Today I encountered a web site ostensibly operated by the entity opening the "Cordoba House" facility a few blocks from Ground Zero. Perhaps you've heard of the project; I understand that a couple of people have commented on it. I will refer to it as "The Project" to avoid tiresome disputes about other names.

Anyway, I also noted that multiple people were engaged in a "dialogue" — to the extent the word applies in the medium — on Twitter with a @Park51 Twitter feed, purportedly authored and operated by the organizers of The Project.

Count me as skeptical. The incident in which Patrick panicked hapless Norweigians into thinking that North Korea was declaring war on Cyrpus via Twitter still weighs heavily on my conscience. The @Park51 twitter feed strikes me as off in some way, and I suspect it may be a hoax or political satire or public relations sabotage. If so, it's fairly well executed.

But if it's real, it suggests that the leaders of The Project are hypocritical twits with a tin ear. Those promoting the Project have asserted that its purpose is to promote interfaith dialogue and dialogue between Americans and the Muslim community, and that therefore the public should not focus on whether its location is an affront to some.

Recently a number of commentators, including Greg Gutfield, began promoting the concept that someone should open a gay bar catering to Muslims next to The Project, in order to test their tolerance for the concept that people ought to be able to open what they want where they want even if others are offended. Some deride this as juvenile baiting, but I think it's a useful rhetorical device to tease out whether and when we should actually care about opening facilities that give offense.

Gutfield pursued the @Park51 Twitter author, seeking their position on the hypothetical Muslim gay bar. @Park51 eventually responded with this:

.@greggutfeld You're free to open whatever you like. If you won't consider the sensibilities of Muslims, you're not going to build dialog

That was the point at which the needle on my skepticism gauge twitched a bit more towards "hoax." It's just too perfectly hypocritical, clueless, and tone-deaf. Of course it makes no sense whatsoever for the organizers of The Project to say (1) we want to open a dialogue, but need not be sensitive to sensibilities of other Americans, but (2) if you want to open a dialogue with Muslims, you need to consider their sensibilities. It's just a little too breathtakingly contradictory to be really credible to me. If it's not a hoax, then someone over there is talking out of his or her ass.

Of course, American principles of free speech, free exercise, and limited government protect everyone — even hypocrites, even people who would not extend the same benefits to others if they had their way. Let people build their gay bars and their Cordoba Houses where they will, and let opponents exercise their free speech to object, and let critics critique those objections, and so on to eternity. But if The Project does start whining about people building a bar or a pork products palace or something, they better be ready to be ridiculed.

This week I watched, with some amusement, as an associate navigated an encounter with the media. No clients were harmed, but she emerged indignant.

Some criminal defense attorneys believe that media relations is essential to an effective defense. I'm a skeptic. I think that very, very few clients are helped by engagement with the media. I think that in most cases, the putative benefits or media engagement (getting your message out, or driving the narrative) are substantially outweighed by the risks. Those risks include (1) increasing negative attention to your client, (2) accidentally saying something stupid or harmful to your client, and (3) being misquoted, or quoted out of context, by journalists with a tenuous grasp of law who don't care about due process and favor drama over precision.

Eric Lipman at Legal Blog Watch offers a prime example of why I feel this way. When his client Marc Payen was accused of immigration fraud in connection with allegedly taking money based on false promises to file requests for asylum, attorney D. Andrew Marshall tried, and failed miserably, to engage the press to make things better:

"This is a nonviolent felony offense. If certain services were supposedly rendered that were not rendered, then the individuals who paid for the services may very well be entitled to their money back. Whether a crime was committed is another story," said Payen's attorney D. Andrew Marshall.

Perhaps D. Andrew Marshall was disastrously misquoted, which is why he emerges sounding incoherent. That's completely foreseeable in dealing with the press. Or maybe he really just did say something that sounds, depending on how you read it, like he's suggesting his client committed a felony.

Rule One applies to lawyers as well as clients: the best course is to shut up.

Judge Robert Bork recognized that the Framers intended the rule of law to protect rights at the core of governance, like political speech and suing the bastards when you tumble from a podium. That important limit applies to free speech, as well. “The First Amendment is about how we govern ourselves – not about how we titillate ourselves sexually,” he said, deeply confusing people who masturbate to C-SPAN.

