This is a serious question: Are right-wingers CAPABLE of telling the truth about anything?

Q: What's wrong with this picture?



by Ken

The answer to the question "What's wrong with this picture?": It's fake.

At Right Wing Watch, Brian Tashman posted the above tweet (also posted to the tweeter's Facebook page) by "right wing 'intellectual' Dinesh D'Souza," along with the note that "D’Souza isn’t the only conservative to post the picture, despite the fact that it’s fake," and also an update:

D'Souza changed the Facebook post to read: "Even if the #ConfederateFlag was edited into this Hillary photo, WHAT is going on with those glasses and that hairdo?"

And, oh yes, Brian posted the actual photo, as unearthed in multiple previous iterations via "5 seconds of Google image search" by The Vicious Babushka at Little Green Footballs:



VicBab had noted:

Interestingly, the first photo to appear in my Twitter feed this morning was from @Bipartisanism, a liberal account. When I pointed out that the photo did not match other instances of the picture and that it was a Photoshop, he deleted the Tweet.

In those unaltered iterations, right-wingers had been chortling over Hillary's pants. Note that the unspeakable Dinesh D'Souza, once word apparently reached him that he had circulated a fake "photo," didn't go for the pants, he went for "those glasses and that hairdo." Very sophisticated. A lesser intellect might have contemplated some sort of apology. [UPDATE: Looking again, I realize that Dinesh couldn't "go for the pants," because they're mostly edited out of the version of the doctored photo he circulated. This doesn't excuse his contemptible, pea-brained ridicule of the young Hillary's fashion choices, but perhaps it explains why he felt he had to find someplace else to go. Certainly not to an apology, though.]

I hope I don't have to rehash D'Souza's place in the annals of Modern Conservatism. From his role as a cofounder of the infamous, odious propaganda-and-hate sheet the Dartmouth Review, he became a principal architect of then-young Republicans transforming lamebrained ideology into a pseudo-philosophical orgy of assaultive, lying imbecility -- while passing themselves off, as Right Wing Watch notes, as "intellectuals."

They don't actually have a philosophy, of course. What they have is a crippling personality disorder that apparently results in a contemptuous break from reality. From it they've fashioned a movement. Unbelievable.



In the January-February issue of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine -- a pretty good magazine, by the way -- ABC News investigative reporter Matthew Mosk '92 did a piece called "D'Souza's America," with the deck: "Following his felony conviction, conservative firebrand Dinesh D'Souza '83 has been humbled -- a little -- by his new life under guard in a San Diego halfway house. But silenced?" I couldn't help but read the whole thing, to see if it contained any insight into what makes this loathsome toad tick. Mostly I learned what a truly vile loathsome toad he is -- whiny, self-congratulatory, utterly unapologetic.

Despite having been caught red-handed breaking campaign-finance laws on behalf of a right-wing-nutjob friend engaged in a futile challenge to NY Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's reelection, and being caught even redder-handed trying frantically to cover up his shenanigans, and consequently pleading guilty, the slimebag insists he's the victim of a political witch hunt -- and while awaiting sentence went on TV multiple times to say so (if you guessed Fox Noise, you guessed right), to the considerable irritation of Federal District Court Judge Richard M. Berman, who played a clip of one of those appearances at his sentencing. Matthew Mosk writes:

“Notwithstanding Mr. D’Souza’s contention in his post-plea TV interview that you saw,” Berman said sternly, “I’m totally confident that Lady Justice is doing her job and that she’s not taking off her blindfold to target Dinesh D’Souza.

“Almost every defendant expresses remorse for his mistake,” Berman said. “They often mean it was a mistake in hindsight, and they are certainly sorry that they got caught. But Mr. D’Souza’s crime was clearly no mistake.” As Berman prepared to hand down the sentence, he continued, sounding almost exasperated, “I’m not sure, Mr. D’Souza, that you get it. It’s still hard for me to discern any personal acceptance of responsibility in this case.”

This, remember, in a defendant entering a guilty plea! Who nevertheless received, Mosk writes, "not a sentence of 10 to 16 months in federal prison, as federal guidelines permit, but Berman’s order that D’Souza spend eight months in a community confinement center," and --

spend an eight-hour day each week teaching English as a second language to immigrants, an exercise Berman said he hoped might bring some humility to a defendant the judge described as an “almost compulsive talker” and “not a listener.”

