The NRO's Ed Whelan apologizes for outing blogger
By John Amato Friday Jun 12, 2009 4:30amI posted about the NRO's Ed Whelan outing of a liberal blogger that wanted to remain anonymous because he couldn't take any criticism, but now sees the errors of his ways.
My Apologies to Publius
On reflection, I now realize that, completely apart from any debate over our respective rights and completely apart from our competing views on the merits of pseudonymous blogging, I have been uncharitable in my conduct towards the blogger who has used the pseudonym Publius.
Earlier this evening, I sent him an e-mail setting forth my apology for my uncharitable conduct. As I stated in that e-mail, I realize that, unfortunately, it is impossible for me to undo my ill-considered disclosure of his identity. For that reason, I recognize that Publius may understandably regard my apology as inadequate.
The damage is done, but at least an apology came. I hope this sends a message to others (it seems to be a right-wing thing) who similarly believe it's just fine to dig up personal information and expose it about a blogger (or anyone else) who wishes to remain unknown, just because they have a mean streak and a taste for vengeance. It's not fine. You listening, Michelle?
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I'd bet you cash money that his sudden sense of morality was brought on by the threat of a lawsuit and a chat with his lawyer.
would the lawsuit be based on? Publicizing someones name is not libel to the best of my knowledge.
And given recent events, a reasonable claim could be made that outing Publius could very well put him in danger from right wing nut jobs.
And if something were to happen to the blogger, he or his family might argue that Whelan (and NRO) share responsibility.
Even if the case couldn't stand, it would still look very bad. You can't claim that all the violent nuts are lone gunmen, while simulataneously providing them with the addresses of their targets. Operation Rescue is getting a lot of bad press for their enabling of Tiller's murderer, and NRO could easily be in at least as bad of a situation is something were to happen to that blogger.
You two shouldn't so thoughtlessly speculate about a subject upon which you are clearly ignorant. What Whelan did was (in my opinion) unethical, but not in any way illegal.
The reason Publius chose to remain anonymous in his commentary was because as an educator and a lawyer, he wished to avoid any awkwardness with future students and/or clients based upon his published political beliefs.In other words, in his professional life, he wished to appear as wholly neutral as possible. That's a completely reasonable position. To insinuate that he did so to protect himself from violent retribution is worst kind of conjecture.
What's a more likely source of retribution against Whelan would be an ethics panel review of his actions, particularly the ethics organization who actually employs him or his local state bar association regarding his status as a bar sanctioned attorney.
But as long as anyone, progressive or conservative, is outraged by outing, being gay will be implicitly a bad thing.
It's 100 years after Oscar Wilde was imprisioned for queerness...let's get over the idignation about people's private lives.
"Who Cares?" is a better response than "OMIGOD, I can't believe they were so indiscreet with someone else's bidness!"
Outing is a good thing in the (too) long run. If a few individuals are inconvenienced for the "cause" so be it.
IIRC, Wilde's sexual orientation became an issue when he sued the Marquis of Queensbury for slander (Wilde had been involved with his son) ... which opened the door for Queensbury to produce witnesses testifying to Wilde's 'character.'
The problem with your premise is that it's SOMEONE ELSE who has to bear the 'inconvenience' of being outed. Just because I'm not ashamed of (for example) my body doesn't mean I want you bringing a video camera into the privacy of my home.
I wouldn't mind
But I'm a nudist
And the theatre concession stand would have to stock up on Pepto Bismo.
Or 3-D glasses.
I don't think I would have shared that bit of information.
What's wrong with being a nudist? Something to be ashamed of?
xoxo
Nothing to be ashamed of at all! :D
or anti-gay rationalizations. When I hear people whine about gay marriage or abortions I always think "then don't have an abortion" If you think outing is a good thing than by all means go ahead and out yourself. But you have no right to make that decision for someone else. You don't know what their family or work situation may be like nor do you have the right to sacrifice their privacy for your cause. Thinking otherwise is adopting the same values as the people who want to make decisions over who can get married and what women can do with their own bodies.
Was he whimpering at the door?
Don't gays do a lot of outing of famous closeted gays?
And as for Oscar Wilde he wasn't really tried for diddling about, but because he was doing a powerful man's son.
Victorian England not only had brothels with girls as young as 11, but also gay brothels as well with comparatively aged boys.
The issue is that Whelan didn't respect his anonymity and published his name, address, etc. I've never heard that he is gay.
