I won the silver in Keith Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World" contest Tuesday (being an honorable journalist, he of course massaged my words), and lefty blogs have been sending nasty comments my way for days.

All I have to say in response is: read this account by one of the survivors, an apparently able-bodied young man who did nothing but huddle under his desk and wait to die as the gunman methodically went around the room murdering his classmates. He reports this with no apparent shame, and seemingly has no idea that anything more could have and should have been done by him.

I’m sorry, but if we’re going to debate gun control, the police response, and the rest, a discussion of courage and manliness is hardly off-limits.

True, I've never had someone come into my classroom and start shooting. But I've never been married, and I'm pretty sure that doesn't disqualify me from saying that adultery and wife-beating are wrong, and criticizing those who commit adultery and beat their wives. If, in the future, I commit adultery or beat my wife, I would be guilty, condemned by the moral standard I am trying to follow, and should be ashamed. The same applies to courage and cowardice.

But this isn’t about me, or John Derbyshire, or Mark Steyn, or any of the others who have voiced these sentiments. It’s about the liberal need to find a conservative to hate at every opportunity. And since the murderer wasn’t conservative, the liberal “netroots” turns its ire toward those who think that less gun control might have lowered the body count, or that more courage and fighting back would have done that.

Conservatives believe that there is evil in this world, that it will intrude into our lives and that we should be ready and willing to fight against it. We also know that evil lurks in every human heart and that we will not always meet the moral standard we claim to believe in. On some points we will fail (mea culpa, mea maxima culpa), on some we shall succeed, and on some we will never be tested. But we will not abandon our belief in that standard, and will resist all attempts to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Courage is real and it is good; cowardice is real and it is bad. And that remains true, and I will believe it, even if I prove to be cowardly and not courageous when the time comes.