Readers are telling me I’m too darn nice. Well, that is a thing I hear a lot; but my gentle handling of Mrs Obama’s thesis is colored by the facts that (a) she’s a candidate’s wife, so that what she thinks is, ah, “peripheral” to real campaign issues; and (b) in my senior year at college, I was a socialist with dreams of raising the red flag over the ruins of Buckingham Palace.

Here’s a representative reader:

Derb — Here, as an ex-pat, you might not quite have your pulse on the American body politic, especially as it throbs out here in flyover country.
Middle America loathes and despises a quota queen. And a quota queen who cops an attitude like this? People get so furious they start looking for broken beer bottles and rocks and two-by-fours.
Lucianne Goldberg deletes her threads about 72 hours after they’re initiated, so this will be gone by Monday, but I have never seen the level of vitriol at her site that this story provoked.
Little Green Footballs is at almost 900 replies.
(And keep in mind that these are people who are posting on a Friday night, after the story was dumped so that the MSM would have an excuse to ignore it.)
Michelle Obama has touched a nerve here that cuts straight to the bone [sic—JD].
It’s like when Dukakis hemmed and hawed in 1988 after Bernard Shaw asked him whether he would support the death penalty for a man who had raped and murdered Mrs. Dukakis. It lays bare the character of these people for all to see.
A thousand policy papers and one hundred million dollars’ worth of cheerful, sunny, positive television ads can’t do for John McCain (& the GOP) what this one thesis does.

Well, I would certainly urge everybody to lay down the two-by-fours — this is only politics, for heaven’s sake. And for all the black-separationist (or, in Michelle-speak, “sep/plur”) boilerplate in the thesis, the sentiments aren’t as bad as I surmised in my Al Gore column last week. And I still think the Obama people were smart to get it out of the way. I doubt it’s bad enough to do the senator much lasting harm. He’s still in line to be one of Al’s top cabinet picks, if not veep …

Meanwhile, does anyone think the entry of Ralph Nader will make any difference to Al’s chances? Isn’t the guy about a hundred years old? I was just reading some back issues of National Lampoon from the early 1970s: they were making fun of Ralph way back then. I guess there are a few creaking hippies in Supp-Hose up in the hills of Vermont who will turn out for him, but who else? O’Bama out-lefts him, Al out-greens him, and Hillary out-scolds him. Go home, Ralph. Take a cab — a biofueled one, of course.