NEW RULE

Jeremy takes time off from apology-writing to come up with his best rule yet:

Who is "WB", and why, whilst embarking on her vigorous attacks on us for criticising Blair, hasn't she identified her connection with him?

Yep, we all know about the requirement for people to “identify their connection” with Tim Blair. It’s a Lefty Law.

What this is about is that this "WB" person who's been travelling the internet smearing us is POSTING FROM TIM BLAIR'S IP.

NOTE THE CAPITALS. This must be the crime of the frickin’ century. Incidentally, how is he so certain that Blair pays the Internet bills? Why does Jeremy not imagine that Blair might be posting from WB’s IP? Sexist scum!

Update: Jeremy decrees that Andrew Bolt must answer his emails. No response from Bolt. Gee, I can't imagine why Bolt would refuse to answer emails from a person who called him a racist liar. Maybe Jeremy needs to find some new magic words... like "I apologise".

Update II: Helen Dale mentioned the other day how Jeremy's writing had become rather "mean-spirited " of late. Turns out Jeremy had the same thought... three years ago:

The longer a person partakes in internet sniping, the shallower and more bitter their own writing becomes, until eventually the only people continuing to read them will be those who are already vicious and twisted themselves.

He should have made a rule about that.

Correction/retraction: Jeremy did not use the words "racist liar" when referring to Bolt. Here is what Jeremy actually wrote, in a post titled "Still a dickhead":

I confess I haven’t been reading Bolt at all lately. But I was clearing out my RSS feed reader this morning and the last post it caught, from late November (before Bloglines hit the 200 unread post limit and started ignoring him) was such a spectacularly awful effort that I can’t just let it pass. Even though it’s almost a month old.

Racist, where race had nothing to do with the issue at all. Misleading and dishonest, where he pretends not to understand what is meant by the word “murder”. And contemptible pandering, as he sets his readers off for some absolutely despicable “let’s slaughter the insane” and “avoid getting in taxies driven by Africans” drivel.