D'Souza has made a glorious career of ruthless, often borderline-psychotic, obviously knowing lies (he's too smart not to know that he's lying his guts out), on the apparent principle: Lie Big and Lie All the Time. It's hard to imagine a more dishonest creature walking the earth, in a life and career of unmitigated filth and degradation. For which he has garnered massive attention and been lavishly rewarded, and has paved the way for a generation of savagely cretinous like-minded pseudo-intellectual hooligans.

With Matthew Mosk, the closest Dinesh comes to self-awareness is an eventual acknowledgment, when pressed about his brush with the judicial system: "It may be I've had a charmed enough life that I began to think the rules don't apply to me. If that's the case, this is a very good thing to show me that they do." So, if that's the case, Dinesh has learned that he has to be a little more careful when it comes to bothersome "rules."

I suppose it's no wonder, then, that such a person can scarcely devote a second thought to the insignificant action of having spread a lie about Hillary. After all, how many thousands of much bigger lies about her has he already spread?

I mean the question I've put in the post title seriously: Are people like this not just unwilling but unable to tell the truth anytime it comes into conflict with the delusional version of "reality" ricocheting through their savage, ravaged brains?

Ronald Reagan awakened discontented Americans to a new version of reality, which offered as its test question not "Is it true?" but "Does it make you feel better?" And he also encouraged scapegoating, suggesting to Americans that if factual reality makes you feel bad, there's no reason on earth not to blame it on somebody, and the Americans he was preaching to needed only a wink from St. Ronnie to know who some of those somebodies might be.

All these years later these impulses have become so deeply embedded in the right-wing psyche that the victims seem to have truly no idea how complete their break from reality is. Which is why I pose the question of whether that break from reality makes it not just undesirable but impossible to deal with factual reality.

#

Dinesh D'Souza-- Prison Or Deportation? Or First Prison And Then Deportation?

To American right-wingers Dinesh D'Souza is a household name. Many normal people are vaguely aware that D'Souza is a right-wing operative who appears on right-wing owned and operated media to spread Republican Party propaganda. He's well-paid for his efforts and even made a movie he thought would win Romney the election, the little seen 2016: Obama's America, which was based on his 2010 book, The Roots of Obama's Rage. The film, like all D'Souza's work, was widely panned outside of extreme right-wing circles. Most people just see him as a kind of slightly less tawdry male Ann Coulter.

Late yesterday D'Souza was indicted by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara for campaign finance fraud, having illegally paid back Republican donors who he persuaded to contribute tens of thousands to an unnamed Republican Party Senate candidate-- possibly 45 point loser Wendy Long, a former Dartmouth classmate who he worked for when she ran against Kirsten Gillibrand. One of the charges-- the one that is likely to send him to prison-- is for "causing false statements to be made to the FEC." The judge and jury are not likely to appreciate D'Souza's tweet from yesterday:

Nor his pal Matt Drudge's:

The ridiculous red meat trailer from D'Souza's crackpot movie, which was laughed out of theaters across the country:

The Age-Old Conservative Crusade To Guarantee The Rich Pay Less

Conservatives never give up-- even if they have to go to extremist and radical means to achieve their ends-- and Monday is always a good day to mull over a bit of Corey Robin's book, The Reactionary Mind.

There's a fairly simple reason for the embrace of radicalism on the right, and it has to do with the reactionary imperative that lies at the core of conservative doctrine. The conservative not only opposes the left; he also believes that the left has been in the driver's seat since, depending on who's counting, the French Revolution or the Reformation. If he is to preserve what he values, the conservative must declare war against the culture as it is. Though the spirit of militant opposition pervades the entirety of conservative discourse, Dinesh D'Souza has put the case most clearly.

"Typically, the conservative attempts to conserve, to hold on to the values of the existing society. But... what if the existing society is inherently hostile to conservative beliefs? It is foolish for a conservative to attempt to conserve that culture. Rather, he must seek to undermine it, to thwart it, to destroy it at the root level. This means that the conservative must... be philosophically conservative but temperamentally radical."

