You don't know this because you don't edit a newspaper opinion page, but there really is a vast right-wing conspiracy. I know it's there because it keeps sending me spam e-mails.

OK, it may not be that vast. It could be the same guy sending e-mails from 27 different addresses. But I'm definitely getting a lot of right wing stuff. The editorial page editor of the Morristown Daily Record, Fred Snowflack, says he is too – though our counterpart at the Asbury Park Press, Andy Sharp, says liberals seem to have been catching up recently.

As for my newspaper, the Courier-Post, here's a view of our letters-to-the-editor inbox – cpedit@courierpostonline.com – for a typical Tuesday and Wednesday. First I clear away the ads for pornography and other commercial products. That's 80 percent of it. Maybe two-thirds of what's left is legitimate mail from readers (right-wingers, left-wingers, dangerously extreme middle-of-the-roaders). After I've read and filed all those, here's what's left:

First, I find something from the Traditional Values Coalition, a southern California organization that thinks I'd like to know that the “California state assembly passes yet another pro homosexual resolution,” declaring the month of June to be “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Month.” The press release is written like a news article, with the press contact himself, Benjamin Lopez, quoted as one of its sources. “`Californians needs to wake up to what these liberals are doing,' Lopez said.”

I personally don't care what the California Assembly does. But I can see how some people might complain that lesbians and gays get the month of June while African-Americans get a cruddy month like February. Hey, who do you have to sleep with to get a decent pride month?

Sorry.

And speaking of vast conspiracies, another note has the subject line, “Hillary Clinton's Secrets Revealed.” These are the same folks who sell Hillary Clinton trading cards. “As the Pentagon proved with its deck of Most Wanted Iraqis,” says the source Web site, NewsMax.com, “there's no better way to `out' the enemy than to depict it on a deck of cards.” Yes, you read it correctly. These folks are so far to the right that a former first lady is “the enemy.” They even sometimes include the subject line “Stop Hillary's Book.” I don't plan to read her book myself, but I defend to the death the right of public radio stations to give away a bunch of them during pledge drives.

Next, a liberal one, from TrueMajority.org. It protests how the Federal Communications Commission will allow fewer people to control more of the public airwaves. The president of TrueMajority.org, by the way, is Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream. Cohen makes a point of adding that Ben & Jerry's is not associated with TrueMajority.org, so don't confuse the two, all right? Then again, he also makes a point of mentioning that he's Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream.

Next, we go right back to the conservatives. I have something else from TVC: “Is pedophilia the next `sexual orientation' to be normalized?” Also, the Land Rights Network wants to repeal the estate tax. And here's this week's essay from the Ayn Rand Institute: “The hazards of a smoke-free environment.” Offsetting that is a liberal one from mediachannel.org, hawking Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception by Danny Schechter, which examines the media coverage of the war in Iraq.

So that's the mailbag. It's five conservative ads to two liberal ones – with a large difference of political extremism between protesting an FCC decision and trying to cast a democratically elected junior senator in the same light as Saddam Hussein.

Now you may be saying, “Barry, you throw all this stuff away anyway. What difference does it make that spam from the right wing vastly outnumbers spam from the left?”

Well, just by sorting the junk from the real stuff, I become marginally more aware of the issues circulating among grass-roots groups. So I know more about what the right wing is thinking than the left.

It makes a little difference. And on a daily basis, that adds up to 365 little differences a year.