They just cannot take a joke. From a post on Accordion Guy's blog, I found a post complaining about the portrayal of President Bush on Toronto billboards for an audiobook service. She made the mistake of claiming that Bush had received his MBA from Yale (in actuality, he received an undergraduate degree from Yale and his MBA from Harvard Business School). Without malice, I corrected her in a comment, throwing in a jab at Yale for good measure.[1]
Now, I purposefully left out any mention of HBS in order to ensure that my comment was taken as an insult toward Yale. Unfortunately, I had failed to take into consideration that I was conversing with Canadians, who have completely different frames of reference. As a result, the author of the original post suggested that I had a degree from York (which I gather is some second-rate Canadian educational institution, like their version of Yale[2]), while I got a response asking me how many Harvard degress I had.
When I replied, I caused a long screed about the Ivy League and the value of a diploma:
Or was the crack about a Yale undergraduate degree just a bit of Ivy League rivalry? I'd hate to think it was a knee-jerk crack at a president who rubs you the wrong way, contradicting everything you personally know about high-priced degrees.
This electronic dialogue with Rick (the commenter) and Kathy (the author of the original post) also confirms something I would like to think is not true about the Right - that they will get intensely confrontational when you make fun of them or their leaders, even if it is in jest.
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[1] It is, of course, the solemn duty of all Harvard students and alumni to cast discredit on that second-rate institution in New Haven whenever they can. The rivalry between the two schools is like Auburn-Alabama - but with bad football.
[2] Zing!