one who is embarrassed to be a member of the most powerful nation in the world and forced to listen to idiots who hawk ludicrous theories on whether or not the president's mother was either an overweight slut or a freak who engaged in fetish porn instead of discussions about the pertinent issues which confront this country?