Franklin Foer takes a shot at me over at The Plank, quoting a nasty piece written about me by Hanna Rosin almost a decade ago that made note of some embarrassingly unfunny stuff I had published in a humor column in the late 1980s.

Foer’s item reminded me of something. When Hanna Rosin came to interview me for that piece all the way back in 1997, she informed me that I had traumatized “Frankie” Foer when I had been introduced to him in a Washington elevator by Rosin’s husband. After shaking his hand, I asked Foer if he might, to my face, justify the charge he had issued in a piece for Slate that the Weekly Standard (of which I was then deputy editor) had a “Stalinist back of the book.”

I said that criticizing the playwright Wendy Wasserstein, which we at the Standard had done, may have displeased Foer’s boss Michael Kinsley, a friend of Wasserstein’s –but that didn’t exactly justify comparison to the mass murderer of as many as 60 million Russians.Foer stammered and turned green.

Ah, Frankie, that confrontational exchange took place in 1995. Don’t you think it’s time you let it go? Come on, Frankie. (Hat tip: I wish I could quit you but it’s just too easy to make fun of you.)