Given Rand Paul's devotion to original intent, it should be no surprise that he agrees with Judge Bork. So when GQ — which, contrary to my prior impression, apparently is actually read by some heterosexuals — ran an article claiming that Dr. Paul acted like a college student when he was a college student, his campaign immediately issued threats reflecting his approach to First Amendment jurisprudence:

"We are investigating all our options — including legal ones," Rand Paul spokesman Jesse Benton emails me. "We will not tolerate drive by Journalism by a writer with a leftist agenda."

Now, if you relied solely on the activist precedent by the liberal-dominated judiciary, you might conclude that the relevant question before pursuing legal options is whether the GQ article contains false statements, and secondarily whether those false statements were uttered with knowledge of their falsity or reckless disregard to their falsity (inasmuch as Dr. Paul is, technically, a public figure). Dr. Paul rejects that activist interpretation. The original intent of the Framers was that the First Amendment would not represent an impediment to suing anyone for anything in state court, let alone suing for defamation by leftists or drive-by journalists (which were, in Revolutionary times, called ride-by journalists) or people with an agenda, which the Framers intended to be recognized exceptions to free speech protection.

[Note: to the extent that Jesse Benton's statement becomes non-operational, it will be because he was not authorized to issue it, and Dr. Paul did not know that he would be issuing it, and it is entirely unreasonable to attribute it to Dr. Paul. Failure to supervise statements made in your name is a genetic condition, and under the Americans with Disabilities Act we need to accommodate him.]

I get to visit some pretty fun nooks and crannies of the internet, and I find some super amusing comments along the way. Today I share with you a great moment in rhetoric:

"I am not partisan either, however, most of the time I will vote republican, and would NEVER vote democrat."

For some time, I've been thinking about a post about revolutionary rhetoric from certain limited elements of the modern American Right. It's a big topic, and I'm having trouble getting my arms around it. Revolutionary rhetoric has become more common and mainstream since Ezra touched on it last year.

I think revolutionary rhetoric from those limited elements of the Right falls into five general categories:

1. People using images of revolution purely metaphorically to refer to voter movements or changes in political stance;
2. People using revolutionary rhetoric to refer to substantial changes in the structure of American government achieved through political means;
3. People using revolutionary rhetoric to rope-a-dope the Left and the media by using language reasonably interpreted as calling for violent uprising, waiting for the media or the Left to call it out, and then playing the misunderstood victim and using the incident to argue that the media and the Left are irretrievably biased. Trolls, in other words;
4. People using calls to revolution as dog-whistle signals to their base, and maintaining coy plausible deniability over whether they mean to call for violence or not;
5. People genuinely and openly calling for violent revolution.

Some of those overlap, as you might notice.

I've been trying to frame a post that asks this question to the people advocating violent revolution: who lives and who dies, and who decides? Is it all politicians, or just politicians who have voted a particular way? Is it all judges, or just judges deemed unacceptable by some revolutionary tribunal? (Does Scalia live for U.S. v. Lopez, or die for Texas v. Johnson?) When do we get free elections again, and when we get them, do candidates have to be approved by some revolutionary tribunal? Do people speaking or writing in opposition to the revolution get killed? Is your position "in a revolution all sorts of people get killed, nobody decides, it's the luck of the bullet, so you'd better do what we say first?"

I've asked those questions elsewhere, and I think the chances of getting an answer from anyone in category 3 or 4 is very low. I might get an answer from someone in category 5. Maybe Mark Epstein or Texas Fred will answer me.

But that's all for a much longer post, that's time-consuming and difficult to write. Today I want to make a much more limited observation: it's amazing how much modern revolutionary rhetoric from the Right resembles rhetoric from classic Leftist revolutionaries: the Marxists, the Maoists, the Khmerists.

First consider the issue of voting. The central and necessary premise of the modern Rightist revolutionary is that the right to vote, as it exists in America, is insufficient, even useless. There's much complaining about Motor Voter laws and voting fraud and a handful of black guys in berets parading outside of polling places that were already going 95% to Obama, but I've not seen any facts (as opposed to Truther-esque supposition) supporting the notion that on any widespread or routine basis the American people are voting for candidate X but getting candidate Y. Rather, the central complaint of the Rightist revolutionaries appears to be stupid people don't know the right way to vote — the way we think they should — and are too easily misled or distracted.