How else could you ever explain a Timothy McVeigh or a Glenn Beck or a Jim DeMint? And how else could you ever explain why the conservatives never stop peddling their rejected wares year after year after year. Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio may not look like dried up, selfish, bloated, old vampires yet but their inherently anti-social message of greed and egoism, their hatred of the concept of equality and their vehement disdain for accepted American institutions like Social Security and Medicare, are the same old conservative message in superficially new packaging. Predictably, both also support the age-old flat tax schemes that are never far from the surface of any right-wing movement anywhere. As Robert Reich explained last week, flat tax schemes always mean the rich pay less. Under Cain’s gimmicky 9-9-9 "plan" (a marketing stunt more than a thought-through serious fiscal proposal), almost every family with over $1 million in annual income would get an average tax cut of $487,300. Capital gains would be tax free... free, free at last-- the dream come true.

Herman Cain’s bizarre 9-9-9 plan would replace much of the current tax code with a 9 percent individual income tax and a 9 percent sales tax. He calls it a “flat tax.”

Next week Rick Perry is set to announce his own version of a flat tax. Former House majority leader Dick Armey-- now chairman of Freedom Works, a major backer of the Tea Party funded by the Koch Brothers and other portly felines (I didn’t say “fat cats”)-- predicts this will give Perry “a big boost.” Steve Forbes, one of America’s richest billionaires, who’s on the board of the Freedom Works foundation, is delighted. He’s been pushing the flat tax for years.

The flat tax is a fraud. It raises taxes on the poor and lowers them on the rich.

...The details of flat-tax proposals vary, of course. But all of them end up benefitting the rich more than the poor for one simple reason: Today’s tax code is still at least moderately progressive. The rich usually pay a higher percent of their incomes in income taxes than do the poor. A flat tax would eliminate that slight progressivity.

Nowadays most low-income households pay no federal income tax at all-- a fact that sends many regressives into spasms of indignation. They conveniently ignore the fact that poor households pay a much larger share of their incomes in payroll taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes (directly, if they own their homes; indirectly, if they rent) than do people with high incomes.

...[W]hen Barack Obama calls for ending the Bush tax cut on incomes over $250,000, he’s only talking about the portion peoples’ incomes that exceed $250,000. He’s not proposing to tax their entire incomes at the higher rate that prevailed under Bill Clinton.

Republicans have tried to sow confusion about this. They want Americans to believe, for example, that if the Bush tax cut ended, small business owners with incomes of $251,000 a year would suddenly have to pay 39 percent of their entire incomes in taxes rather than 35 percent. Wrong. They’d only have to pay the 39 percent rate on $1,000-- the portion of their incomes over $250,000.

Get it? We already have a flat tax-- flat within each bracket.

The real problem is the top brackets are set too low relative to where the money is. The top-most bracket starts at $375,000 a year. People with incomes higher than that pay 35 percent-- again, only on that portion of their incomes exceeding $375,000.

This is absurd. It means a professional who’s making, say, $380,000 a year pays the same income-tax rate as a plutocrat pulling in $2 billion or $20 billion.

Our current flat tax at the top is treating the nation’s professional class exactly the same as it treats super-rich plutocrats. My doctor pays the same rate as Steve Forbes.

Actually, it’s worse than that because the plutocrats get most of their income in the form of capital gains, which are taxed at only 15 percent. That’s why America’s 400 richest people-- who earned an average of $300 million last year, and who have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans put together – now pay at a 17 percent rate (according to the IRS).

The Republicans’ push for a flat tax masks what’s really going on.

Remember: The top 1 percent is now raking in over 20 percent of the nation’s total income and owns over 35 percent of the nation’s wealth. Under almost anyone’s view of fairness, these are grotesque portions. They’re especially large relative to what they were as recently as thirty years ago, when the top 1 percent raked in under 10 percent. And these huge portions at the top continue to increase.

Meanwhile, the top tax bracket is now 35 percent-- the lowest it’s been in three decades. Between the end of World War II and 1980 it never fell below 70 percent. 

Simple fairness requires three things: More tax brackets at the top, higher rates in each bracket, and the treatment of all sources of income (capital gains included) exactly the same.

