Michael Fumento

I never thought that Tim Lambert was a mild-mannered respectable blogger until something about Mike Fumento made his brain snap and left him a dysfunctional obessive-compulsive. Sure enough, it turns out he was playing his rude tricks months earlier with Tim Blair, a fellow Aussie with a terrific blog. Blair made this posting on March 15 of this year:

Lefty Tim Lambert has set up a mirror of this site, apparently hosted on the University of New South Wales server. I've sent him a note.

UPDATE. Lambert, who hasn't answered my email or phone calls, has given the mirrored site a clever new name: "This is Not Tim Blair's blog". Yet everything I post immediately appears there. It's the work of a super genius!

I'm not really interested -- yet -- in what legal or copyright issues may be involved. I'd just prefer that Lambert close the thing and stop being so weird and obsessive.

UPDATE II. Just spoke to Lambert's supervisor, Paul Compton, at the UNSW. He told me Lambert had agreed to take his site down lest the UNSW's role in this debacle be "misunderstood". I'd spoken to Lambert a few minutes earlier; he hadn't mentioned this. We'll wait and see.

UPDATE III. The Lambert matter is concluded. Much thanks to everybody (including Ken Parish) for legal advice and offers of assistance; it's alarming to me that things had to reach to that point before the duplicate site was taken down. If ever a right-winger tries to pull the same dumb stunt on a lefty, well, let me condemn you in advance.

A final point: after complaining about how unfair it was that they couldn't comment here, members of the banned had an entire day to make their incisive points about any post ... and they didn't say a thing outside of the lead item. Kinda proves something, doesn't it?

The last paragraph contains Lambert's explanation for his misdeed. Blair, like millions of other bloggers, doesn't allow comments on his site. But Lambert thinks that's unfair because it doesn't let people say nasty things about Blair right on Blair's site. That they can say them anywhere else in the universe is irrelevant. So Lambert set up a mirror site of Blair's that allowed for nasty comments. Alas for Lambert, as Blair observes, people barely took advantage of the opportunity anyway.

A final note. When Lambert took down his mirror site, this is what he replaced it with. Start taking that Clomipramine Lambert -- one bottle per day.