That, of course, is classic Marxist thought. The modern Right doesn't use the term false consciousness, but they might as well. Their complaint that the modern voting system necessarily protects and promotes the interests of an enemy elite is also classic Marxist-Leninist rhetoric.

Second, consider the modern Right's identification of an enemy class. Angelo M. Codevilla is the darling of the revolutionary Right these days based on his American Spectator essay describing an American elite ruling class and how it makes revolution more necessary (or even, he implies, justifiable). Codevilla's ruling elite is defined by education and the language and culture that flows from it, and by hostility to faith. Leave aside, for now, the other echoes one might hear in a description of a narrow and clannish cultural elite selfishly devoted to its own good at the expense of the decent common people and hostile to the correct faith. For now, consider how much Codevilla's definition of the enemy class along educational lines makes him echo the Khmer Rouge. The leaders of the Khmer Rouge were themselves well-educated, but tried to form a society premised upon the notion that educated people, including but not limited to "intellectuals" or "professionals," were inherently made class enemies by their education. No, I'm not saying that Codevilla or most of his fans want to shoot everyone wearing glasses. But the concept of education transforming people from one social and political class (normal people with acceptable values) to another (selfish ruling elites) finds historical precedent in the ideas of multiple radical Leftist movements.

It would be fatuous to suggest that people on the Right who favor armed revolution are secretly socialists. In fact, they often cite descent into socialism as grounds for revolution. My point is that they have adopted classic socialist revolutionary tropes. Question: is that inevitable? Given that revolutionaries must justify social change through violence despite the existence of a right to vote, will they necessarily resort to classic Leftist revolutionary rhetoric that focuses upon class divisions and treats the populace at large as incapable of deciding its own governance for itself?

Also, does asking the question mean that I ought to be put up against the wall when the revolution comes?

Edit: Note Patrick's disagreement with my observation, set forth in the comments.

if this had happened on an American flight.

Unfortunately for the French, German, and Israeli passengers aboard this June Lufthansa flight from Tel Aviv to Frankfurt, they seem not to appreciate the dangers inherent in pillow fights. They'll find out, one day, that air travel must be as unpleasant as possible, for everyone's safety.

I've accused the government of habitually abusing categorical rhetoric — selling the populace on the concept that certain categories of things are uniquely dangerous and therefore outside our normal scheme of individual rights (child pornography, for instance, or anything related to the Great War on Terrorism), and then surreptitiously trying to cram as many disfavored things as possible into those no-longer-narrow categories, whether or not those things logically belong in those categories or not. Hence you get government officials explaining to you that anti-piracy efforts calculated to protect Shrek from illegal downloads belong in the terrorism "box", with all the additional government powers and limits on citizen rights that implies. This approach eases the government's persuasive burden: leaders only need to keep the populace convinced of the legitimacy of the pure category (e.g., terrorism is very scary, and the government should have more powers to deal with it), and then smuggle stuff into the category under the noses of an inattentive citizenry.

But it would be wrong to say that this rhetorical dishonesty is unique to government. Citizens are guilty of it, as well — citizens employ categorical rhetoric, and therefore encourage our government to use it. Take, for instance, the trend of citizens advocating limits on free exercise of religion. Diana Serafin of ACT! For America, who protested to oppose the right of Muslims in Temecula, California to build a mosque, executes a picture-perfect abuse of the categorical worthy of any bureaucrat defending the scope of his power:

“As a mother and a grandmother, I worry,” Ms. Serafin said. “I learned that in 20 years with the rate of the birth population, we will be overtaken by Islam, and their goal is to get people in Congress and the Supreme Court to see that Shariah is implemented. My children and grandchildren will have to live under that.”

“I do believe everybody has a right to freedom of religion,” she said. “But Islam is not about a religion. It’s a political government, and it’s 100 percent against our Constitution.”

