Seipp saga continues

Michael Fumento shoots back in an NRO column of his own, the link for which I found through Seipp's blog:

I suppose this is as good a place as any to note that while I have no personal animosity against Michael Fumento, he is understandably very angry with me, and yesterday responded to my "Good Riddance, Michael Fumento" post and National Review column with an NRO commentary of his own called "Seipp's Snipe." (For which I paid him twenty bucks, some newly collectible WB totebags I had lying around and a few shares of Monsanto. Kidding!)

Fumento:

Read the Business Week piece. It takes three whole minutes. Nowhere does it say I took money for any column or story. It says I solicited a grant from Monsanto for a biotechnology book I was working on. (It doesn't say, but should, that such solicitations from philanthropies and corporations are the general rule for writers of policy books.) It says my think-tank employer accepted the grant and paid me a salary while I worked on the book.

Using a bizarre set of rules that writer Eamon Javers made up on the spot, applied specifically to my circumstances, and then made retroactive, Javers decided — bizarre though it sound — that a book grant received in 1999 should be disclosed in columns written in 2006 — and presumably forever.

He hung his grease-lined hat totally on the issue of disclosure. Nowhere did he claim I took pay for columns, though I don't doubt his headline was meant to imply it and that he hoped many readers would stop reading at that point.

Seipp also uses my firing from Scripps Howard as evidence of guilt, but made no inquiry into the circumstances — that Scripps acted solely upon receiving a phone call from Javers. I wasn't even consulted. That's not evidence of my guilt, but of their cowardice.

He then argues that there's a liberal conspiracy to unfairly take down conservative pundits. Well, maybe. I'm not big on conspiracy theories, though. Anway, this has been your Inside Conservative Journalism report for the day.