Seriously, if Michael Bérubé bitch-slaps Horowitz any harder, there’s going to be teeth on the ground. It’s hard to choose just one excerpt–(Bérubé whaling on D. Ho; the Pringles of the internets!) The ineluctable inference that Horowitz doesn’t know what these new-fangled “links” are is rich in charm.
To his credit, Mr. Horowitz addresses one of my objections about my appearance in his new book, The Professors. It appears that I have once again seized on a mere quirk in the format—or, rather, a “stylistic conceit”:
“Michael quibbles with a bullet-point heading, a stylistic conceit of the book, which claims that Berube believes in teaching literature so as to bring about “economic transformations.” Michael protests that the sentence from which this phrase comes is lifted out of context. This is what the sentence says: “The important question for cultural critics, is also an old question—how to correlate developments in culture and the arts with large-scale economic transformations.” This appears to me like a classical Marxist notion. Michael doesn’t actually argue otherwise. In other words, despite the context Michael supplies, the statement stands.”
You heard it here from the Respectful One himself, folks: the statement stands. It’s official: David Horowitz thinks “correlate” means “bring about.”
Damn! I’ve had my ass fact-checked on the interweb before, and it felt all tingly. I can only imagine Horowitz has got some serious Tiger Balm on the toilet paper happening up in there. Or how about this:
But you know, dear friends, I resent being called “the very professor who calls [Horowitz] a liar without checking the facts.” The truth—and I use the term advisedly—is that I called Horowitz a liar while hyperlinking to the facts. Horowitz lied about the student in Colorado, he lied about the biology professor who allegedly showed Fahrenheit 9/11 to his class, he has lied about me (actually, the line about how my “entire political focus since 9/11 has been in getting our terrorist enemies off the hook” comes closer to actual slander), and—I can’t believe I forgot this one!—he lied—to O’Reilly, on one of his many Fox News appearances—about his speaking engagement at Hamilton College. Or, as Horowitz put it at the time, “I fibbed about my invitation to Hamilton and about my Academic Bill of Rights . . . because it was truer to say that I had to be invited by students . . . than to say the faculty there—the Kirkland project in particular, which is what we were talking about—would invite me.”
When “fibbing” prospers, none dare call it a bald-faced lie on national TV. Mmmm, feel the truthiness. Well, as I told John just now, when we move back to the States, he damn well better get on the list of the 102-203rd most dangerous professors in America, at the very least, or I’m leaving his sorry, insufficiently-devoted-to-the-cause-of-worldwide-Islamic-revolution ass. Oh, sure. Call me Xanthippe.
