5 Feet of Fury

‘Dr. Mann, whatever his other gifts, is an inveterate name-caller’

Mark Steyn writes:

In court, our notably unimpressive judge Natalia Combs-Greene declared, even before we got anywhere near the trial, that she was with Dr. Mann:

“The court agrees with the arguments advanced by Plaintiffs. To place Plaintiff’s name in the same sentence with Sandusky (a convicted pedophile) is clearly outrageous.”

So what? It’s equally outrageous to call anyone who disagrees with you a “denier,” a slur with a very particular pedigree, and one which would be distressing to any critic of Mann with family who died in the Holocaust.

And in the case of Dr. Mann, he was in fact (which is what courts used to concern themselves with) a colleague of the pedophile Sandusky at Penn State University for six years. So it’s not in the least bit “outrageous” to put Mann and Sandusky in the same sentence, even if only when compiling the Penn State faculty list, or drawing up guest invitations for its now indicted president’s Christmas cocktail party.

If Dr. Mann doesn’t like being linked to Penn State’s scandals, he should get a new job. (…)

BONUS shout-out to me!

If you’re going to be a partisan warrior in the public arena you need, as the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle likes to put it, “insensitivity training.”

Miss Shaidle also argues that the matter of honour was better handled before the libel laws replaced dueling.

When a fake Nobel laureate and a frontman for a terrorism-sympathizer are suing for their “reputation,” I’m inclined to agree.

If Dr. Mann’s up for it, how about hockey sticks at dawn?