Creighton Abrams, easily the best U.S. commanding general in Vietnam during the war, had a simple principle for dealing with cranks and nasty critics: “Never wrestle with pigs; the pigs love it, and you get dirty.” It’s sound advice, if sometimes hard to follow, given the toxic nature of today’s public discourse. But persons are never “pigs.” Even thoroughly bad people have an ember of human dignity buried somewhere in their lives, and treating individual persons with contempt violates a basic sense of decency.