Accountability is not censorship

IN HIS Oct. 18 column (`"Censoring ideas"), Jeff Jacoby recounted a handful of anecdotes wherein people said mean things to conservatives. We're told this amounts to a war on free speech -- no doubt waged on the same battlefield as the war on Christmas.

Jacoby cherry-picks this quote from me: ``. . . we should have war crimes trials for these bastards -- some sort of climate Nuremberg." In context it's clear that, contrary to Jacoby's claim, I'm not talking about garden-variety global warming skeptics.

The bastards in question are a network of industry operatives, for-hire scientists, and think-tank shills paid to confuse the public. They obscured the health effects of tobacco for decades -- ``our product is doubt," as the infamous tobacco company memo put it -- and now they're doing the same thing on global warming. Many of the very same institutions and individuals are involved.

I never ``recanted" my comment. I merely acknowledged that the Nuremberg analogy was stupid. (A helpful tip to all you polemicists at home: Leave the Nazis out of it!) I don't want state-sponsored trials, I just want transparency.

It isn't about suppressing their speech. It's about holding them accountable for it.

DAVID ROBERTS Grist Magazine
Seattle