Not only fairness demands it, but also fiscal prudence. A truly progressive tax would bring in tens of billions of dollars a year from the people at the top who are in the best position to afford it.

Regressives are pushing the flat tax as a smokescreen. They’d rather not have anyone talk about the unfairness and fiscal absurdity of the current system.

Rather than merely oppose the flat tax, sensible people should push for a truly progressive tax-- starting with a top rate of 70 percent on that portion of anyone’s income exceeding $5 million, from whatever source.

And any semblance of economic fairness has been as far from the top of Mitt Romney's priorities list as giving up his ambitions to become the first Mormon president.

In his quick, casual reply—corporations are people—Romney had seemed to give something away, though it wasn’t immediately clear what. The press chose to play the episode as a “gaffe,” as ABC’s Jake Tapper described it, a moment in which the weakness in Romney’s political pitch, the gap between his own privileged experience of the world and that of working-class voters, had been exposed. ­MSNBC, in a spate of giddy incredulity, seemed to keep the clip on loop for a week. But Romney’s own campaign managers did not try to obscure the episode at the state fair, to say he had been misunderstood or to secret it away. Instead they promoted it, as an advertisement of principle, and made the confrontation the centerpiece of a solicitation to supporters. A few days later, Romney’s communication director, Gail Gitcho, told the press that the exchange had raised $25,000 within 24 hours.

The incident, in retrospect, did less to peg Romney as a creature of privilege than it did to reveal something deeper. For Romney, the corporation has long been an object of a certain idealism. It is something he has spent much of his adult life—first as a management-strategy consultant, then as CEO of the private-equity firm Bain Capital—working to perfect, to strip of its inefficiencies until it might function as a perfectly frictionless economic unit.

The political genuflection to businessmen is so gauzy and generic that praise for a candidate’s private-sector acumen can often sound phony. But Mitt Romney is the real thing. He was, by any measure, an astonishingly successful businessman, one who spent his career explaining how business might operate better, and who leveraged his own mind into a personal fortune worth as much as $250 million. But much more significantly, Romney was also a business revolutionary. Our economy went through a remarkable shift during the eighties as Wall Street reclaimed control of American business and sought to remake it in its own image. Romney developed one of the tools that made this possible, pioneering the use of takeovers to change the way a business functioned, remaking it in the name of efficiency. “Whatever you think of his politics, you have to give him credit,” says Steven Kaplan, a professor of finance and entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago. “He came up with a model that was very successful and very innovative and that now everybody uses.”

The protests going on at Zuccotti Park now have raised the question of whether that transition was worth it. What emerged from that long decade of change was a system that is more productive, nimble, and efficient than the one it replaced; it is also less equal, less stable, and more brutal. These evolutions were not inevitable. They were the result, in part, of particular innovations developed by a few businessmen beginning a quarter century ago. Now one of them has a good chance of becoming president.

...By the time Mitt Romney left Bain Capital for good, in 1999, American CEOs looked very different from the predecessors he had met in the seventies—the genial paternalists, spending their careers at a single company. More and more, they were pure meritocrats—well-educated, well-compensated, moving frequently between jobs and industries, trained to look ruthlessly for efficiency everywhere. They look a great deal more, in other words, like Mitt Romney.

...[W]hat separates Romney’s plan from Obama’s—and gives some clues about his potential presidency—is its almost-accidental origin. Romney did not begin with a philosophical quest to improve American health care. He began with the idea of himself as a problem solver and asked those around him for a problem that he might usefully solve. I remembered, when I was told this story, an anecdote I’d heard from a former political staffer of Romney’s. On even basic philosophical questions like abortion, the staffer said, Romney did not try to resolve the question in the abstract, as a matter of principle, and would consider instead various hypothetical cases—for instance, a late-term abortion—and build from them a politics. The line that Romney is a flip-flopper may vastly understate the depth of the condition.

It is arresting to imagine a Romney White House, inevitably filled with as many former Bain colleagues as each of his other public ventures have been: The ­PowerPoints, the 80-20 jargon, the clinical separation of decision-making from ideology, the detachment of those decisions from moral consequence, a persistent blind spot for people as people. It would represent the final ascension of a perfectly American type, one that has already remade the culture of business. I once asked a Bain colleague of Romney’s how Romney thought of his own core competence. “I think Mitt thinks he’s good at being Mitt Romney,” the colleague said.

