The picture of the dead pigs in that last post reminded me of the confusion that can be created when human emotions get in the way of our better judgment. A number of people who grew up on farms, including my father, have told me that children should never be allowed to make friends with animals raised as food.

"You may look at the pigs, but you may never name them!" is a rule often implemented, because it is well known that once kids are on a first name basis with an animal, slaughtering time becomes an emotionally draining ordeal instead of a merely unpleasant chore.

I've seen variations on this theme in politics for years -- most recently in blogging. For many bloggers, it's very easy to stick a rhetorical knife into someone you don't know, especially if you disagree so heartily with his views that you're certain he's a despicable idiot. The more distance there is, and the more notorious the target, the easier it is to attack him. A total stranger in a distant place who spouts the things you consider the most evil is the easiest sort of target, and the more the anonymity, the better. Thus, anonymous bloggers tend to be the most vicious attackers, and anonymous targets draw the most vicious attacks. Anonymous comments left on anonymous blogs tend to display the least evidence of humility or humanity.

Once you meet a blogger, however, that blogger becomes much more of a real person -- a person you know. It's always much tougher to disagree with (much less attack) someone you know than someone you don't know, as I noted yesterday when I disagreed with the Philadelphia Inquirer's Tom Ferrick, Jr.:

Most of the time, I don't agree with Tom Ferrick, and I don't even know the guy. The problem is, I hate to disagree with people (whether I know them or not), and I don't know which is worse; my disagreeing with them or their disagreeing with me. Fortunately, it's generally easier for me to disagree with someone I don't know than someone I know, but that still doesn't mean I like disagreements. Let's face it; disagreements tend to be, well, disagreeable.

That's because I really don't feel like disagreeing with the New Jersey Star Ledger's Paul Mulshine -- one of the few journalists who was nice enough to contact me about a post I'd written, and whose piece I linked in another post.

He seems like a nice enough guy, and I enjoyed the piece I linked, so naturally I find myself a little flabbergasted by his recent broadside. To put it bluntly, it's unfair to Glenn Reynolds, to bloggers in general, and especially to bloggers unfortunate enough to have had their minds poisoned by legal training. (As was mine, and I freely admit it. Ouch!)

Let me start by admitting my bias. I am a blogger who has had legal training, and I am very loyal to Glenn Reynolds. (He was an inspiration to this blog from the start, he has been very generous to me with links, plus I have met him and like him. So you can expect that if Glenn is attacked unjustly and I hear about it, I will speak up.)

Reynolds' specific offense, says Mulshine, is that he slammed the MSM's "insufficiently obsequious coverage of the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi." I don't think I need to spend much time defending Glenn for for this; other bloggers (including a Phildelphia Inquirer editor) have. Plus, all Glenn needed to do to defend himself was to cite his own post (which Mulshine never cites -- and which makes clear that Glenn was citing another story as a supplemental correction to a Howard Kurtz report to show which reporters were clapping).

Had that been all there was to the flap between Paul Mulshine and Glenn Reynolds, I wouldn't be going to all this trouble. The problem is that the Mulshine piece goes well beyond disagreement with Reynolds, and becomes a full-blown ad hominem attack on all lawyers said to share an especially odious characteristic which makes them members of the Reynolds-Coulter axis of right-wing wannabeism. That characteristic? They are lawyers who publicly write:

I soon realized, however, that Coulter's career was evidence of a trend that has taken off in the Internet era: the lawyer as public intellectual. Lawyers are all over the place these days, holding forth on a number of topics far beyond the law.

I am not a fan of this trend. I prefer the more traditional type of public intellectual -- the historian, economist, political scientist or writer who follows the evidence where it leads. The lawyer, on the other hand, tends to take one side of an issue and then make the evi dence fit the argument. Coulter was at her best when she employed this technique to argue that Bill Clinton should be removed from office in connection with the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Such a person is often a trained in a particular discipline, such as linguistics, biology, history, economics, literary criticism, and who is on the faculty of a college or university. When such a person decides to write and speak to a larger audience than their professional colleagues, he or she becomes a "public intellectual."

