Dark Bilious Vapors

This takes the cake (from Michael Berube):

Over the weekend, a couple of friends wrote to ask what had happened to me. “Michael,” said one, “do you realize you’re featured on David Horowitz’s FrontPage website yet again – this time in a ‘debate’ with Horowitz on the topic, ‘Is the Left in Bed With Terrorists’? What made you debate the guy in the first place, and why did you let him set these bizarre when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife terms?

“And more important, why did you tank so badly in the final round?”

Another friend suggested that Horowitz had made me “testy” so that I came off like a punch-drunk fighter who’d had enough; yet another pointed out, in bewilderment, that Horowitz had gotten 3300 words in the debate and I’d gotten a mere 860. “What’s up, Michael?” he asked. “You’re not normally so . . . taciturn. Have you finally gotten tired of dealing with D. Ho at last?”

D. Ho! Dang, I wish I’d thought of that one. But what was this nonsense about “860 words”? That didn’t sound right. I took part in an email exchange with one of David’s personal assistants, Jamie Glazov, over the past couple of weeks, with the understanding that it would be published in FrontPage. Like my earlier exchange with FrontPage in 2003, this one was long and full of back-and-forths, and my part of it certainly went well over 860 words.

But when I went to the FrontPage site to check out the “debate,” I found that almost all my replies to David had been cut from the “conversation,” and that Glazov and Horowitz, after chopping all the stuff I’d written, slapped me upside the head for not replying to them:

FP: Prof. Berube, it was clear to you that, in this second round, you just had your final turn. We had ascertained that this would be your final opportunity to discuss each of the points that Mr. Horowitz would raise, and that Mr. Horowitz would then have a final reply. And yet, this is all you have to contibute [sic] to what was supposed to be an intellectual dialogue.

Mr. Horowitz, what is your take here on Prof. Berube’s contribution to our second and last round?

DH: This answer from Michael Berube is disappointing but not surprising. As I have already observed, the left has become so intellectually lazy from years of talking to itself (and “at” everyone else) that it has lost the ability to conduct an intellectual argument with its opponents.

Well, holy infant Jesus with a rattlesnake, folks – what a shabby little stunt. First they refuse to publish my responses, and then they chastise me for not responding to them? What is going on over there at FrontPage – are they smoking crack, or are they just giving up altogether? Did they think maybe I wouldn’t notice that fifteen paragraphs of mine had somehow disappeared from the text of the “debate”? And did they forget that I have my own website, where I can call them out on this stuff for the benefit of the savviest readers on the Internet? Or maybe they were hoping I wouldn’t keep my own copy of the exchange? I did, of course, and I’ll reproduce it below – so you all can see just how bad things have gotten with D. Ho & Co.

Len on 04.12.05 @ 12:01 PM CST