It's hard to argue for exceptions to rights or interpretations of rights. It's much easier to just argue about boxes. Thus Ms. Serafn and ACT! For America tries to sell us on the concept that Islam belongs not in the "First Amendment right to free exercise of religion" box, but in the "enemy government" box. Ms. Serafin's rhetorical move is rather reminiscent of that employed by the advocates of campaign donation restrictions who were infuriated by SCOTUS' recent decision in Citizens United v. FEC, who argue that donations to support desired candidates and measures don't belong in the speech box, and ought to go in the "interfering with elections" box instead.

In a world governed by karma, Ms. Serafin would find her preferred religious denomination reclassified and placed firmly in the Political Action Committee box rather than the free exercise box. But as watching the news for ten minutes will tell you, most karmic rewards must be awaiting wrongdoers in the next life, because they aren't getting them here. Besides, despite the temptation to respond to rhetorical abuse with rhetorical abuse, disingenuous categorical thinking about rights is self-perpetuating and threatens everyone's rights.

Gennady Osipovich was most upset to hear that he would die in prison.  So he attacked the gypsy fortune teller who'd foretold his fate, and killed two innocent bystanders in the process.

Osipovich was sentenced to 22 years in maximum security prison this week.

Fortunately, the fortune teller escaped serious injury.  We should give this woman a visa and put her in charge of something important, today.

Via the Twitter feed of the Browser, a site you should visit often.

I think I've got everyone here covered except Ezra. Shhhhhh! Don't tell them, it will ruin the surprise.

I hope they have enough for all of my friends.

Probably not.  I'm sure the networks have confronted rape victims in ambush interviews, shown footage of weathermen being decapitated by tornado-propelled flying glass, and branded innocent men as terrorist murderers.

But this is … exceptional:

On May 11, 1955, before an audience of millions of viewers, a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing was shocked to receive a handshake from the co-pilot who flew the mission to destroy his city. This Is Your Life, the show that engineered this stunt, was an enormously popular “testimonial” program, but one that was frequently criticized for its tendency to go overboard in exploiting the emotional responses of its usually unwitting subjects. The Hiroshima episode is so far off the charts in this regard that—even today—it is unsettling to watch the one clip that is available online. …

In a maneuver typical of the middle America-catering show, Edwards took special care to point out to his millions of viewers the dual invocation of the almighty by the bomber and victim:

“And so, Reverend Tanimoto, you on the ground, and you on your military mission, Captain Lewis, in the air, both appeal to a power greater than your own. Almost at the same moment you both utter the same words: My God. Thank you, Robert Lewis, now personnel manager at Henry Heide Incorporated in New York City.”

Read on if you dare.

Via.

Billy Graham, at the height of his powers:

This is, on one level, an obscene comparison, but for sheer oratorical skill Graham is only paced by Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Adolf Hitler.  At least among orators who were filmed and recorded in the 20th century.

There's no one like Graham on the world stage today.  Many think that Barack Obama is a great speaker, but he's just an extension of his teleprompter.  He's a mumbling, stuttering ass compared to Billy Graham.

If you're a young lawyer, you should accept that you'll never be as good a speaker as Billy Graham.  You won't have the incredible drive Graham had, you won't have the passion, and as a result you won't have the opportunities to speak before huge audiences, overcoming your weaknesses in the most challenging possible environment, that Graham had.

But you can overcome the fear, and you can make yourself a better speaker. You can emulate Graham even if you can't beat him.

Get a video camera and record yourself speaking.  Watch your gestures, your body language.  (Don't try to become another Billy Graham, who practiced constantly in front of a mirror – you don't have his natural gifts – become a better you).  Listen to yourself.  Over and over.  Catch the "uhs" and the "ums" that are mere placeholders, used by a lazy speaker to cross the bridge to his next thought.  Above all, practice, watch, listen, and learn from your mistakes.

You must feel the Force … flow.

This won't make you a better person, or a smarter lawyer, but it will make you a more persuasive speaker.  What you do with that is up to you.