And what is the purpose of calling a lawyer-writer a "public intellectual"? That public intellectuals are bad? Or that writer-lawyers shouldn't be public intellectuals? Well, let's suppose they shouldn't be public intellectuals, and that they never claimed they were. Let's just agree that they don't have such a title. So what? How would their lack of entitlement to this rather dubious title be of any assistance in determining whether they're right or wrong about a given issue?

There are millions and millions of blogs, on as many topics as there are bloggers. Some of them are written by lawyers, some are not. So what does Mr. Mulshine mean when he criticizes lawyers for "holding forth on a number of topics far beyond the law"? Why should lawyers confine themselves to writing only about legal matters, while the rest of the blogosphere -- and a host of journalists -- vent freely about anything and everything?

Is that fair?

I'm afraid Mr. Mulshine has caused me to take a close look at my dark side, and it's true confession time. Yes, I was trained as a lawyer. I worked as a lawyer for years, and I really didn't like it. I went to law school and acquired my license to practice because I was a member of a closely-knit community (a network of interrelated quasi communal households) which had vulnerable members, and I acquired legal training the way some people might learn how to use a firearm. I never especially wanted to be a lawyer so much as I thought it was a peculiar sort of duty. I majored in Rhetoric at U.C. Berkeley, and one of my favorite professors warned me not to go to law school because my writing skills would likely be destroyed.

"Law school destroys good writers!" That's what they kept telling me.

I should have listened, but I insisted on arming myself with legal training, and then I went on to practice. As time went on, I found myself more and more repelled by what I was doing, because I did not like litigation. I hated waking up at 2:00 a.m. remembering that I'd forgotten to do stuff that was "important." Plus, I didn't like seeing what lawyers were doing to the country with endlessly expanded theories of liability, and I didn't like being part of it.

Next thing I knew, AIDS hit, and my world came crashing down. Suddenly litigation went from being a major drag to being invasively, heinously, irrelevant. People were dying, and I was trying to help Trucking Company A put one over on Trucking Company B. Other lawyers might brag about such accomplishments, but I felt ashamed.

I was lucky to get through that period in my life. Somehow, when things were at their worst, I imagined I might "make a difference" and I dabbled in Berkeley politics. An appointment to the Berkeley Police Review Commission put me on the firing line for professional activists, and I never forgot it.

Anyway, I'm sure as hell not a "public intellectual," and I have never held myself out as such a creature. Nor is my legal background of much importance to this blog. I just say what I think, and I blog for the same reasons a lot of people blog: I have stuff I want to say, and blogging helps me think.

I don't know what Paul Mulshine's background is, but another reason he doesn't like lawyers as writers is because they "tend[] to take one side of an issue and then make the evidence fit the argument." I agree that this is a common tendency of lawyers, and it's a tendency I don't like. But I don't think it means all lawyer-writers operate that way, nor does it mean that journalists don't.

Ever heard of a thing called advocacy journalism? Media sensationalism?

Let me confess more of my bias. Since the mid 1970s, I have owned pit bulls. For more than three decades now, I have seen one media campaign after another which has targeted and demonized this breed of dog in order to sell newspapers and keep people glued to their televisions. I know that there's a need to sell newspapers and attract viewers, just as I know Ann Coulter wants to sell her book, and bloggers all want hits and links. But to generate malignant prejudice and hysteria at the expense of a particular breed of dog by frightening the public so that they grab their children and run when they see a dog that looks like it might be a pit bull (yes, I've seen that, and I've had total strangers threaten to shoot my dog) -- all to sell newspapers -- that goes a bit far. It went too far for me for far too long. And it still goes too far. (The difference today is that writing another "letter to the editor" is not the only remedy. Another reason I thank the gods for the blogosphere.)

I've owned generation after generation of these lovable dogs. My poor old dog Puff died last summer and young Coco is looking at me right now as I type this. She gets tired of my solitaire tappy-tappy games, and I don't blame her. I know this will sound crazy, and because Coco's a dog she can't understand it, but what was done (and continues to be done) to her breed is one of the reasons I blog, for it's one of the reasons I have held the MSM in bitter contempt. On this particular issue, my grudge against media bias is much older than the blogosphere. It's over thirty years old, it's personal with me, and it runs deep. You don't kick a man's dogs -- especially when he is down. I'm not naive, I understand the ways of the world, but the anti pit-bull hysteria is tough to forgive. The need to sell papers (because news is only entertainment after all) just never seemed to suffice.

