The unveiling of the Guardian Blog Comment is Free and the opening up of their opinion and leader pieces to comments has led to an interesting, if predictable phenomenon.
If your RSS reader features, as mine does, a fair smattering (all right, an exclusivity) of political blogs, you might be forgiven for thinking there is a veritable army out there of highly articulate, well informed commenters and bloggers who can demolish in a pithy sentence the whole Guardian world view. All of them lament the sad decline of said organ and terrabytes of bandwidth are swallowed up every day in deconstructing and exposing for the drivel it is the latest Maddy of the Sorrows, Polly, Naomi, Moonbat or whoever.
So, you would have thought, wouldn't you, you would have thought that this vast intellectual juggernaut would have bulldozed the pages of the Guardian's venture within days of its inauguration?
Funnily enough, it hasn't quite happened that way. Faced with the opportunity of taking the fight to the enemy, the Keyboard Commandos prefer to stay in their own havens to do their fighting. They drop their virtual Shock and Awe in the same way as they have always done, in safety, among friends.