Has it really come to this? Don Luskin threatening to sue Atrios for…well, what, exactly? Definition of character? Excessive snarkiness? Operating a blog without the express written consent of Major League Baseball? Hell if I know. Didn’t anyone learn from the O’Reilly-sues-Franken fiasco? I’m with Orcinus – if this is anything but unadulterated bluster, discovery ought to be a hoot. (Speaking of hoots, as always The Poor Man has the best response. Standard beverage warning applies. Oh, and I’m with Jesse.)
Let me be up front here: Luskin is a snivelling crybaby who deserves to be mocked mercilessly. Go ahead, big boy, sue me for that. Maybe you can have your mommy serve me the papers.
Atrios has a roundup of comments, some of Don Luskin’s more charming behaviors, and his original response to Luskin.
It will be interesting to see how the mainstream media plays this – and make no mistake, this will be in the mainstream media. I wonder if Luskin’s attorney will be as laughable and ungracious as O’Reilly’s were. Hard to imagine, but then so was this.
“Definition of character? Excessive snarkiness? Operating a blog without the express written consent of Major League Baseball?”
You forgot ripping the tag off the blog before taking it home to use it. As we say in Brooklyn, que pendejo!
Am I the only one who sees a “Use Don Luskin’s Name For Your Own Purposes Day” on the horizon?
Am I the only one who sees a “Use Don Luskin’s Name For Your Own Purposes Day” on the horizon?
Nope. Pandagon and Tom Tomorrow have already suggested something like it, and Blah3, who runs the Take Back the Media site that was part of the cause of Appropriate Michael Savage’s Name For Your Own Purposes Day, is on board with Jesse. So look for something tomorrow.
Let me get this straight, Luskin writes a story on May 7, 2003 that is subtitled “We Stalked, He Balked” and then has a lawyer write a letter asserting that people calling him a “stalker” are committing negligence per se. I think I have new definition of chutzpah.
make that libel per se, doh
Its a little scarier than it is silly. Part of Atrios’ shtick is that we don’t know who he is (although Kaus thinks he’s Sidney Blumenthal). By being anonymous, Atrios feels he can push the envelope a little further than if he had a name, address, and picture floating around.
The threat, boys and girls, is not to WIN a libel suit, which is, on its face preposterous, given that Luskin intends to claim defamatory words when spoken by others about himself that he used to describe his own actions, but the REAL threat is to LODGE the suit for the PURPOSE of issuing a subpoena to blogspot (or I guess, Google, these days?) to “out” Atrios, and perhaps, neutralize that envelope pushing. This is several moves on the chess board ahead– perhaps its about lingering resentment over Trent Lott, or something else. Who the fuck knows?
The only word for it is despicable; I would be delighted to contribute to a legal defense fund, should A. set one up.
I will say, even his fellow contributers to NRO think it’s a bit over the top.
Yeah, the Cornerites have been on the right side of this one, to their credit. It will be interesting to see if NRO quietly drops Luskin in the aftermath of all this.