Yes, Celtic’s midfielder has shown contempt for our rivals. I say “Let’s have more of it.”

There’s a wonderful moment in The West Wing, in Season Four, where the president appears to make an unscripted remark at the end of an interview, when he doesn’t realise the camera is still rolling, and he makes a quip that seems to suggest his rival candidate, Rob Ritchie, isn’t terribly bright.

For days, the White House press secretary fights the good fight. She starts off with a statement that the president didn’t know the camera was on and said something he shouldn’t have. Over the course of the week, the narrative evolves until, eventually, she throws her hands up during a press conference and says, “You know what? Yeah, he was saying he’s stupid.”

It is, as someone in the West Wing describes it, a perfect scandal — because they’ve been caught telling the truth. What nobody realises until CJ, the press secretary, herself puts the pieces together, is that the president did it on purpose.

He saw the camera was still on. For a full week, nobody in America was talking about anything other than whether the Republican candidate for president was an idiot. He had started the debate in the most ruthless way he knew how, exposing Ritchie as a dumb and the Republican Party as hopelessly entitled and whiney.

Because, you see, there are rules about this stuff.

There’s etiquette. You’re not supposed to say that your opponent is hopeless. You’re not supposed to degrade them. You’re supposed to handle both victory and defeat with a bit of class. There’s got to be some civility.

There’s an equally brutal moment in one of the best TV dramas ever made — Murder One, from the 1980s — about a single court case and all its many twists and turns. The star of that show was a guy called Daniel Benzali, whose character, Ted Hoffman, is a defence attorney and gets dragged into the big case.

At the end of an early episode, he’s in a bar having a drink when a guy starts having a go at him for defending guilty people — calling him all sorts. Hoffman, rather than debating the point, asks the guy if he’s ever met anyone who doesn’t know he’s bald. He points out that everyone in the bar knows he’s wearing a toupee but that nobody mentions it until he “forfeits the right to civility.”

The point is clear: you get treated how you deserve. You get the level of respect you earn by the way you treat the people around you.

And that’s a theory I subscribe to myself in all our dealings with the club across the city and their media acolytes. If these people are going to insult our intelligence, if they’re going to disrespect us, if they’re going to talk down our achievements, then they don’t deserve the civility or the respect that’s normally afforded to people who are just doing their job and putting forward a view.

Some comments are unspinnable. Some comments are just as brutal as they seem. And I don’t think we should have any problem at all admitting that they are exactly that.

Which is why there was a kind of genius in what Luke McCowan said today, when asked whether our club expects a guard of honour at Ibrox this weekend. His initial answer that of course we don’t was perfectly in line with what you’d expect. Routine. Professional. We don’t think we’ll get one. We don’t think it’s particularly important. Had he left it there, it would’ve been a throwaway interview. Unmemorable.

But he went a little further. In relation to a question about whether we would have offered them a guard of honour if the roles were reversed he said, “I don’t think we’ll ever know.” What a magnificent response that was.

And there’s no dressing that up.

That was McCowan saying, “They’re not good enough for us to ever have to face that choice.” That we’ll never be in a position where it even becomes a question. Because we’re just going to keep winning titles.

And when the media finally clocks that, when it hits them that McCowan was basically mocking our rivals — in the most brutal, blatant, in-your-face fashion — I imagine he’ll take a bit of stick. And I imagine more than one person will ask whether that was appropriate to say.

Just like the Republicans whined and wailed in the aftermath of Bartlet’s “hot mic” moment in the show. But see, that’s called getting triggered.

And getting triggered was kind of the point — as Bartlet clearly understood. I hope they get triggered. I hope they wag their fingers and talk about decorum and disrespect and sportsmanship. What hypocrites they will sound. What whiney little brats. Because this whole debate is about whether or not we’ll get the guard of honour that just about every other club in the league would give us.

Yet somehow we’re the ones being accused of disrespect?

Yeah, he’s saying they’re rotten. He’s saying they’re not good enough to ever deserve a guard of honour. And what of it? We’ve won 13 titles in the last 14. We’ve won the last four in a row. Their sole title came in a year when the whole world was upside down. So if people want to use that as the basis for pretending they’re something more than they are — that they’re somehow a bigger club than those numbers suggest — then let them. But haven’t they been living with that delusion long enough?

Let’s be clear: if a team treats even the suggestion that they should show us a bit of respect with contempt, then we’ll respond in kind.

And The Village Idiot can bang on all he wants today about our club refusing to use the term “Old Firm”. That decision actually predates the liquidation of Rangers. It’s not even a statement on the new club — it’s about distancing ourselves from a poisonous, nasty, vindictive, disrespectful, cynical, opportunistic, selfish organisation with which we have nothing in common.

And if we’ve decided that this is the moment to start layering contempt into how we talk about them, then I’m all for it. Because that’s how they treat us — day in, day out.

If I’d been there to hear McCowan say those words, I’d have given them a standing ovation. It was a brilliant answer. Sharp. Pointed. Aggressive. Uncompromising. And yeah — contemptuous.

What else do they expect?

What else do they deserve?