I appreciate my colleague James Fulford pointing out dissenting comments to the “fainting couch” column by my ex-colleague Rich Lowry the other day.

(Radio Derb, in its own December 13th remarks along the same lines as Lowry’s, referred to the couch more accurately as a chaise longue.)

It is, though, a shame that my 2012 defenestration by National Review has overshadowed the simultaneous dropping of Bob Weissberg from the magazine’s academic blog Phi Beta Cons—a more significant and more deplorable event, in my opinion.

As I have written in a book forthcoming from Washington Summit Publishers:

Prof. Weissberg’s offense was to have addressed the annual conference of American Renaissance. The editors of National Review confidently described his address in print as “noxious” even though the conference organizers did not issue DVDs of the event until some weeks after Weissberg’s dismissal and no transcript was available until I made one from Bob’s notes five months after that. In fact the Weissberg address argued against white nationalism, so that one of the following things must be true: either (a) the decision-makers at National Review were both clairvoyant and sympathetic to white nationalism, or else (b) they jumped reflexively at the crack of the leftist whip … and justified themselves by pretending to know what Weissberg had said.

That kind of dishonesty seems to me much more flagitious than the girlish squealing about “racism” that accompanied my own dismissal, and much more poisonous to the public conversation. At least the National Review editors seem actually to have read my offending piece.