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Thursday, June 14, 2012
WND's Real Intent With Esquire Lawsuit: Vengeance
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily and its sue-happy defamer attorney Larry Klayman seem to know they don't have a case against Esquire magazine for its satirical blog post about WND admitting that President Obama was born in Hawaii and that it was destroying Jerome Corsi's birther book. Not that it will admit that at WND, of course.

A June 11 WND article announced that WND would appeal a judge's dismissal of its Esquire lawsuit. It repeats the usual rantings from Klayman that don't address the key finding the judge made in dismissing it, that WND editor Joseph Farah admitted the Esquire blog post was satire before it became "inconvenient" for him to do so.

The article also claims that Klayman said that the judge "prejudged the case, for example, in her material finding that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, even though Obama’s birthplace was not at issue." But if you remember, WND's dog-and-pony show announcing the lawsuit against Esquire featured Corsi and Mara Zebest doing their birther presentation. If the subject of Obama's "eligibility" was not a key component of the lawsuit, what were they doing there?

Despite all the usual legalistic boilerplate in the article, WND's promotion of it was, one might say, a little more honest. Here's what the promotional email WND sent to its readers said:

Esquire Magazine's phony-baloney report claiming the "Where's the Birth Certificate?" book was being pulled off the shelves continues to to be fought in the legal realm.

WND is now taking new action in its effort to punish the rag with $250 million in damages ... 

So it's not about justice -- it's about vengeance and a desire to "punish the rag." More to the point, the email arguably demonstrates that WND's lawsuit against Esquire is nothing more than a nuisance lawsuit designed to intimidate critics, which runs counter to Farah's assertion in the article that the lawsuit is "not because we desire to restrict First Amendment-guaranteed protections, but because we want to police them and guard them."

Can't lawyers be sanctioned for filing nuisance lawsuits? Yes, they can. Klayman better watch himself.

One wonders why WND and Klayman chose to continue this  lawsuit and not a previous one against the White House Correspondents Association for not selling WND the number of tickets it demanded for the WHCA's annual correspondents dinner, which was also swiftly tossed out of court.

Perhaps WND and Klayman have decided they haven't gotten the full amount of publicity from the Esquire suit yet. Perhaps they should hold another dog-and-pony show at the National Press Club.


Posted by Terry K. at 1:40 PM EDT
Updated: Thursday, June 14, 2012 1:56 PM EDT

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