There isn’t much that hasn’t already been said, or rather ripped apart, by every news outlet and Bachelor of Arts in the country after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad walked out of Columbia University Monday, no doubt sufficiently uncomfortable with Uncle Sam’s foot lodged snugly in his mouth.

Pundits have debased Mr. Ahmadinejad’s address at Columbia University on Monday as vitriolic, blindly ignorant and shockingly laughable. But what few of these talking heads have chosen to wax political on ‘ and what is perhaps the real story ‘ are not his few and far between words, but rather his less than warm reception.

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s appearance so quickly dissolved into a sideshow of American bulldozer diplomacy and bully tactics, courtesy of the Dick Cheney School for Assault, that no one, especially the Iranian president, could hope to dodge the quail shot.

It became rapidly clear that Mr. Ahmadinejad was not ushered into the halls of Columbia University on the behest of its president, Lee C. Bollinger, to air the grievances of Western opposition and the opinions of an uncompromising fundamentalist.

Nor was he there to facilitate the ‘open discourse’ Columbia so laudably defended.

Instead, Ahmadinejad was brought onstage and stuffed with straw, a VIP effigy to illustrate the grandeur and glory of true democracy.

Unfortunately for democracy, and for Columbia, Bollinger thought it better to use the spotlight to flex his own brand of foreign policy ‘ an especially tendentious and equally self-righteous introduction to the Iranian leader that consisted of several choice bouts of name-calling.

Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York and subsequent acceptance of his invitation to speak at Columbia was thoroughly denounced and criticized weeks before his arrival ‘ close-mindedly enough.

And so from one extreme of First Amendment interpretation to another, truly from the sublime to the sanctimonious, Ahmadinejad was tarred, feathered and lambasted as closely in the tradition of the auto-da-f√É© as modernly possible.

Mr. Bollinger hedged the event as an ideal forum of America’s greatest virtue then virtuously told Mr. Ahmadinejad that he exhibited ‘all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator.’

In no defense to Ahmadinejad, who stands as a ballooned figurehead at best, few speakers ‘ at least those extended an Ivy League invite ‘ are deserving of this caliber of pejorative hectoring, no matter how much they swear homosexuals are a nonentity in the Iranian realm.

In the end, though, Ahmadinejad’s public flogging ‘ almost on par with that of James Frey’s at the hands of Oprah a year prior ‘ belied Columbia’s defense of free speech and served more to embarrass American interests than Ahmadinejad ever could.