Forgive this self-referential post, but if one can't be thus on a blog, where can one be? And there is a wider benefit, I hope, of this post, in bringing to your attention one of the great comic figures of our age.

If it's possible to find an apologist for a mass murderer amusing, then I have to admit to finding Neil Clark's website amusing, not least because he seems to have some sort of fixation on me.

Flattered as I am by the attention, I do not believe Clark actually exists. He is clearly a comic creation, given the extreme stupidity he evinces in most posts.

Leave aside his political views. First there was his now legendary conversation with a spam robot. Yesterday he showed (in a post denying that there had ever been aggression by Milosevic against Bosnia!) that he doesn't know how to deal with a link that wraps on to a second line. Today he fingers me for creeping to Gerard Baker:

Here he [Stephen Pollard] is today drooling over the newest member of the blogosphere.

'Gerard Baker, whose Times columns are essential reading, has joined the ranks of bloggers. His blog has only just started, but I can't imagine anyone more likely to produce a must-read blog, so I'd definitely recommend reading it.'

What he neglects to mention is that Baker is assistant editor of the Times, the paper which commissions much of Pollard's work. 'I can't imagine anyone more likely to produce a must-read blog' Pollard says. How about the editor of The Times?

Yes, indeed, it's really well hidden that Baker is an Assistant Editor of The Times. I mean how could anyone tell, given that the blog's url is http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/baker/, that it has a huge banner saying Times OnLine and that, at the very top, his biography says: Gerard Baker is United States Editor and an Assistant Editor of The Times. It's a closely guarded secret, I'm sure you'll agree.

It gets better. In response to a commenters' point that he is being hypocritical, since he lavishes praise on Seumas Milne, the comment editor of the Guardian, Clark replies:

Seumas Milne is one of the finest radical journalists in the country and the fact that he occasionally commissions me has nothing to do with that opinion. Honest!
I can also assure you I am not Stephen Pollard! If I were, I wouldn't be sitting here writing this, but would be in the waiting room of the nearest face surgeon... Have you seen his mug?

Devastated as I am by his put down, which clearly renders all my opinions invalid, I can only marvel at a man who thinks it is not arse-licking of him to praise the man who directly commissions his own pieces, but it is arse-licking of me to praise a journalist I have never met and who has no involvement in commissioning pieces for a paper for which I write.

(As it happens, I don't think there's anything wrong with Clark praising Milne - they're two of a kind, and why shouldn't he praise him?)

Then again, what else can one expect than an inversion of reality from an apologist for Milosevic?