Meghan McCain’s lawyers successfully scared conservative blog RedState into taking down a pair of parody posts written in her voice that made fun of her columns and interviews.
“We’re confident that we are within our rights to parody and mock Meghan McCain on this, but it is frankly not worth our time,” RedState co-founder Erick Erickson said in a blog post announcing their removal.
The posts by RedState user “Totally Meghan McCain” portrayed the Daily Beast/Newsweek columnist and daughter of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) as vapid and ignorant of American politics, most recently sending up her real-life endorsement of Mitt Romney over Rick Perry. The post, “Why Rick Perry Cannot and Also Can’t Win Being the President,” has been taken down but there’s still a cached version on Google. Here’s a pretty representative sample:
Firstly in the first place, some people had a question about my very obvious statement, “I don’t necessarily agree that Rick Perry is George Bush on crack, but he could definitely be described as George Bush 2.0.” The question, I have most often, been asked, is why I did not include literally anything in the piece to back up this claim or point out, the places where Perry and Bush are similar, the reason for that being simple. Hello? They are both from Texas. I guess I should apologize for, assuming that most people knew that already, but I guess they don’t. Well I am here to tell you in case you didn’t know: both George W. Bush and Rick Perry are from Texas. Now, in the entire time I have been paying attention to politics, there has only been one President of the United States elected from Texas. And if electing someone, from Texas was a winning strategy, then obviously, there would have been more.
Some ignorant jerk, clearly who doesn’t know about the young people, pointed out that George W. Bush 1.0 won, two elections, which is two more than my dad did. Let me just respond to that jerk by saying that George W. Bush only won those elections because he didn’t have to go against my dad either time. FACE!
According to RedState, lawyers for McCain threatened legal action if they didn’t remove the posts since they argued they could be misconstrued as having been written by McCain herself.
“These fake front page posts place Meghan McCain before the public in a false light which is highly offensive to a reasonable person,” a letter from attorney Albin Gess posted on RedState read. “The RedState ‘community’ that voted to put these posts on the frontpage acted at least as in reckless disregard as to their falsity and the false light in which Meghan McCain was being placed.”
You can read their full complaint here.
Benjy Sarlin
Benjy Sarlin is a reporter for Talking Points Memo and co-writes the campaign blog, TPM2012. He previously reported for The Daily Beast/Newsweek as their Washington Correspondent and covered local politics for the New York Sun.
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