Wingnut Wendy Long is the likely challenger to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, though she still has to win a Republican primary next month.
Long has the support of the NY Conservative Party and a near majority at the recent state Republican convention, because they expect that Wingnut Wendy can raise many millions from her longtime connections with Republican/conservative/Catholic rich people and their political foundations/PACs.
Like near-lifelong wingnut-welfare beneficiary Dinesh D'Souza, who has maxed out to fellow Dartmouth alum Long with $5K from himself, and $5K from his wife.
Details, below.
Wingnut Wendy didn't raise much in the first quarter -- just $172K -- and about 6 percent of that came from D'Souza and his wife.
D'Souza is a Catholic from India who came here on a Rotary high school scholarship and stayed here at Dartmouth College, where he was one of the first editors of the Dartmouth Review, the initial college newspaper funded by rich conservatives.
D'Souza outed gays at Dartmouth in the early 1980s, because he saw it would be good for his wingnut-welfare career.
Indeed it was -- his post-Dartmouth employment has been entirely funded by rich conservatives (except for a year in the Reagan White House), at the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, the King's College, etc.
D'Souza has written a few books that were only "best-sellers" because of bulk sales to wingnut outfits that essentially gave away the books to their contributors.
His most recent book, reflecting the views of his 1 percent patrons that Obama is un-American, is The Roots of Obama's Rage, which is a mendacious argument that Obama's policies as President are completely related to the "Kenyan anti-colonialism" of his deadbeat father, whom he met just once.
Dave Weigel at Slate calls this weird book "D'Souza's third pseudo-academic swing for the fences, and ... he strikes out."
Weigel destroys D'Souza in many ways, like this:
It's jarring to see D'Souza making the latest attack. His book, The Roots of Obama's Rage, is a mess. His most memorable previous books were messes, too. Every time he publishes a new mess, it gets the full Pastor Jones treatment in the respectable press. That's had basically no effect on his ability to get published or his ability to get onto the stage at conservative conferences. But it is good for liberals.
D'Souza was the first modern conservative author to discover—the hard way—that if you want to be a pundit, there is no downside to making a reprehensible argument.
And this:
Only after seeing Obama give a definition of "American exceptionalism" that didn't sound right did D'Souza go back to Obama's books and realize that the president was cribbing his politics from 1960s Marxist and anti-colonial theory.
"This is intellectual terrain I know well," he writes. Obama "demonizes his predecessor and his opponents," according to D'Souza, because he looks to former Kenyan Prime Minister and President Jomo Kenyatta as an inspiration.
That creates a mystery about why George W. Bush criticized Bill Clinton or Clinton criticized Bush's father, but never mind.
Or Reagan criticized Carter, Carter criticized Ford, etc.
Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review read a shorter version of the book in Forbes, and had this to say:
self-evidently appalling, ... D'Souza's baloney, ... moronic, ... just plain ignorant, ... disingenuous, ... dishonest, ... simply false, ... warped, ... racist at its rotten core, ... the worst kind of smear journalism
D'Souza's latest no-heavy-lifting wingnut-welfare sinecure is as president of King's College, a small, barely solvent, Manhattan outpost of the Campus Crusade for Christ. (Though he's had the job for two years, D'Souza did not disclose it when maxing out to Long.)
D'Souza has earned no degree beyond his Dartmouth bachelor's, unlike almost every president of a real college/university, but he has presumably helped his little evangelical college raise money from his longtime patrons, while he continues to devote most of his time to wingnut agit-prop (like CPAC 2012 and Ralph Reed's get-together of Christianist rubes next month).
Plus, he's working to promote a BS movie based on his latest discredited book, for release this summer.
Obviously no one outside of the few million diehard wingnuts will pay to see it, because:
D'Souza probably maxed out for Long because of the Dartmouth connection, though they also share extreme political views based on demonizing Democrats and liberals.
Long took $10K from D'Souza and his willing wife because she needs money desperately, and because she's as far-right as D'Souza.
Both of which underscore the near-impossibility of Wingnut Wendy becoming the next Senator from New York.
