National Review Gets Sued, Finally Some Good News?

Once, in the dark ages before Blogs, I took a six month subscription to The National Review with the idea that maybe something Buckley had a hand in wouldn't be intolerably stupid.  The writing was childish (you get better here, if that's saying anything) and Buckley's only contributions were some sort of "Emeritus Letters" that clearly showed the man was well past whatever prime he had.  The subscription ran out... thankfully since that meant that I didn't need to read the waste of my money.  It isn't so much that I disagreed with them (I do, pretty much unequivocably) but that I don't care to pay for and read HS Freshman thinking and writing.  At NRO the ability to string words together has improved somewhat, but the logic and thinking still approximates the three year old's, "I want this now, don't tell me about facts!" screaming.  (I've had kids and I know they don't talk like that)

Now Michael Mann, a Penn State climatologist,  is suing NR for libel and defamation of character.

filed in District of Columbia Superior Court, Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, claimed that a July 15 article not only falsely accused him of misconduct, but crossed a line by comparing him to Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State football assistant coach convicted of child molestation. He also sued the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank that ran a piece about Mann on its staff blog, OpenMarket.org.  

This place right here doesn't worry about calling somebody like Rick Santorum names or even saying Mittens is a liar.  Some of that has to do with the fact that they deserve it, but I'm sure I can get away with it because they're quite public enough in their assholery for me to be shielded.  I'm afraid that Mann has been enough of a public face on his own hook that NR could pretty much call him any damn thing they pleased, and just claim satire.  The part about accusing him of fraud may cause them a bunch of difficulty.

It seems it has:

As many of you know, National Review is not a non-profit — we are just not profitable. A lawsuit is not something we can fund with money we don’t have.

You may not know much about NR but I'm pretty sure you do know that they are great whacking bangers of the "Free Market" drum.  They are not a news magazine any more than this site is so they don't have the excuse of running a large information gathering staff eating their income.  What they have are opinion writers that the market doesn't value highly enough for them to earn a profit.  That market would be the right-wing grifting machine that has given us Newt and his plastic wife earning a fine lifestyle and Dick Morris not looking at all as if he's missing meals.  You could run down a pretty fair list of right-wing noise makers (Rush?) that don't seem to be poor, though begging is big with all of them.  Somebody/s are being over-paid, there is that little matter of deficit spending or even the Right To Work For Less.

To be sure, the profit their investors are looking for isn't from $$$$s generated under that "Masthead" but from the benefits of keeping the marks in line and on script so "not profitable" works for them.  It doesn't have a damn thing to do with the "Market" they're always on about - it has everthing to do with manipulating politics to subsidize their betters - the antithesis of their individuality fetish.  NR is essentially paid advertising for all the rest of the RW grifting and their plutocratic overlords.  They're not pointless, that machine managed to get a Mitt Romney sort of close.  You only have to think about that in relation to everything else going on for about a minute to be very frightened... or at least a bit ill.

Anyhow, it is an early Xmas gift.