Barry and Me

No.  Not that one.  This one:

There is, at the moment, a feeding frenzy going on at at least one predominantly atheist/agnostic ex-Mormon message board -- ten threads thus far, totaling roughly forty pages -- about my viciousness, nastiness, brutality, lack of ethics, and etc., and I know on the basis of reliable reports that the same matter is also being "discussed" elsewhere.

I hope it won't surprise anybody that I don't plead guilty to the charges.

It reminds me, though, of a story about Senator Barry Goldwater, just after he lost the 1964 American presidential election.

He had been so busy campaigning that he had fallen behind in his newspaper reading.  Now that he was getting a chance to catch up, though, he was realizing how monolithically hostile to him the coverage in the mainstream media -- essentially the only media in existence back then -- had been.

Senator Goldwater had a salty tongue, and, at his first post-election press conference, he commented to the assembled journalists that he very much appreciated the time he now had to catch up on his newspaper reading, because, he remarked, he hadn't realized before "what a $%&-d@#$ed son of a b&#$% I am."