What “human fail” looks like

Bitter out-of-power wingnut welfare recipient Ed Whelan fucks up explaining a joke, gets called out on it, and then goes Full Metal Asshole:

One bane of the Internet is the anonymous blogger who abuses his anonymity to engage in irresponsible attacks. One such blogger who has been biting at my ankles in recent months is the fellow who calls himself “publius” at the Obsidian Wings blog.

In the course of a typically confused post yesterday, publius embraces the idiotic charge (made by “Anonymous Liberal”) that I’m “essentially a legal hitman” who “pores over [a nominee’s] record, finds some trivial fact that, when distorted and taken totally out of context, makes that person look like some sort of extremist.” In other of his posts (including two which I discussed here and here), publius demonstrated such a dismal understanding of the legal matters he opined on—including, for example, not understanding what common law is—that it was apparent to me that he had never studied law.

Well, I’m amused to learn that I was wrong about publius’s lack of legal education. I’ve been reliably informed that publius is in fact the pseudonym of law professor John F. Blevins of the South Texas College of Law. I e-mailed Blevins to ask him to confirm or deny that he is publius, and I copied the e-mail to the separate e-mail address, under the pseudonym “Edward Winkleman,” that publius used to respond to my initial private complaints about his reckless blogging. In response, I received from “Edward Winkleman” an e-mail stating that he is “not commenting on [his] identity” and that he writes under a pseudonym “[f]or a variety of private, family, and professional reasons.” I’m guessing that those reasons include that friends, family members, and his professional colleagues would be surprised by the poor quality and substance of his blogging.

That is to say that publius was "irresponsible" in that he criticized Whelan and, for that crime, Whelan wants to fuck with publius’ life.  Why else out him? (Publius responds)

Oh course the real kicker is that Asshole Ed points out the "poor quality and substance of his [publius] blogging" when the whole problem stemmed from Whelan’s inability to write a "quality" post. Go ahead, Ed:

While I’m at it, I’ll respond briefly to Blevins’s latest post, which misconceives an exchange I had yesterday with Eugene Volokh about a joke of Judge Sotomayor’s. In my post about the joke (and amidst a flurry of blogging), I initially wrote a sloppy sentence that Volokh used as the occasion for a broader discussion of the Supreme Court’s consideration of consequences in deciding cases.

[...]

I credited Volokh for a “characteristically thoughtful critique” and tweaked my sloppy sentence so that it read as it should have in the first place…

[...]

What Blevins—I mean, “publius”—somehow takes away from all this is that “Volokh actually decimates Whelan’s argument”—the concededly sloppy sentence that I promptly revised

Yes. This is the guy I want as a lawyer. The guy who yells out  "my bad" and asks for a "do-over" when he fucks up.

No wonder he’s on the wingnut dole.

Legal fail.

(Added): Wow. I had no idea that Whelan had such an extensive history of  being wrong and then acting like a whiny bitch when it was pointed out to him.  It must be fun to play golf with Ed. "Mulligan!" "Mulligan again!""Whoopsie. I call mulligan."…and you still haven’t  left the first tee. I’m kidding of course. Whelan doesn’t look athletic enough for golf….