But Romney’s career-long commitment to his own particular brand of impersonal decision-making might suggest something personal after all. One great mystery about Romney has been where his Mormonism comes in and what it explains. Maybe the clearest answer comes from taking at their word the businessmen with whom he came up, who say they never saw its influence. Romney’s religion constitutes a minority set of beliefs. Poorly understood and widely mocked, it can provoke suspicions about his motives. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that he has adopted a public persona that contains no detectable motives at all, one that is buried in objectivity, in data, in process. The best evidence of how important Romney’s religion is to him could be how far he has kept it from view. But the character that remains visible is at once uniquely American and a little strange: a perfectly objective efficiency machine.

To Conservatives Like Gingrich Anti-Colonial Attitudes Have Always Been Anathema, Going Way Back To 1775

I can't count the number of times we've covered Mike Lux's brilliant book, The Progressive Revolution this year. That's because Lux elegantly draws the bright red line between our nation's mainstream progressive traditions and the conservative reactions to them. This past weekend, thanks to off-the-rails, right-wing polemicists Newt Gingrich and Dinesh D'Souza, America got a taste of the reactionary vision of America. The two of them, trying to imply President Obama is an illegitimate president and was born in Kenya and is like a Mau Mau, accused him of anti-colonialist views. D'Souza, who has a disgraceful public history of supporting apartheid in South Africa, isn't any more deranged than the pseudo-intellectual Gingrich.

As Lux reminds his readers, there were conservatives back in colonial America too. Many of them fought alongside the British and against George Washington. After they lost the War Ig Independence, wealthy conservatives scurried back to England, while thousands of others went to Canada and the Bahamas. I guess it would be a stretch to call it "ironic" but an awful lot of Georgia traitors packed up their slaves and resettled on the Caribbean islands. Conservatives hated the Declaration of Independence, hated the Revolutionary Wall, hated Washington, Jefferson, Franklin... hated America-- they still do, to this day-- hated freedom, hated liberty, hated the Bill of Rights with a passion... That's the tradition from which Gingrich and D'Souza were speaking when they denounced President Obama as an anti-colonial Kenyan Mau Mau over the weekend. Even David Frum was embarrassed by his right-wing colleagues.

With the Forbes story and now the Gingrich endorsement, the argument that Obama is an infiltrating alien, a deceiving foreigner-- and not just any kind of alien, but specifically a Third World alien-- has been absorbed almost to the very core of the Republican platform for November 2010.

Rush Limbaugh has been claiming for almost 2 years that President Obama is bent upon “redistribution” and “reparations.” Following D’Souza, Gingrich has now stepped up to suggest that this redistribution is motivated by anti-white racial revenge. If Obama wants to expand health coverage and create government make-work projects, and tighten bank regulation it’s not because he shares the same general outlook on the world as Walter Mondale or Ted Kennedy or so many other liberals, living and dead, all of them white and northern European. No, Obama wants to do what he does because he thinks like an African, and not just any kind of African but (in D’Souza’s phrase) “a Luo tribesman.”

It is to vindicate this African tribal dream that Obama wishes to raise the taxes of upper-income taxpayers and redistribute money away from these meritorious individuals. D’Souza contends that Obama is acting to vindicate his father’s supposed dream of overthrowing the global order and ending the global domination of the white race over other peoples.

...Obviously I don’t know, but I’d venture that Gingrich’s words were not a one-drink-too-many rhetorical excess. Through his career, Gingrich has emphasized the use of harsh and stereotyping language to draw political contrasts, as in the famous 1996 GOPAC memo.

Earlier this year, Gingrich deployed the phrase “secular socialist machine.” Adopting as his own D’Souza’s new epithet about “the ideology of the Luo tribesman” revs Gingrich’s attack into a higher gear. It would be very characteristic of Gingrich to road-test the new concept with friendly journalists and audiences. If they applaud, we’ll hear more of it.

