Not them, us.  This is the issue I’m going to ponder, right up front, during the cold nights of exile.

The majority of the comment section to a piece I wrote, and which was linked to by Instapundit last week, was so outrageous, insulting and over the top — as well as mainly utterly non-responsive to what I wrote — that I did something I never did before and just shut down comments.  I don’t mean people disagreed with me.  I mean that most of them were nuts,  or at best seriously misconstrued what I said and savaged me for it.  Others invented quotes by me or by Obama, and one accused me of “pandering” — pandering?  What’s the idea, that I think of myself as in line for the ambassadorship to Williamsburg?

The know-nothing Right is out there, reading, and it’s fair to say that while it’s usually been easy to link to Daily Kos and find stuff for the Left to be very embarrassed about, we have more than our share of dingbats, loonies and the tinfoil-hatted too.  (In fact I think we are the better off, for we are in fact embarrassed about it.)

I wouldn’t have even bothered to mention it… save for the fact that Glenn couldn’t resist sharing one of his own specimens of a the exact same species just now, too.

Glenn Reynolds and I are seldom mentioned in the same breath, but one thing you can say is that we are not ideological twins.  But we’re both pond scum to a certain sort of blog reader, and for the same reason:  We try, as many do, to focus opposition on legitimate issues, not demonization.

For some people that is just not enough.  What is to be done?