A couple of weeks ago, as I was reading Dinesh D'Souza's new book The Roots of Obama's Rage, I took a quick break from the merciless punishment it was inflicting on my logic centers to poke some fun at one of the more risible claims D'Souza makes -- that Obama wants to rein in NASA to prevent the realization of 19th-century British colonial magnate Cecil Rhodes' dream of colonizing space.

Yeah, he actually wrote that.

I had my fun mocking it and then got back to dismantling the rest of the ridiculous book, not really expecting the space colonization argument to pop up anywhere else.

But yesterday the Christian Science Monitor published an op-ed by D'Souza titled: “Is Obama trying to 'decolonize' space?” At first I laughed, but then the realization sank in that not only had D'Souza revisited the space decolonization argument, but he made it the focus of an entire op-ed, and a mainstream newspaper agreed to publish this op-ed aware that the person who wrote it was earnestly arguing that the President of the United States wants to “decolonize” outer space in accordance with the ideology he inherited from the father he met only once as a young child.

D'Souza's theory has been discredited more times than should be necessary and slammed from both sides of the political spectrum as nativist garbage. And it's absolutely staggering that this dishonest, intellectually vacant, and on-its-face absurd rubbish has been published in two mainstream papers: first the Washington Post, and now the Christian Science Monitor.

Newspapers have an obligation to keep their readers informed, and publishing op-eds on the secret presidential plan to protect Mars from American colonial interests definitely runs counter to that goal.