Be not afraid!

Gentle reader, don't think that I positively want Lionel Hutz Warren Kinsella to sue me or any other blogger. The opposite: it's important to demonstrate that, when his bluff is called, Kinsella runs away from a fight. That's important because defamation suits have not been used to intimidate Canadian bloggers; the empty threat of defamation suits did that. And there's no bigger empty suit than Kinsella. That's the teaching moment here: the only place where Kinsella "Kicks Ass" these days is in his lovingly-written autobiographies.

Tonight, Kinsella sent me an e-mail saying that if I repeated the claims I made about him last month, he'd sue. As any blogger knows, when you edit a blog post, it writes over the original, so I don't have the exact words that I used the first time. So I republished the nub of my post again. Instead of suing, he backed away -- saying his wife told him to do so, and that I was avoiding a "big fat libel action" by not using his "Libel Notice" as a crib sheet. (Here's a quiz for our non-lawyer readers: can you name at least two ways in which Lionel Hutz's e-mail to me fails to meet the legal requirements of a real Libel Notice?)

Anyway, let me go through the boring motions one more time of proving that there's not a lot of ass-kicking left in the author of Kicking Ass. He says he's not suing me because I'm not repeating the words in his purported Libel Notice. So let me cut and paste those words right now:

"You claim that the National Post has removed columns I have written for them because they are untrue."

I stand by that.

"Your claim that the newspaper is "fed up" with my "erosion" of their credibility."

I stand by that.

"Your claim that I have used my position to advance the interests of my clients."

I remember I didn't phrase it that way; I wrote that he wrote boring items about his clients. (I don't think he actually advanced their interests.)

This isn't about being mean to Kinsella. I confess, I actually have a soft spot for him and, weirdly, I think he does for me, too. This is about proving to all the bloggers that Kinsella has threatened over the years -- Jay Currie, Kathy Shaidle, Mike Brock, Mark Steyn, Blazing Catfur, etc., etc., etc., that if your facts are right, you just don't have to be scared anymore.

P.S. I think this is the second time in a week that Kinsella said he's done writing about me. Do you think he means it this time? Will his wife prevail upon him? I don't think he can go cold turkey!

P.P.S. By my calculation, it's been a week, and his prediction about the Conservatives "repudiating" my statements on free speech haven't borne out. We knew Kinsella has, uh, fallen out of touch with the Liberals lately, and he's obviously missing some important memos from the Post. But is he out of touch with the Tories, too? (At least he has the NDP.)

UPDATE: Here's Joan Tintor's story. 

UPDATE 2: I've had a journalist ask for other examples of bloggers being threatened in the past. If you want to tell your story, e-mail me and I'll pass them on.