When I peruse the comments to my posts on Pajamas Media, I am alternately amused, entertained, and enlightened. Some of PJM’s interlocutors have corrected errors I’d made, some have also brought illuminating information or frutiful alternative perspectives to bear on the issue at hand. For all those comments, I offer my thanks.

I harbor a different sort of gratitude for another kind of comment: the work of the intemperate crank. Some of those, too, are, in their way, illuminating, and few fail to provide at least some value as entertainment. Consider, to take just one example, this little bijou from “Drew,” commenting on my report that a delegation of Columbia professors was traveling to Tehran to “apologize” to President Ahmadinejad for the rude treatment he suffered at the hands of Lee Bollinger, the President of Columbia University. Quoth “Drew”:

boo hoo you bunch of fricking crybabies! So there’s some fringe whackos in Universities. They are going to Iran to apologize to a repressive regime. Most liberals know they are idiots as do most Americans.Let them make fools of themselves. But no! You babies have to resort to violent fantasies about eliminating all liberals because they don’t think like you do. Isn’t there some stupid book out calling Liberals fascists? Well, pot, kettle, black morons! Have you pajama wearing sacks of crap ever been on a college campus? Jeesh!

Excellent stuff, eh? I think–no, I am quite certain that it was the phrase “you pajama wearing sacks of crap” that endows this comment with its distinctive charm. What a combination of delicacy and rhetorical finesse! Leave to one side the distracting fact that my animadversion contains no fantasy about eliminating any, let alone all, liberals (though the commentator who suggested that the US government think twice about letting those professors back in the country had a proposal worth considering). Pointing that out would be to detract from the primal roar Drew was clearly pleased to emit. Cicero himself, dilating on the depredations of Catiline, was hardly more eloquent. It’s a pleasure to see public controversy and invective pursued at such an exalted level of mannerly articulation.