I haven't heard it either and I can't find where he says it.
words in Ys mouth, but I think he meant that as a comparison to the lgbt community outing celebrities, not that the fellow was gay.
Outing was a term originally was used in the gay community and has been normed. And Otto brought up Oscar Wilde's trial.
Otto's comment above was what I was referring to in my comment. I think the word "out" is what got all mixed up here.
That was the line I was responding to.
That's so funny. Now he has to contend with being known AND being gay.
Tough day.
...He was tried for holding the ruling class up to general ridicule.
Actually, now that I think of it, Victorian England AND America had brothels with girls far younger, often with guarantees of sound-proof rooms.
I've been chasing the links around and I can't find the part where he says Publius is gay. I thought he just exposed his name and occupation location.
I have no idea why the guy apologized but if it was sincere, I'll give him a few points for that.
I think the above thread put a gay taint on this particular situation.
(Sorry, I totally made myself giggle with that unintentional pun.)
as long as one of the fuck turds that read him doesn't take it into his little pea brain to eliminate this communist, socialist,, LIBERAL ,Nazi, Muslim loving , gay marriage , womens rights spouting person whose name and address he now knows.
For doing or saying things that can't be undone but then retracting them or issuing a non apology apology. Paul Krugman has an excellent piece today about the right wing media feeding the lunatic fringe. Only now is the traditional media acknowledging that which we've known for years. The line between mainstream conservatism and the lunatic fringe has been erased. What he doesn't point out is that happened years ago, long before Obama was even elected to the Senate.
... used to be knowing how to discern fact from fiction, and remaining an objective observer.
IMHO, if you're 'outing' someone for hiding behind anonymity or a pseudonym, you're no longer being objective - you're injecting yourself into the story, because it's YOUR opinion. (Similarly, it would be inappropriate to repeat the offense of a Michelle Malkin in this manner.)
What Ed really needs to do is acknowledge his error AND his lack of professionalism. It's not 'uncharitable,' it's UNETHICAL.
And whether they are of the attack machine Sean Hannity mold or more of the stenographer David Gregory sort or of the cheerleading to power Judith Miller variety, they more than illustrate the need for some kind of ethics course for journalists specifically. The damage that they have done to our country and system of government is inexcusable and unconscionable.
What's with this "uncharitable" crap? What he did was juvenile, mean-spirited, and likely with the intention of fucking up some guy's life who dared call him out on the merits of his argument. It's not "uncharitable." That's if you have a thousand bucks and instead of donating it to the local homeless shelter you buy a hooker for yourself.
Not only does Whelan need ethics, he needs a more accurate vocabulary.
Publius responded magnanimously yesterday.
it had nothing to do with being gay and everything with being proven wrong on too many occasions. Like any other self loathing right winger , he couldn't take being proven wrong by this man and giving out his name and address was his revenge.
Whelan's is better than most. In it, he acknowledges that he did something unacceptable and recognizes that it doesn't repair or ease the damage he has done. Who'd a thunk? A winger taking responsibility for a really low act. I agree with Atomic Cat: That apology was almost certainly elicited by the threat of a lawsuit.
If Valerie Plame couldn't succeed with a lawsuit for her outting, I doubt many others could.
They would still have to defend, whether the plantiff has a chance of winning or not. Maybe NRO talked to it's lawyers and decided to cut the damage.
with prior case law a decent attorney would have it dismissed with a motion that would take them maybe 15 minutes to write.
And off the point. I didn't mean to get into an argument over a matter of opinion. I've never seen or heard a winger apologize without the threat of a lawsuit or some other strong motivator so I agreed with Atomic Cat's speculation that this may have been done under threat of a lawsuit. I was clear that it was an opinion. I'm no attorney so I bow to your apparently greater knowledge of the subject. Even so, it doesn't make the specualtion untrue.
Wouldn't they have have to show that they had a worthy case before they could file the suit? If the guy lost his job or suffered some other damage then it might fly, but just for having his name given out on the internet with no resulting provable damages, probably wouldn't qualify as a viable case.
As far as slander/libel goes, it's not actionable if the content is provably true.
Harm to one's reputation and absence of malice are also involved.
(But are we to believe, then, that Bill-O held no malice towards Dr. Tiller, and that Scott Roeder did not commit provable damages?)
Wouldn't you have to prove that there was a personal connection between Roeder and BillO? A one on one conversation or something like that? Just because BillO says he hates someone and then a stranger kills that someone, I can't see a direct connection.
