David Horowitz just wants some attention

My goodness, the man sure is a caricature of himself.

When his politics changed, liberal intellectuals shunned him. "For 20 years, when I have written books on the left, the left has ignored me," he says. "It's just what Stalin did to Trotsky."

Prone to hyperbole, Mr. Horowitz does not mean to suggest that leftist professors are trying to kill him. He simply believes he has been blacklisted by academe. Although he says he was a "leading figure in the New Left," professors do not assign his books, nor do they refer to his work in the hundreds of courses taught on the 1960s, he says. They don't invite him to speak in those courses, either.

To gain the recognition he believed he deserved, Mr. Horowitz established the center, which features conservative programs such as catered lunches with right-leaning luminaries who discuss their latest books. "I don't have a platform in The New York Times," he says.

If he were liberal, he contends, he could be an editor at the Times or a department chairman at Harvard University. And his life story would have already been told on the big screen. Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, his autobiography, has been out for eight years. "Someone would have made a film out of it if I was a leftist," he says bitterly.

He claims he would make more money as a liberal, too, "at least three times," what he earns now. According to the center's most recent available tax form, Mr. Horowitz received an annual salary of $310,167 in 2003. He declines to give his current income, but in addition to his salary, Mr. Horowitz receives about $5,000 for each of the 30 to 40 campus speeches he gives each year.

Perhaps I'm just being lazy, but that really defies comment, doesn't it?