WND Not Happy, Appeals Dismissal of Esquire Suit

It seems there’s room for WorldNetDaily (WND) to have one more obsession related to President Obama’s birth certificate, though this time it has little to do with Obama himself.

This week, WND announced its plans to appeal a federal judge’s decision to dismiss its $250 million lawsuit against Esquire magazine. At issue is a satirical piece executive editor Mark Warren wrote that claimed, quite comically, that WND editor-in-chief Joseph Farah was pulping the first print run of Jerome Corsi’s Where’s the Birth Certificate? The case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President. The book, which WND had trumpeted as the definitive work on the question of Obama’s provenance, was about to go on sale when Obama released his long-form birth certificate last year – a fact that, for most, ended the “birther” debate.

“[Farah] called up Corsi and really tore him a new one,” Warren wrote in the May 2011 parody, quoting a fake anonymous source at WND. "I mean, we'll do anything to hurt Obama, and erase his memory, but we don't want to look like f------ idiots, you know?”

U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer saw the humor and last week ruled in favor of a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, agreeing that satire was protected under the First Amendment. But shortly afterward, the quixotic WND responded with the fervor once reserved for Obama alone.

Larry Klayman, an attorney for WND who also runs the watchdog group Judicial Watch, said the ruling was “so poorly reasoned it rises to the level of negligence, if not a desire to dump the case because it is not palatable to the Washington establishment.”

Not palatable? Try ludicrous.

And that, arguably, is the crux of what WND is after. More than protecting the First Amendment by attacking those who abuse it – which so far has been its reasoning for taking legal action – WND in the end seems more interested in making sure the “birther” brouhaha lives on.