Don't Give Michael Crichton Any Guff!

The pen of a global warming denying author is a mighty weapon. It can
turn you from a centrist columnist into a child molesting tool of big
pharma.

New Republic's Michael Crowley -- who's views are so extreme that he also has a monthly column in Reader's Digest
-- found out the hard way that global warming deniers don't have to
answer arguments. They can just smear opponents in the guise of fiction.

After calling Crichton out in a cover story for New Republic (subscription required), Crowley found his arguments answered in an unexpected way.

Crichton's new book, Next, features a character named 'Mick Crowley,' who's not a very nice man.

Excerpt from Next, courtesy of TPMMuckraker:

Alex
Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a
rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu.
The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based
political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he
experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son,
still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir
to a pharmaceutical fortune. ...

It turned out Crowley's taste
in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]--as was
his custom--tried the case vigorously in the press months before the
trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child's mother as
"fantasizing feminist fundamentalists" who had made up the whole thing
from "their sick, twisted imaginations." This, despite a
well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley's penis was
small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler's
rectum.)

Not surprisingly, Crowley's not taking that lying down. In a post on NR's website, Crowley writes:

The
next page contains fleeting references to Crowley as a "weasel" and a
"dickhead," and, later, "that political reporter who likes little
boys." But that's it--Crowley comes and goes without affecting the
plot. He is not a character so much as a voodoo doll. Knowing that
Crichton had used prior books to attack very real-seeming people, I was
suspicious. Who was this Mick Crowley? A Google search turned up an
Irish Workers Party politician in Knocknaheeny, Ireland. But Crowley's
tireless advocacy for County Cork's disabled seemed to make him an
unlikely target of Crichton's ire. And that's when it dawned on me: I
happen to be a Washington political journalist. And, yes, I did attend
Yale University. And, come to think of it, I had recently written a
critical 3,700-word cover story about Crichton. In lieu of a letter to
the editor, Crichton had fictionalized me as a child rapist. And,
perhaps worse, falsely branded me a pharmaceutical-industry profiteer.

It's a pretty cowardly way for Crichton to hit back. Take a page from Hemingway -- get loaded and take it like a man.