I want to thank all of the bloggers who like my columns. Kathryn posted this earlier, but apparently I’m the second-favorite columnist among rightwing bloggers. Mark Steyn — who I will obviously have eliminated by the end of the week — came in first. Assuming I’m reading the numbers correctly, what’s interesting and oddly gratifying is that while I’m not too many bloggers’ favorite columnist I’m one of the favorites of a great many bloggers. In a sense you could say that makes my column sort of a vanilla product on the web. Few people claim vanilla is their favorite flavor, but even fewer people dislike vanilla. I choose to read this not as a statment that people think I’m bland but that there’s a flattering consensus about my writing out there (albeit among the forces of villainy and cruelty according to the left). It’s particularly nice to hear because hate mail in the last six months has been running high and if you use the blog search engines — technorati, blogpulse etc — to guage opinion about yours truly, you would have to conclude bloggers think I’m a biggoted moron. So, thanks folks. I’ll buy you a few beers at Mark Steyn’s Irish wake.