THAT THE EVER-PLATITUDINOUS Jack E. White has called David Horowitz a "bigot" is, of course, stupid and unprofessional but hardly surprising to the weary Time readers who, like hikers confronted with a bog, must rapidly skirt White's flatulent prose whenever it appears.

But that Time's editors allowed the sophomoric libel to pass raises questions about the magazine's process of internal review: Was this simply a late-summer slip-up (in which case Time will promptly admit it), or is there a double standard for PC propagandists like White?

I respect the astute and rigorously unsentimental David Horowitz as one of America's most original and courageous political analysts. He has the true 1960s spirit audacious and irreverent, yet passionately engaged and committed to social change.

Although we are both columnists for Salon, I do not know Horowitz aside from when I was interviewed on his radio show in California eight years ago. But I regard him as an important contemporary thinker who is determined to shatter partisan stereotypes and to defy censorship wherever it occurs notably, in this case, in the area of discourse on race, which is befogged with sanctimony and hypocrisy.

As a scholar who regularly surveys archival material, I think that, a century from now, cultural historians will find David Horowitz's spiritual and political odyssey paradigmatic for our time.