Re my last post on the Democrats’ Seventh Grade healthcare spokesman, I’ve had a ton of e-mails along the lines of the following:

Good to see Steyn backpedaling a bit on his earlier comments about the Frost case. Perhaps in the future he’ll take a closer look at the facts of a case before making a lot of misleading statements about it. I understand that he’s just a humor writer, not someone who knows anything about the issues at hand, but then it’d be appropriate for him to confine himself to jokes and avoid making substantive comments.

Actually, I’m not backpedaling. I stand by everything I said: A family with a 3,000-square-foot home, commercial property, private schools and moneyed grandparents are not “poor” or “needy” people who should expect to be on the government dole, and to accept that they are is to redefine the relationship between the state and the citizen in deeply damaging ways. Middle-class entitlements are one of the principal causes of Europe’s terminal enervation. As another reader pointed out, that’s why left-wing politicians are so resistant to means-testing – or even, as the Frost case illustrates, the most rudimentary consideration of a family’s true financial situation. Because, for the left, it’s not about addressing need or providing a “safety net” but about the annexation by government of key areas of life.

On the other hand, the above letter was more “substantive” than this one (also very typical), reprinted in its entirety:

You are a f—in’ moron. and probably queer too!

Well, everyone knows we’re all closeted gays on the right but I’m a principled closeted gay. I only solicit casual sex in private-sector men’s rooms.