I’ve generally appreciated what Josh Trevino has to say over the years so I don’t quite know what to make of this fit he pitches on his blog.

Basically, here’s the short version — North Carolina’s BB&T is one of the more successful banks in the country, having emerged from the banking crisis in much better shape than the competition. The CEO of BB&T through the end of 2008 was John Allison, who also happens to be a major Ayn Rand devotee. I interviewed Allison for NRO about his decision making as a banker and BB&T’s response to the current crisis, and obviously Rand was a major topic of conversation.

Now Rand is an awfully polarizing figure, so I didn’t expect everyone to blithely accept Allison’s perspective. That Trevino would pull out a bunch of stock objections to Rand’s objectivist philosophy rattling around the mental attic is perfectly understandable. What I don’t understand is why he would attach said objections to me. Trevino actually uses the headline, “Hemingway is anti-life, anti-mind, anti-reality.” You can read my piece and make up your own mind, but I think the far more accurate headline here would be “Trevino is Over-Dramatic.”

As the author of the piece, somehow I don’t recall writing about how I personally agree with Rand’s moral philosophy. But I’ve also never run a bank that has a $143 billion in assets — let alone one that, as Trevino himself observes, has out performed Bank of America, USBancorp, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Suntrust during a major banking crisis. What moral reasoning I use to make my financial decisions isn’t of much interest to anyone, so I kept the focus on Allison.

If Trevino wants to know what I actually think — well, I actually have some pretty serious issues with Rand’s moral reasoning. In retrospect, writing “aspects of Rand’s philosophy might legitimately be called controversial” may elide over enough objections as to seem dissmissive. But that was not my goal. If I ask BB&T’s CEO about how the bank made their decisions and if Trevino doesn’t like his answers, that’s fine. But if you buy into Trevino’s objections, what was I supposed to do? Write a piece about how mystifying it is that the bank has done so well despite their CEO’s flawed moral reasoning? Given the bank’s performance, I imagine far more people are interested in what Allison says informed his managerial decisions than those who are interested in arguments about why Rand is pernicious.

Trevino is free, nay, encouraged to object here. There’s a time and a place for different journalistic approaches, and I understand Trevino wishes I were tougher on Allison because he objects to what Allison said. But my vocational obligations as a reporter are certainly different than Trevino’s as a blogger. Trevino’s passing judgment on me for making the perfectly respectable decision to let Allison speak for himself seems unwarranted. If that were a crime, every journalist between D.C. and Tijuana would be rotting in jail.

Now I realize it’s not quite as simple as saying that I had my reporter cap on. As for any confusion about what my perspective is as it relates to Allison’s — do I think that Rand’s defenses of capitalism are illuminating to some degree, not to mention largely preferable to whatever Barney Frank is smoking? Sure, I do write for National Review after all. But I don’t think it should have been hard to read the piece and disagree with aspects of what Allison said without shooting the messenger.

UPDATE — Trevino responds:

Hemingway responds, and I must clarify one point: he is certainly not, to my mind, “anti-life, anti-mind, anti-reality,” as the post title states. The phrase — now in quotes — is a quote from here, which I note in the text above. Nonetheless, as multiple readers have missed that, it deserves restating. Any offense caused is my error.

There’s no way I would have understood the context of the headline without going deep into Trevino’s links (and I still haven’t read the Rothbard essay in question), but I appreciate Trevino is now being clear about the fact he wasn’t trying to be as personal as the headline suggests. I had always figured him as more decent than that and am relieved to see that’s the case.