The Emmett Till smear

In response to my much-noted American Spectator column of yesterday, some obnoxious troll commenter asserted that I had once wrote a column "praising the lynching of Emmet Till." For the record, I never wrote any such column.

At the time that this libelous accusation first emerged on the Internet, I was employed as an assistant national editor at The Washington Times. My employers ordered me not to respond to this libel, and I was compelled to remain silent under penalty of being fired if I dared defend my good name. Duty and loyalty required me to obey, but when I resigned from The Washington Times in January 2008, no one even bothered to say "don't let the door hit you on the way out."

C'est la vie! C'est l'amour! C'est la guerre!

Having acquired a bad reputation in such a manner, I am loath to deny anything unnecessarily. Being notorious is not the same as being famous, but it's better than being anonymous. So if it helps my career to be thought a vile "white supremacist" hatemonger (like the notorious Walter Williams), then I'll laugh all the way to the bank.

I write for money, and if someone wants to pay me enough to explain how a fundamentally unserious person, a "tedious nothing" like myself, could ever acquire such a monstrous notoriety, please make an offer. Don't lowball me, because it's a very long story and the value of the continued mystery is not neglible.

Let the mystified think on this: Saturday evening, I was introduced to the old college boyfriend of a beauty whom I'd introduced to her most recent boyfriend. The college beau's eyes were burning with rage, his upper lip glistened with perspiration, and when I shook his hand, it was cold, damp and unsteady. With jocular courtesy and good cheer I greeted as an old friend this fellow whom I'd never met before and who, for all I knew, was even then contemplating whether to pull out a .32 semi-auto and blast me into oblivion.

And he never saw me flinch, not once.