You know your enemies are getting desperate when they start attacking … your name. Glenn Reynolds snarks:
“Dennis Raimondo? It doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?”
One could go on in this vein: would you rather read a book by Ayn Rand — or by Alice Rosenbaum? Charles Lutwidge Dodgson — or “Lewis Carroll”? I see nothing wrong with the name Eric Blair, but for reasons of his own the man we know now as George Orwell shed his old name and assumed a new, more adult, more authentic identity. What of it?
To attack a writer because he has a pen-name is akin to accusing him of all sorts of other non-crimes: yes, writers like to change their names. They also like spending inordinate amounts of time alone, sitting at a desk. Odd, but true. So shoot me.
UPDATE: Following the link so helpfully provided by the Insta-snarker, we arrive at one Tim Blair’s blog, where we’re breathlessly informed: “Justin Raimondo is over 50”!
What is this — Logan’s Run?
Just because I don’t write like the young fogeys of today, and I look a decade younger than I actually am — is this really a crime? In Blairworld — where, I’m peremptorily informed, my “real name is Dennis” — the grim answer is apparently yes.
Every time these people open their mouths, they reveal their inner rot, a kind of moral halitosis. Reynolds takes on the Name Question, linking to Blair who takes up the Age Question, who points to Stephen Schwartz’s 3,000 word screed calling me a faggot and a “failed l’homme fatale”!