Pseudonymous CBC blogger Ouimet writes to Denis McGrath (q.v.): “I get uncomfortable when commenters viciously attack other commenters, but I know Joe and Allan can take it.”
Actually, no, I really can’t. I am quite sure nobody I know is as hurt and damaged by intentionally derogatory blog comments as I am. (I read everything written about me and tend to remember it all.) However, as we are all sinners who have fallen short of the glory of G-d, I do occasionally dish it out, as in a comment on that same post that addressed McGrath as “you fat fuck.”
The extended context was McGrath’s unwillingness even to insult me by name, and my retort that I had just finished writing to Kirstine Layfield insisting that Intelligence stay on the air and that I had programmed my TiVo to record his new opus, À travers le fleuve vers Motor-City, which I expected to be as atrocious as Rent-a-Goalie. Calling him a fat fuck was, in some respects, merely a rhetorical flourish, in other respects gratuitous, in further respects objective news reporting.
I then told him to get lost to his “sacred” fucking “room.”