A few minutes ago someone from Congress' internet domain came here by searching for information about the Pace Amendment. You remember the Pace Amendment. It was the proposal by James O. Pace, a.k.a. L.A. County judicial candidate Bill Johnson, that went like this:

No person shall be a citizen of the United States unless he is a non-Hispanic white of the European race, in whom there is no ascertainable trace of Negro blood, nor more than one-eighth Mongolian, Asian, Asia Minor, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Near Eastern, American Indian, Malay or other non-European or non-white blood, provided that Hispanic whites, defined as anyone with an Hispanic ancestor, may be citizens if, in addition to meeting the aforesaid ascertainable trace and percentage tests, they are in appearance indistinguishable from Americans whose ancestral home is in the British Isles or Northwestern Europe. Only citizens shall have the right and privilege to reside permanently in the United States.

Gosh, maybe this came up in the course of discussing altering the Fourteenth Amendment.

In the midst of all the brouhaha over marriage and its definition(s), few people pause to ask the question that David Harsanyi raises: why should the state be entangled in such matters at all?

Like any other law-centric blog, we get our share of attorney spam here. It is unpleasant, as it clogs the drain and gets in the way of other people directly addressing the posts and calling me dumb in the comments.

We briefly toyed with the notion of confronting the law-spammers by assuming that they were innocent naïfs, led astray by marketers to whom they had, in the parlance of these things, outsourced their ethics. It was unsatisfying, not least because the lawyers stop responding to your queries if they think you are going to delete the spam and move on. And so we return to our old ploy of outing the fools and engaging in a public shaming.

In a recent post regarding the admissibility of Wikipedia as evidence and vicious, vicious Border Collie mixes, we received a comment from a confused party named 'dogattorney'. Though it was a fairly straightforward post, the entirety of the comment was "I don't get it." It almost makes you think that the commenter is actually a dog; it is unlikely he is a very good attorney.

But no, the comment wasn't left by a dog. Nor, actually, was the comment left by an attorney. These particular idiots, who appear to be confused about their claimed expertise, can be found at DogAttorney dot com, a nationwide attorney referral service for dog bite victims.

What to do, then, if there is no one person we can "out" and embarrass? The site offers no hint of which lawyers have signed up for a dog-bite site that advertises by spamming blog comments. If you wanted to know, you might find out by calling the number (1-888-7DOGBITES*) and providing a location, in response to which they may give you a contact. Or you could fill out their online form. Then you could ask that attorney — why are you a member of a network that advertises through spam? Or you could post their names here in the comment section.

Of course, if you've bitten by a dog and want to leave a message for "John Donahue, Top Dog Bite Lawer [sic]" (seriously, "lawer"?) all about the miraculous 96 hour cubic time day, and why 24 HOUR TIME IS NOTHING BUT A VICIOUS LIE PERPETRATED BY FRAUDS AND CHILD MURDERERS, and your dog bite, of course, we're sure he'd be happy to hear about it.

After all, he wanted us, and you, to know all about his prowess as a world-renowned dogbite lawyer.

I can hear you saying "That's unfair, Popehat! They didn't even hire the marketer who spammed your blog." But you know what they say:

If you lie down with dogs, you'll end up with fleas.

*7 dog bites? I'd say you have a pretty good case!

It's time for the Road to Popehat, the feature in which we throw open the traffic logs, check out the search terms that brought you here, and wonder if a zombie apocalypse wouldn't represent a marked improvement in the national discourse.

This month's fun searches:

how will i write a welcome speech to welcome the president if i am the provost: I didn't know Obama was going to visit USC.

what illegal things can mucinex be used to make: I know how it is. The third month of summer, the kids are bouncing off the walls and driving you crazy, and you're looking for anything to keep them busy.

Why does Michelle Obama have such evil looking eyes: It's to strike decent patriots dead with her socialism ray. Run!

i am offended by lawyer's comments: . . . and hungry for more, apparently.

my mother's gigantic brassiere: Once again, the issue is not that people enter strange searches. The issue is that the searches bring them here.

i am sure you have heard of that case of the guy who was speeding on his motorcycle and he got the entire thing on camera: Google can be a little insecure, and works better if you add some works of reassurance to your search.

how many shots can u get out of a police taser: Is this like the Tootsie Pop question? We don't know, but we'll wait here why you go get stopped in traffic and find out. Try acting like a 50-year-old black schoolteacher; apparently that helps.

looking for coyote who writes bdsm fiction Well, you can ask him, but I think he's more into small government and small business issues. Not that there's anything wrong with that.