Okay, sorry, I had to get something else done.

Now, as for this <a href=”http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000903812

” target=”_blank”> Greg Mitchell guy and his criticism of my USA Today piece, I’m going to take a little room to deal with him. Although it’s probably dumb for a syndicated columnist and would-be author to beat up on the editor of the leading trade rag. But, what the heck.

First, let me say I think E&P is a good publication which has been stacked up in piles around my parents’ house since before I was born.

Second, let me say I think Greg Mitchell is playing to type. He sounds almost exactly like the sort of smug liberal babyboomer I had in mind when I wrote the piece. But, then again, what do I know?

Well, let’s see. I know that Mitchell is a very, very liberal guy who has written a book essentially on why we shouldn’t have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima (his co-author was Robert Jay Lifton, a leftwing psychiatrist who helped popularize Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). In another book Mitchell laments the fact that Upton Sinclair didn’t win the governorship of California. And his book, Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady on Helen Gahagen Douglas and Richard Nixon, is precisely the sort of history you’d expect from someone who thinks it’s a shame Sinclair never became Governor.