The American Prospect Can't Stand the Heat and Wants Everybody Else to Get Out of the Kitchen:

After publishing Garance Franke-Ruta's smear of me, The American Prospect is now threatening legal action against anybody who "reproduces" an old article accusing her of racism. You've really got to read this to believe their hypocrisy.

At the time I wrote,

"I must confess that my eyes glazed over while reading about Franke-Ruta's and The American Prospect's alleged high crimes and insensitivities against Latinos. What I saw of it before nodding off seemed no more persuasive than what she wrote about me.

On the other hand, as Across Difficult Country asks, why should the benefit of the doubt be extended to Franke-Ruta if she won't extend it to me? Good question. It's often those who live in the glassiest houses who are most inclined to throw stones to distract from the fragility of their own abodes.

Well, it being the Christmas season, I shall give Franke-Ruta the benefit of the doubt anyway.

The Winds of Change blog is flabbergasted by the whole deal.

Speaking of glass houses,, although Franke-Ruta wrote some obnoxious and absurd things about me (my response is at http://www.iSteve.com/04DecA.htm#smear ), she shouldn't be silenced for her own political incorrectness.

In further defense of Franke-Ruta, let me point out that she is sometimes quite a bit more honest than most liberals about issues like race and crime. For example, in a 2002 review of Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine," she attacked the movie for roughly the same reason I did in my "Baby Gap" article ( http://www.amconmag.com/2004_12_20/cover.html ).

She wrote:

http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2002/11/franke-ruta-g-11-22.html

"My beef with Moore is this: He has managed to make a movie about gun violence in America -- where 53 percent of the gun murder victims are black -- without interviewing a single black victim of gun violence, or even asking black community leaders, who have spent decades successfully trying to combat the problem, for their insights. Instead, to explore a phenomenon that has devastated inner cities and is a horror primarily in urban areas -- nearly 70 percent of gun murders take place in cities, according to U.S. Deaprtment of Justice statistics -- Moore has made a movie that takes as its focal point the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo., a type of crime (five or more victims) that represented one-tenth of 1 percent of murders that year and that occurred in a white, prosperous, suburban community...

"Young black men ages 14-24 make up only 1 percent of the U.S. population but around 15 percent of the murder victims. Nor are Moore's suburban white gun owners, no matter how ridiculous their fears, the reason that black Americans were six times more likely to be murdered than whites in 1999, and seven times more likely to commit homicides."

Personally, I think The American Prospect could use more of the kind of honesty Franke-Ruta is showing in the two paragraphs I quoted above.

What she appeared to be doing by attacking me in such a frenetic and irrational manner is the old trick that when the wolves of political correctness are closing in on the sleigh, throw somebody even more politically incorrect to the wolves to distract them. "When they came for Steve Sailer, I led them to him," etcetera etcetera

Obviously, I don't appreciate her ploy, but I certainly don't think it's in American political discourse's best interest for her to be devoured by the politically correct either.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer