Some of my more conservatively-inclined readers may enjoy tearing a new one in this hapless Ole Miss undergraduate, who I’m sure thinks he’s far more clever than he actually is. A free sample:

The anti-Christ is dead. That was my initial reaction Saturday afternoon at a Cincinnati hotel bar to the news of former President Ronald Reagan’s death. I know it’s an insensitive sort of statement to the news of a death of someone grandly touted as one of America’s “greatest presidents.” Frankly, though, he is one of the worst presidents we’ve had.

Oh, don’t worry, it gets better from there. I think the only thing he forgot to complain about was Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers.

Needless to say, Mr. Neimeyer’s Wednesday column, which referred to the recently deceased Ronald Reagan as “the anti-Christ,” attracted a rather colorful exchange on the Letters page of the Daily Mississippian.

Thursday:

• Sgt. Chris Hankins.
• Prof. William F. Shugart II (yes, that William F. Shugart II).

Friday:

• Monty Horne.
• Steve Phillips.
• Kenneth Jones (who somehow manages to work in a reference to Matthew Shepard, thereby invoking what has to be the 21st century corollary to Godwin’s Law).
• Prof. David Sansing.

For what it’s worth, I was never a huge Reagan fan—I was more of a Thatcherite in my youth, albeit perhaps a bit more of a “wet” Tory than she was. But in a world with Kim Jong-Il, Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe, and the entire leadership of the Chinese Communist Party still around, I think one can find much better candidates for the title “anti-Christ.”

I also think Dr. Shugart might have more properly addressed his remarks to Mr. Neimeyer for having written such ignorant drivel, rather than complaining that the paper failed to exercise proper editorial judgment—although the idea expressed by Mr. Jones that Dr. Shugart’s rather brief letter constitutes a “chill” on free speech only serves to highlight the widespread misconception among undergraduates that the right to hold an opinion somehow includes the non-existent “right” to have that opinion go unchallenged if articulated in public, no matter how ill-informed or poorly-argued it is.