LEAVE JESSE GRIFFIN ALONE!

Time to address something that came up in the comments at a previous post, and deserving of a separate post: People are making violent threats against Jesse Griffin, the anti-Palin blogger who finally published one too many libels and inadvertantly outed himself as a result.

First: Stop the threats, everybody. Some threats were inadvertantly approved in the earlier thread, only because I'm so dog-tired I can barely see straight.

Second: Don't let Griffin get away with his "martyr for truth" schtick. Anybody with any knowledge of libel law could see that, by passing along third-hand salacious gossip about the Palins' marriage, Griffin was not merely on thin ice, he was treading water with a legal millstone around his neck. (No, "multiple sources" are not magic words.)

However, given my own personal experience with Internet-induced madness, and given the even more frightening experiences of such friends as Michelle Malkin and Jeff Goldstein, I don't want to see anyone, even a lying idiot like Griffin/"Gryphen," suffer threats of personal retaliation on account of what they've posted on a blog.

Sometimes, my dear online friends, we need to step away from the keyboard, relax a minute and ask ourselves: "What Would Chris Crocker Do?"

Had to remove some information here, if you get my drift.

UPDATE: One of my sources had a problem with something I'd posted previously here, and it was very important to take it down immediately, for reasons I can't explain. Because I didn't have time to go through the sentences and try to find exactly the part that had to be deleted, I just deleted everything below the video.

Better safe than sorry, according to multiple sources. And a basic rule is that a reporter never burns his sources, especially sources who are giving him really great stuff.

By the way, I'm loving how some of the commenters are picking up on the Cargo Cult Journalism trick that Dennis Zaki and Jesse Griffin have used to smear the Palins. It's the "sources said" voodoo, where the magic words are an incantation empowering you to say anything you want.

It's a game that's fun to play. Like you could play it with your wife: "Honey, those jeans make you look fat, sources said." And then when she clobbers you, she's violating your First Amendment rights.