By Brian Carnell

Thursday, April 19, 2001

I was really enjoying the spectacle David Horowitz was creating around the country with his anti-slave reparations ad. But part of the fun was the knowledge that at some point Horowitz would blow it. Considering how accurately Horowitz himself had described the tendency for Republicans to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on any number of issues, Horowitz often seems like the self-appointed leader of the implosions himself -- perhaps his next book should be "Self-Destructive Generation."

Anyway, I still didn't expect that a couple of leftists at Princeton would be able to vanquish Horowitz. Like elsewhere, Horowitz submitted his advertisement to the Daily Princetonian. They accepted it and ran the ad. They also ran a ridiculously vituperative advertisement calling Horowitz a racist and all sorts of other bad names.

Horowitz responded that the Daily Princetonian's accusation of racism went beyond the pale and actually constitutes slander. As such, Horowitz said he would not pay the $1,007.50 for the advertisement unless the newspaper apologized for the editorial.

Give me a break. The Wall Street Journal had the best take on Horowitz's newfound sensitivity to outrageous attacks.

The Princetonian printed the ad, and its editors have every right to publish wrongheaded editorials if they want to. They even printed a letter from Horowitz responding to the editorial. Besides, Horowitz's plaint about "the atmosphere of intolerance and hate" sounds to us like a classic PC whimper. Quit whining and pay your debt, David.

I half expected to read Horowitz demanding that the editors at the paper undergo sensitivity training. In refusing to pay for the ad, Horowitz went from an interesting bit of tweaking college journalists to prove a point about intolerance toward an open exchange of ideas on campus, to simply being a lousy parody of his own bombastic style. And, of course, in the process killed the reparations ad as a national story which probably tickled his opponents to death, but how will Horowitz ever survive without all that media attention?

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