Don’t Call Us Ishmael; Ishmael Calls Us

As the routine reader of this humble “weblog” knows, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” have a regular gig as Sunday essayists for Wizbang. Since Wizbang is quite a popular e-destination, this allows us the delightful opportunity to compose essays read by more than three people.

But this is not all it offers. As we found out recently, Wizbang also numbers among its readers a few eminences. (Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that it’s picked up by Google News?) Accordingly, when we excoriate some public intellectual or other, he’s liable to write a response.

To this end, the former CIA analyst turned loony conspiracy theorist Michael Scheuer deigned to comment on our Wizbang “post” that denigrated his feculent tome Imperial Hubris, Honestly, dear reader, we were rather surprised by this. After all, we offered evidence of Mr. Scheuer’s creepy crush on Osama bin Laden, and maintained that he was dumber than a pinecone.

This is not, we would have thought, the kind of criticism that positively begs for a rebuttal. But apparently Mr. Scheuer’s got a bit of free time. Maybe he’s on vacation from blaming Israel for all the world’s sins.

Nor is Mr. Scheuer the only semi-famous loon who has seen fit to respond to us. A few weeks prior to our discussion of Imperial Hubris, we took aim at an article by Ishmael Reed.

Ishmael Reed, for those of you pleasantly unaware of this fellow, is an angry black radical author who shares Don King’s good looks, but none of his good sense. Which, we might add, is saying something.

In response to our drubbing, Ishmael Reed sent us a personal missive with the following message:

you guys are about as accurate as fox news. ishmael reed

Huh. Apparently, Mr. Reed is stealing a page from bell hook’s book. Or is that e.e. cummings' book?

Anyway, we found it an uninspired retort. After all, we had just mercilessly criticized his article. If memory serves—and, like McDonalds, memory serves a lot—we ridiculed his overwrought arguments, his manifest distortions, and his sloppy writing. We concluded by suggesting that “Mr. Reed ought to drop the giant chip on his shoulder and replace it with a spell-checker.”

Surely that is worth more than a shopworn mention of Fox News? And, gee: Now we know that Ishmael’s capitalization skills are a bit shaky.