I'm not arguing to be pissy, I just love talking about these sorts of things and learning.
... would be DISPROVING a suspect's claim that he got the idea from a radio/television personality.
I can claim the space aliens made me do it, but that doesn't mean there are really space aliens or necessarily a relationship between us. Celebrity 'stalkers' are often found to believe the object of their attention has/is communicating with them directly, and/or has been involved in a personal relationship.
What difference does it make where he got the idea, he is the one who did the crime. He may want to go for insanity and say God told him to do it or maybe he does think God spoke to him, but either way it was his decision in the end to commit the crime. I don't see that disproving would have anything to do with it.
He can say I shot the doctor because BillO said he hated him and he was murdering babies, but that doesn't make the shooting any less a crime or the shooter any less guilty. Plus it also wouldn't make BillO any less an a-hole.
Crazy folk used to claim the government was spying on them.
... difficult to prove cause-and-effect with this kind of speech (not just Whelan, but the Bill-O-on-the-bookshelf stuff) in court.
We're told they're not directly responsible, but every single day, we're exposed to opinions and pitch-lines that are intended to influence our choices/actions - who we vote for, what we watch, what we consume, where we go on vacation, who we perceive as attractive ...
... so why not give due credit to the impact of hate speech?
anyone could sue McD or Burger King for being overweight because of their commercials. Which has been tried. But people have free will, which allows us to choose what we listen to or what we let influence us.
... a conscious one? Sad to say, there are people who simply vote because they're told to vote a specific way, and don't bother to look at the issues.
People are willing to believe that video games teach children to kill and/or make them more effective killers. Is that truly a matter of conscious choice, or conditioning?
Would conditioning be a legal excuse for doing something? I just don't believe it would, but hey it's early in the day so maybe I have some brain cells that haven't kicked in yet.
any case law on the matter at the moment, but I believe conditioning has been brought up in cases regarding ex-military and manslaughter ie they were trained to neutralize a threat and did so. I can't remember off hand the outcome of the suits though.
I'm less into conditioning now and more into minoxidil.
It's been extremely unpopular but I've been saying that I would like to see voting privileges suspended for anybody who voted for Bush in '04, until such a time as they can prove they can vote responsibly. I can kinda, (but not really), understand voting for him in 2000 but by 2004, there was no excuse for not seeing what he was and what he was doing to our country. Only inexcusable laziness and apathy or believing that ideology trumps what is good for the country can explain a Bush vote in 2004.
I just mock and laugh at those that still sport Bush/Cheney and McCain/Palin bumper stickers.
I'm not naive enough to believe that ever decision is a conscious one. But I believe they won't effect me contrary to my basic beliefs. So a commercial might make me choose one burger over another, but won't make me a vegetarian eating boca burgers.
Your assumption is that the wingnuts are capable of learning from their mistakes, or that one wingnut is capable of learning from the mistakes of another. This assumption is not borne out by the evidence.
While it was a good apology, it does not lessen the douchbaggedness of this Rovian asshole.
True. But I am surprised he apologized at all. And it doesn't even seem to be a backhanded "he made me do it" apology.
Good for him.
Think of what might have happened if someone, say, Sibel Edmonds, had anonymously published on a blog the things she knows and had then been outed. With all the dirt she had on the Bush Cabal, I doubt she'd be breathing now.
"Are you listening Michelle?" Good one John. Probably when hell freezes over. It's nice that you are an optimist.
Ya know - I just don't buy the apology for a millisecond. It's just way too late and .... just too late.
Many people put their thoughts down and some do not want their identify 'known' because of their employment or some other such reason. I don't think my place of employment would mind my blogging. My blog, however, does NOT reflect the views of my employer, and there are idiots who will use it as such.
I'm beyond the level of taking more bullshit from these right-wing critters.
very weak.
Whelan = Pathetic Asshole.
So what happened?
Did someone threaten to publish Ed Whelan's home address and phone number as I suggested?
I hope your mother died in great pain from the syphilis and gonorrhea that she got from your father. I see your brain is already rotting. I hope you have good health insurance, those public hospitals are a bitch when you are dying of syphilis, you whoreson bastard.
ok take it easy, there.
Na that is bs. He did it and his apology means nothing. If he gets another chance to do it, you bet he will.
And then probably apologize for it.
What a scumbag. Just because he was pissed off at being made to look so stupid.
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