...But remember: Newt Gingrich no longer leads the congressional Republicans. Of course he wants to see Republicans elected (and to receive credit for helping to elect them). But as he prepares to run for president, he has other priorities – and other problems. Gingrich endorsed TARP. He has acknowledged that human activity is warming the globe. He attempted to work with Hillary Clinton on healthcare reform and with Al Sharpton (!) on education. He endorsed Dede Scozzafava in the NY-23 special election. As Speaker, he joined Bill Clinton to pass the S-Chip program, a big expansion of the healthcare entitlement. And then there is the tangled complexity of his personal life. Gingrich must feel very vulnerable to the kind of attack from the right that has slammed so many Republicans this year.

So it’s his mission now to present himself as the most ferocious right-winger in the race. Confident (over-confident) that he can best Sarah Palin among business-minded and ideas-minded Republicans, he wants to deny her or some other Tea Party style challenger any footing to attack him as a compromise-minded moderate. Calling President Obama a Kenyan fits into that strategy.

What it does to national unity and to distract the president from solving the problems conservatives left him to deal with is another matter entirely.

A YOU TUBE SEPPUKU MIGHT HAVE BEEN MORE FITTING BUT THE WRETCHED DINESH D'SOUZA APOLOGIZED FOR HIS LATEST HOMPHOBIC OUTBURST TODAY

A male Ann Coulter forced to apologize

You probably know that there isn't a single member of Congress-- not in either house-- who is both an African American and a Republican. The Party, which can-- but won't-- boast having once elected the first African American senator in modern times, Ed Brooke (R-MA), is now completely captive of racist NeoConfederates. By January, 2009 it will be clearly recognized as a regional southern party with racist, xenophobic, Know Nothing sympathizers here and there outside the states that started the Civil War. But between now and then there will be a Republican convention and they don't usually parade their closeted KKK dragons in front of the national media. Instead they try to dig up some moderates... and some people of color, for their little minstrel show. They try to present themselves-- especially after the Buchanan fiasco-- to independents and the general public as a legitimate, all-American political party that can appeal to everyone.

There aren't all that many people of color they can turn to to shuck and jive for them. One sure shot though is a two-for-one, a person of color and an immigrant (a legal, very rich one). If you know who Dinesh D'Souza is at all, you probably remember that he's an extremely partisan far right author and commentator. He was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1961. One of his first brushes with fame was when he was a 20 year old student at Dartmouth, already a vicious little homophobe, and he published the names of the officers of the Gay Student Alliance, many of whom were in the closet. He's widely dismissed as just a male Ann Coulter (an ex-girlfriend, as was Igraham), only he's uglier and takes himself more seriously. Most mainstream conservatives view him as a lightweight and a kook and he hasn't been taken seriously in quite a few years. He writes for AOL now.

I nearly blogged about an incendiary piece he wrote last month, Gays in the Military? Ask Cardinal Mahony. But then I realized he has no following and no one cares what drivel he's babbling so why bother giving him any publicity. I was wrong. AOL was flooded with complaints, as was Stanford's Hoover Institution, a radical right "think tank" that harbors hate mongers like D'Souza.

AOL pressured him and he was forced to send out an apology to their staff today. The note wasn't published but a DWT insider was happy to send it along.

August 23, 2007
 
To: AOL
 
From: Dinesh D'Souza
 
On July 16, 2007 I posted on my AOL blog an item titled "Gays in the Military? Ask Cardinal Mahony."  This item attributed to a friend in the military the view that "if the American military gets soundly whipped in a future engagement, we could always laugh off the defeat and say: well, yeah, but you only beat a bunch of gays."
 
This was an attempt on my part at humor, but clearly it misfired.  Upon reflection the item could easily be taken as showing a cavalier disregard for gays being harmed, and this was certainly not my intention.  Some readers also thought I equated pedophiles in the church with gays in the military. The mention of the two topics in the same post may unfortunately have given the false impression that I see no difference between pedophilia and homosexuality. This is not the case.
 
I can see why some readers were offended by the tone and content of this post.  Given the sensitivity of this subject, it was careless and insensitive on my part to have adopted such a derisive attitude at the expense of others' feelings.
 
I strongly believe that all people in this country are entitled to equal dignity and equal rights.  I will be more careful in the future.

I wonder if this guy has ever considered seeing a psychiatrist.