I may as well admit that I can recall not only Ronald Reagan but Jackie Gleason. “The Miami Beach audience,” Gleason would say at the end of each of his TV show, which he taped in Florida, “is the greatest audience in the world!”

Which is just the way I’ve come to feel about the audience that reads the Corner. I’ve only been posting for a few days now, but I’ve already received a couple of hundred emails, only three of which have proven abusive and only two of which have attempted to sell me something. The remaining 98 percent have proven friendly, well-written, useful (special thanks to the 30 or so readers who advised me on comic books for my eight-year old, who at this very moment is reading “Essential Spiderman,” one of your recommendations) and, very often, extremely intelligent. In response to my puzzlement over Tony Blair’s eagerness to cozy up to Europe, for example, a reader has just slapped me around a little, rightly reminding me that the British left lives on:

[The European constitution would be] a dream come true for British left-wingers;
with a single stroke of a pen, the EU constitution would implement virtually their entire agenda on British soil. Britain’s leftists would gain powerful allies from the Left on the
Continent (where socialism and other left-wing ideologies are much stronger
politically). And there won’t be a damn thing that Britain’s conservatives
could do about it, short of a full-blown revolution, once that constitution is
adopted.
So, if you’re a leftist, it makes perfect sense. I think we’ve lost sight of
Tony Blair’s true ideology in all the Iraqi war hubbub. Blair’s support for
the Iraq war was an aberration; his true heart lies with the Continent’s Left.”

Readers like that keep this poor boy right where he ought to be, which is on his toes.