I suppose that I should take it as a backhanded compliment that various folks on the Left seem to have developed a sudden interest in smearing me, though I confess that I have a modest preference for the old-fashioned straightforward compliment. But at least the feebleness of the attacks is amusing.

Take this fellow who calls himself Comrade Commander Guy (and who thus signals his tenuous grasp of reality). Comrade Commander Guy alleges that I’m responsible for the “lame canard … that Harold Koh will end English and American Common Law and replace it with Sharia Law.” Never mind that I promptly and specifically repudiated the sharia allegation as soon as I learned of it.

Comrade Commander Guy also faults me for “cook[ing] up” a “conspiracy theor[y]” that Justice “Ginsberg [sic] will end Mother’s Day.” Well, I’ll acknowledge that I have called attention to the fact, documented in point 5 here, that Ginsburg in 1974 recommended this change to federal law:

Replacing “Mother’s Day” and “Father’s Day” with a “Parents’ Day” should be considered, as an observance more consistent with a policy of minimizing traditional sex-based differences in parental roles.

Comrade Commander Guy evidently doesn’t recognize the difference between a fact and a conspiracy theory.

Comrade Commander Guy also links to a post of his from two days ago that claims that I “ma[d]e up” stuff (his noun is cruder) about Ginsburg. He links to this May 2005 post of mine, which cites the source for the charges. In supposed refutation of my charges, Comrade Commander Guy links to a Slate article that contests a separate charge—one that did not appear in my May 2005 post but one (on lowering the age of consent) that I did later add, temporarily, to my Ginsburg bill of particulars. I added that charge after I discovered that law professor Eugene Volokh had established the intermediate links that apparently supported it. But as soon as Volokh discovered that Ginsburg’s own miscitation had confused him, I withdrew the charge and publicly apologized to Ginsburg for “my misunderstanding of what her report apparently meant to recommend.”

As regular readers know, far from “mak[ing] up” stuff, I carefully document the facts that I set forth. Further, my consistent practice has been to acknowledge and correct the occasional—and, as I think the record will show, very rare—errors that I make. I guess that I can only wish that those seeking to discredit me would adopt similar practices.