Billmon piles on

I could have posted this as an update on the previous post but it's just too funny to tack on the end of a post... not just Billmon's comments, but the claims by David Horowich that precipitated them.

This evening I had an extremely weird e-mail conversation with David Horowitz -- yes that David Horowitz -- stemming from a trivial comment I left on his latest screeching rant about the Cheney-Rumsfeld vacation home flap.

Horowitz (on his blog): The fact that Rumsfeld responded to the Times request to take the pictures means what? What else could he say?

Me: How about "no"?

Horowitz killed the comment (or at least, I don't see it displayed on his blog) but he e-mailed me a rambling response that began by pointing to his proposed explanation for why Rumsfeld muscled under to those street toughs at the Times: "If Rumsfeld had said 'no' . . . that would merely have confirmed their view of this administration as secretive and repressive" (again, that's from Horowitz's blog, not his e-mail.)

So in what parallel universe has "confirming that the administration is secretive and repressive" ever stopped Rummy before?

[...]

I mean the notion that the New York Times could use the threat of bad publicity to literally extort the Secretary of Defense into letting them publish a picture of his house is just falling down, can't breathe, snot-spurting-out-of-your-nose funny. Hell, in the real world, Rummy would just have Dick come over and shoot the Times photographer in the face with his shotgun. Problem solved.

The point is, nobody in their right mind could possibly believe what Horowitz wrote. And judging by the rest of his email, plus the two others he sent me in quick succession, Horowitz is every bit as loony as people keep telling me he is -- a real meshuggeneh, to borrow that fine Yiddish phrase.

[...]

he apparently can't even let a silly three-word comment from a minor-league lefty blogger go unanswered. I would have thought David would have more important things to do with his time: running his rat lines into the Middle East Studies Association, tracing the sinister links between Harry Belafonte and Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman -- above all, figuring out new and nasty ways to draw media attention to himself.

But apparently not. I guess even the slander business has its slow nights.