You know that reporter whom President-Elect Obama cut off, kind of tut-tutting him, and telling him not to “waste” his question? Did he really later ask, “Do you or Duncan have [the] better jump shot?” (The reporter referred to Arne Duncan, Obama’s nominee for education secretary.) Oh, yes, he did.

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Do you get the feeling that media treatment of this president is going to be different from media treatment of President Bush? Also, did you think of the question that young woman asked Candidate Bill Clinton on MTV (I think it was) — about boxers and briefs?

I also thought of Farrah Fawcett, telling Alfre Woodard in a certain movie — oh, hang on, I shouldn’t “go there” . . .

At any rate, media treatment of President Obama looks like it’s going to be borderline amorous, and maybe you can even forget the border. Great.

Several readers have written to make the following point: “During the campaign, you were a hateful, racist monster if you spoke Barack Obama’s middle name. But now it’s cool?”

Yeah, now it’s pretty cool, or something. Look, I don’t write these rules (and I often don’t follow them, either . . .).

I saw something extraordinary from a wire service, here:

US President George W. Bush said in an interview Tuesday he was forced to sacrifice free market principles to save the economy from “collapse.”

“I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system,” Bush told CNN television, saying he had made the decision “to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse.”

Bush’s comments reflect an extraordinary departure from his longtime advocacy for an unfettered free market . . .

Forget the bizarre use of that preposition “for” (should be “of”): Bush has been for “an unfettered free market”? That’ll be news to libertarians, and to everyone else.

You sometimes have to wonder whether reporters are ignorant or malicious or what.

A college student writes asking what he should read — “I am in search of a canon of sorts,” he says. Well, that’s a very big question. But I would read books by Paul Johnson, David Pryce-Jones, Robert Conquest, Norman Podhoretz, Thomas Sowell — Bill Buckley, of course. It pretty much doesn’t matter what you pick up — what books in particular. Just pick them up, and soak them in.

Does it matter whether you read Johnson’s history of the Jews, or his history of Christianity, or his biography of Napoleon? Not really. Read them all, eventually — just begin. Does it matter whether you read Pryce-Jones on the Hungarian Revolution, or on Paris under the Nazis, or on the collapse of the Soviet Union — or even one of his novels? Not really. Just wade in.

A professor I admired said something memorable about a professor of his: that this old gent had given him “what I can only describe as a cast of mind.” That is something the above authors — distinct as they are, one from the others — might do for you.

Sometime before the election, I had a few items on being a Republican in the San Francisco Bay Area. I published some letters from readers. And those drew further responses, including the below, which I also published:

You think it’s bad in San Francisco? I live in Madrid, Spain, and people here assume that, just because I’m American, I’m for Obama. One night, at a dinner party I was hosting, a guest went into my study to use the telephone, and upon entering yelled out in horror as he saw my framed 1980 campaign poster of Ronald Reagan (“Let’s Make America Great Again”) on the wall. I ran in to see what was going on and he actually spit on it! I have given up talking politics here. Thank God for the Internet and podcasts.

Well, that letter drew many responses itself, which I have saved for you. Give you a couple?

A man said, “More than one person has wandered into my private study, chanced upon Nordlinger, Goldberg, Bork, Collier & Horowitz (Destructive Generation is a great freakin’ book), Steyn, Noonan, Will, etc., and emerged to say, ‘I didn’t know you were a Nazi.’ Nice, huh?”

Yup, very.

And speaking of spitting: A reader wrote to say that he was spat on while collecting signatures for the Civil Rights Initiative in California in 1996. Lovely.

And, hang on, there was at least one accusation of Nazism too: “Our volunteer coordinator — a registered Democrat, incidentally — was called a Nazi by one passerby. He politely corrected the person, explaining that Nazis were the people who killed his parents’ families during the Holocaust.”