David Horowitz, who suprisingly enough now has his own blog, has a new post up calling the proprietor of this website a “Leftwing Hatchet and Compulsive Prevaricator.” The post is in response to 
an earlier one of mine in which I leveled some criticisms at his publication, FrontPage Magazine.
(He bizarrely calls my post an ‘apology’ when it was obviously, and expressly, the opposite of an apology. I guess he just wanted to juice his argument a bit?)
You probably know who Horowitz is, since he’s rather fond of telling his personal story. But if not, he’s a one-time sixties-era left-wing journalist and activist who, later in life, reinvented himself as a sort of Tasmanian Devil of right-wing agitprop and political hyperventilation.
Anyway, these are ominous days we’re about to move through so I thought a bit of comic relief would be in order.
On his website he notes a highly-charged ‘confrontation’ we apparently once had …
Shortly after this article was published Marshall appeared at an event I had organized and I had the occasion to confront him. Instead of acknowledging his ignorance and apologizing for the smear he steadfastly defended the falsehoods he had written and repeated the smear. I did the only thing it seemed appropriate to do. I called him a liar to his face.
The article he’s referring to is one I wrote several years ago called “Exhuming McCarthy,” which he said slandered him and various others. He later said Jake Weisberg, now editor of Slate, also slandered him and his friends along similar lines. It’s a whole long story that doesn’t merit going into here. But given Horowitz’s flair for the dramatic, I thought I’d give a little detail of the moment he “confronted” me, since it was a bit different and rather more comedic, on both our parts, than he says.
If memory serves, the event in question was a Hillary-hating conference Horowitz had put on at one of the conservative think-tanks in DC. I was new in DC at the time so I thought I’d go and see what all the fun was about. So I went.
At this point Horowitz and I had already had a heated back and forth in the ‘letters to the editor’ section of the American Prospect. So at the end of the festivities, when everyone was milling around I figured, ‘Hey, you should go up and introduce yourself.’ (Clearly, this was a mistake …)
So I went up and stood next to where Horowitz was chatting with some admirers and waited there with a friend of mine until I caught his eye and I could make my move.
And I waited.
And I waited.
And I waited …
After a while we started to wonder whether he was intentionally ignoring me or whether — as seemed more likely — he just didn’t know me by sight and couldn’t be bothered.
Anyway, I finally saw my chance, moved in, put out my hand and introduced myself.
At this point a sort of clenched, rumply look came over Horowitz’s face and he blurted out something like, “What you wrote was disgusting.” Or maybe it was despicable, or something like that. And then he made sort of a lean to turn away like I was beneath his contempt, which I suppose I probably was.
I shot back something to the effect that talking like that was beneath him and he shouldn’t say things like that. (He now says he called me a liar. He probably did. Who knows?) And within a few seconds everyone within a twelve-foot radius started looking distinctly uncomfortable and that was the end of it.
In Horowitz’s retelling, apparently the ghosts of Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain, and various other indignant worthies hung around the event. But I didn’t notice any of them. And as for moral clarity and Horowitz’s long twilight struggle against The Left, I guess my memory is just too foggy.
Anyway, that’s my comic relief for the day, now back to the drums of war.