(Oh, Ann Coulter packages and sells hysteria too? So what? Does that make it right?)

If only they could have picked on some rich spoiled Hollywood celebrities instead and left my dogs alone! I might never have developed such a longstanding grudge. I realize that the problem is also fueled by the fact that prejudiced humans want groups to hate, and dogs are a safer target but that's even less of an excuse to generate prejudice against a breed of dog.

And of course, I know that not all reporters write biased or sensationalized stories about pit bulls, nor do all editors put these stories on the front pages with scary headlines. It's a small minority, but it's a damned persistent one.

Obviously, my pit bull complaint does not apply specifically to Mr. Mulshine, and I'll omit another long harangue about the similar hysteria generated against guns (which also grab headlines and sell papers) as I suspect readers will be as tired of reading this as I am of writing it! My point is simply that "tak[ing] one side of an issue and then mak[ing] the evidence fit the argument" is not uniquely a legal attribute. In fact, I'm worried that Mulshine is doing what he complains lawyers do -- taking one side of the argument and making the evidence fit the argument.

Let's return to Glenn Reynolds. Whether you're a lawyer or a journalist (or both), suppose your goal is to prove that he's a member of some despicable newly identified group. A "new breed of right-wing wannabes," perhaps? You could start by attacking someone everyone hates right now -- Ann Coulter -- the villain of the day in New Jersey. Again, Paul Mulshine:

The further Bush sinks, the more histrionic Coulter becomes. This culminated with her tirade against those 9/11 widows who have been called "the Jersey Girls."

"These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis," said Coulter in a TV interview in support of her latest book. "I have never seen people enjoying their husbands' death so much."

The shift from Coulter to Reynolds is accomplished by noting a "similar trend":

I enjoy a good insult as much as the next guy, perhaps more, but why go so far afield in search of a target? Apparently because the lawyer can permit no argument against the client to stand. I've no ticed a similar trend among the lawyer-writers at the National Review and on the many Internet blogs generated by lawyers, such as the Instapundit site of lawyer Glenn Reynolds, which was one of the seminal blogs. These lawyers tend to portray any criticism of the Bush administration as just this side of "treason" -- the title of a re cent Coulter book, coincidentally enough. Among their most prominent targets are the mainstream media -- or "MSM" in bloggese.

As to "any criticism of the Bush administration" as being "just this side of treason," by that standard Reynolds is himself guilty of treason. But that doesn't matter when the goal is to link Reynolds and Coulter.

As it turns out, there's another amazing similarity between Reynolds and Coulter. They are both authors:

Reynolds, like Coulter, is an author. In his recent book "An Army of Davids," he argues that the thousands of bloggers out there are supplanting the despised MSM. That may be so, though as a member of the MSM I certainly hope not. But I for one think the style of writing employed by Coulter and the many lawyer-writer-bloggers out there, though amusing, is limited.

Who knew?

Another common feature is that both Reynolds and Coulter are not as good as P.J. O'Rourke.

Compare Coulter or Reynolds, for example, to the great political humorist P.J. O'Rourke, who made a career out of visiting and understanding places before writing about them. If O'Rourke wanted to take on the Jersey Girls, he would do so with a sentence so wittily constructed that even their supporters would laugh.

This new breed of right-wing wannabes epitomized by Coulter is not up to that level. And all of their flailings at the mainstream media fail spectacularly in pointing out the true mistakes and biases of the journalistic establishment.

Regular readers may remember that Coco is also a blogger. Not to insult her, but I think it's fair to say that that her writing skills fall short of the P.J. O'Rourke standard too. And being a pit bull, Coco already has a major strike against her. How do I break the news to her that on top of that stigma, she might also be a member of the latest maligned breed?

If only I could explain to her that it's nothing personal.

Isn't it all just entertainment?

UPDATE: The "public intellectual" question does not appear to break neatly along partisan lines. Here's Atrios:

...I don't think you have to be a credentialed expert in a particular subject to have smart things to say about it....