It’s been observed that History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. There seems to be echoes of similarity bouncing among lawsuits these day.

The shutuppery lawsuit that the big-time media has take some notice of is Shirley Sherrod’s defamation suit against Andrew Breitbart’s estate. J. Christian Adams writes about it here.

Sherrod’s lawsuit is premised on a dangerous idea: when conservatives speak about liberals, they shouldn’t be allowed to quote the liberal saying disgraceful things unless they quote the liberal also saying nice things. Supposedly, Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart.com didn’t publish enough of the nice things Sherrod said, and thus Sherrod sued Andrew and Larry O’Connor (a Brietbart.com editor).

Let’s call it the not-enough-nice-context theory of defamation. They don’t teach it in law school, yet.

Sherrod’s defamation theory is dangerous to the free press

Read the whole thing. The Gentle Reader who has been following the lawsuits reported here at Hogewash! may see certain recurring themes.

One of the topics Shirley Sherrod’s lawyers wanted to know about in my deposition is who controls the comments to articles here at PJ Media.

Hmmmm.

UPDATE—Bad link fixed.

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