YES, BUT HE DIDN'T SAY, "EEEEUUUUUW, MUSLIM DICTATOR COOTIES!" SO IT DOESN'T COUNT

Obsessed? I'll say the Internet right is obsessed. A post at Power Line today is titled "Columbia's Disgrace, Part 7." Hugh Hewitt titled a post "Columbia's Complete Disgrace" (presumably to save himself the trouble of having to break the disgrace into multiple parts, which might require him to take off his shoes to count past five).

Meanwhile, at the event that the entire Internet right has loudly condemned before it ever took place, here's what the president of Columbia actually said to Ahmadinejad:

"Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator," Bollinger said, to loud applause.

He said Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust might fool the illiterate and ignorant.

"When you come to a place like this it makes you simply ridiculous," Bollinger said. "The truth is that the Holocaust is the most documented event in human history."

Wow -- what a coddler of dictators that Lee Bollinger is.

And after that, Bollinger coddled him even more:

[Ahmadinejad] did not address Bollinger's accusations directly, instead launching into a long religious discursion laced with quotes with the Quran before turning to criticism of the Bush administration and past American governments, from warrantless wiretapping to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated," Bollinger told Ahmadinejad about the leader's Holocaust denial. "Will you cease this outrage?"

Kissing up -- it's nothing but kissing up. I'm just disgusted.

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UPDATE: Are you really surprised at what Bollinger said, righties? Well, maybe you should have paid attention to Lee Bollinger's actual words last week:

In order to have such a University-wide forum, we have insisted that a number of conditions be met, first and foremost that President Ahmadinejad agree to divide his time evenly between delivering remarks and responding to audience questions. I also wanted to be sure the Iranians understood that I would myself introduce the event with a series of sharp challenges to the President on issues including:

· the Iranian President's denial of the Holocaust;
· his public call for the destruction of the state of Israel;
· his reported support for international terrorism that targets innocent civilians and American troops;
· Iran's pursuit of nuclear ambitions in opposition to international sanction;
· his government's widely documented suppression of civil society and particularly of women's rights; and
· his government's imprisoning of journalists and scholars, including one of Columbia's own alumni, Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh.

Bollinger told us he was going to be critical of Ahmadinejad. That statement was widely disseminated in a Power Line post -- but the post, bizarrely, was titled "Columbia's Disgrace." There's right-wing logic for you: The righties decided Bollinger was an evil appeaser, and when the supporting evidence flatly contradicted their thesis, it was just reproduced, then ignored as if it wasn't even there. It was in plain sight, but to right-wing crazies, it was invisible. Power Line's bloggers and Power Line's readers saw Bollinger's plain words promising a challenge to Ahmadinejad -- and they just ignored them, because their desperate need to hate a fellow (presumably liberal) American was too great.