I guess all of us here on The Corner are connoisseurs of hate mail at this

point. I have long since ceased to bother about it. There is only one

sub-category of hate mail that excites any emotion in me at all nowadays,

and that is the feeble hate mail. I mean, sending hate mail to bloggers

is like any other human activity: it can be done well, or badly. Some

hate-mailers are just pathetically hopeless at what they are trying to do,

and these people arouse in me an odd mixture of scorn and pity. They are,

in fact, the only hate-mailers I respond to. I guess it’s the schoolmaster

in me — I want to help them to do better.

I had some exchanges with one fellow who took strong exception to my Space

Shuttle piece. “It must really suck being you,” he asserted. Now, this is

pretty lame on a first occurrence; but in our subsequent exchanges he just

couldn’t think of any way to improve on it. “Like I said, it must really

suck being you,” he’d close. It dawned on me at last that the guy thinks

this is the most crushing, most devastating put-down that has yet been

devised from the English language. I weep for these people.