Teabagging.com: The Vicious Ad Hominem Continues…

Yesterday, Stephanie at the Left-Wing hatchet-job site, Teabagging.com, wrote the following:

“Well no wonder he doesn’t like taxes very much. According to documents obtained by Teablogging by running a goddamned simple Nexis search on the internets, national Tea Party organizer, Top Conservatives on Twitter cofounder and TCOTReport.com publisher Michael P. Leahy has, over the past 16 years, amassed nearly $150,000 in state and federal tax liens, small claims court judgments and civil suits.”

She goes on to call Mr. Leahy a number of crude names and make accusations about his mental state. Then she attaches a partially redacted public records search that includes the name of a relative of Mr. Leahy, as well — possibly a spouse or daughter.

We understand that Stephanie spends considerable amounts of time creating a blog to attack people she disagrees with on a personal level, but rarely bothers to understand their message or make a coherent argument about why they are substantively incorrect. It’s amazing that she’s so angry that she thinks it’s valuable to fill a WordPress blog with unfunny sexual references, snide but substantively empty remarks, and attacks on people who attended tea parties.

We’re tempted to fight fire with fire, but we won’t. Instead, we’ll dissent to both her tactics and her techniques.

First, it appears that her Lexis-Nexis search has picked up duplicate or multiple entries for the same debt. Both the collections complaint filing entry and the judgment entry for the same matter are included in her list of debts as separate entries. The tax judgments from later entries may include judgments still unpaid from earlier entries. In other words, she’s probably double or triple counting certain debts in order to reach the total that she’s reached. But, in any case, we don’t know and we don’t think she does, either. If you are going to do a hit piece, you should at least try to be accurate.

Second, she should have thought twice about the underhandedness of publishing her accusation and documentation about Mr. Leahy, who may or may not be a “public figure” for first amendment purposes, but is certainly still a citizen blogger like her. Mr. Leahy isn’t a politician or government policy-maker. We understand the argument that people should be informed about who Mr. Leahy really is in order to better evaluate the truth or accuracy of claims in his online advocacy, but we wonder how exposing financial problems really helps people put his commentary in perspective. Does she think Mr. Leahy’s views on taxes should be discounted because he may have a grudge against the tax man? Even so, why not actually address grounds for disagreeing with the views themselves before simply attacking the messenger? This kind of ad hominem isn’t just fallacious, it reveals that she’s more about hating the tea party crowd than about disagreeing with their position.

Third, we’d think that a self-described liberal like Stephanie would wonder whether it’s seemly to put-down a guy because he’s had financial problems or isn’t a rich young metropolitan type. Is Mr. Leahy in any way less credible about government spending trends because a decade ago he was unable to pay some debts and had to default in small claims? Can only rich people who’ve managed to make it through the various valleys and troughs of their lives without financial hardships have credible opinions?

Finally, what we dislike the most about Stephanie’s approach is that it can have a chilling effect on conservatives and libertarians who’d like to post their opinions online. It’s a kind of unspoken threat. You better think twice before you publicly disagree with the netroots/obamabot crowd or your embarrassing small claims court judgment may end up on the blogosphere.

Note: We’re only assuming that Stephanie’s search results actually reflect civil case filings, judgments and liens against the Mr. Leahy of TCOT fame because we haven’t verified with him and we don’t know his address or social security number. We wonder if Stephanie verified with him or gave him an opportunity to respond…?

Technorati Tags: ad hominem, brandon martin, chiling effect, conserative, daily uprising, hatchet job, Michael Leahy, Michael P. Leahy, TCOT, tea party, teabaggin