Well played, James Wolcott, well played.

Dinesh D’Souza’s forthcoming book The Enemy at Home looks to be amply deserving of the execration Wolcott heaps upon it. The publisher’s own description—replete with the ever revealing attempt to make some vacuous distinction between freedom (good!) and the “abuse of freedom” (bad!)—makes it sound like an almost heroically contemptible potpourri of the lowest cheap partisan slander and the most craven imaginable capitulation to puritanical and extremist forms of Islam—both grounded in the ludicrous supposition that Sex and the City is somehow at the root of Muslim hostility to the United States. If the contents are anything like Random House’s summary, I expect D’Souza’s own fellow travelers to flense him like a heiffer dropped in the Amazon. But Wolcott gets off to an early start, delivering the kind of verbal pummeling that is simultaenously splendid and a little painful to behold. That’s the sledgehammer.

But what’s really pleasing here, to be honest, is the stiletto. You know the sledgehammer’s come out when you can imagine its object crawling home battered and bloodied. When the stiletto’s been deployed, you imagine him arriving there to discover it razed to the ground, his family dead, his bank accounts emptied, and his dearest friends convinced by means of an elaborate ruse, months in the making, that he is a child rapist. The stiletto here is timing. Wolcott explains:

It isn’t rare that I take instant animus against a book like this. But I don’t tend to react right away. The responsible thing for me to do as an occasional book critic is to wait until the official pub date, find a suitable venue for review, and thrash the book based on its merits.

But this is a special book, deserving special mistreatment. With The Enemy at Home, I prefer to do the irresponsible thing and declare war on Dinesh D’Souza and his stinking mackerel of a book starting now.

The thing is, especially if you’re a conservative author, an attack showing this level of animus from a liberal Vanity Fair editor could very well be a boon, spurring sales and buzz through controversy. If it happened a week before the book was due out, that is.

But the book doesn’t hit shelves until mid-January. Three long months away. Wolcott’s attack has started the controversy—the controversy the publishers doubtless would have welcomed in early January—far too early. Meaning, I’d be willing to wager, that the book meets the same fate I’d thought might befall Snakes on a Plane—a fate that’s probably a novelty of the Internet age: becoming passé before it even debuts.

Galleys are apparently out, so there will be ample fodder for discussion in the coming weeks. Presumably someone on the right debased enough to rise to the book’s defense will be found, and a little fire will be exchanged across the blogs. Ideally, it rises to the level where D’Souza is being asked to do TV appearances to defend his besieged thesis by early November. But by the time the thing actually appears in print? Well, gosh, isn’t this what people were debating last year? Whatever curiosity might have existed, from partisans of either side, will be long dead. They might have to empty the cartons of the first run straight into the remainder bins. Well played indeed, Mr. Wolcott.