I blog under a pseudonym. So I take special note of the recent outing of the anonymous liberal blogger “Publius” by Ed Whelan at National Review’s Bench Memos blog. Publius turns out to be a law professor, and Whelan uses this to ridicule his wish for anonymity:

In response, I received . . .  an e-mail stating  . . . that he writes under a pseudonym “[f]or a variety of private, family, and professional reasons.” I’m guessing that those reasons include that friends, family members, and his professional colleagues would be surprised by the poor quality and substance of his blogging.

The motive for Whelan’s exposure of the blogger? The anonymous blogger “abuse[d] his anonymity to engage in irresponsible attacks” and “has been biting at my ankles in recent months.” Quite petty, if you ask me. I actually find myself in agreement with Anonymous Liberal for the second time in a week, at least in part:

It’s really difficult to put into words just how despicable and childish this behavior is. This is a man who was a Deputy Assistant Attorney General. He’s currently the President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. And he’s acting like a six-year-old.

In his post outing Publius, Whelan claims that he is doing the world a service by “exposing an irresponsible anonymous blogger.” The entire tone of the post, however, is petty and childish. It’s clear that Whelan’s only motive is getting back at someone who was critical of him.

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway also gets it exactly right:

While I generally find the practice of revealing people’s secrets to the public distasteful, there are times when it’s appropriate.  Public officials who are abusing their power is the most obvious case.   Here, however, there is no public benefit achieved. Whelan is simply annoyed that Publius had been “biting at my ankles in recent months” and critiquing his blog posts.

Jeopardizing a man’s career and family relationships over something so petty is simply shameful.

In short, in “outing” Publius, Whelan has outed himself as petty and thin-skinned. It’s good to see other righties noting the wrongness of this outing, including Just One Minute and a one-liner from Pirate’s Cove (who likewise thinks Anonymous Liberal makes some good points). And Walter Olson of Overlawyered writes at Point of Law that “the particular motives for anonymity in most of the instances I know about are more complicated and less illegitimate than one would imagine from the simple charge of cowardice.”

It’s hard to imagine a more comfortable environment for a liberal than the faculty of a law school, but if the guy wants to be anonymous, who’s to argue? In fact, in his own post about the outing, Publius — professor John Blevins — gives some pretty good reasons for blogging anonymously.

At first, I was  a little worried about blogging anonymously. I was afraid it would lead me to be intemperate. I don’t think I have been, but I’ll admit the cloak of secrecy occasionally tempts me toward more over-the-top writing that (I think) I engage in.

Like Publius, though, I think I have a pretty good reason to blog anonymously. My profession (law) is notoriously liberal. I  see no reason to share politics with clients, and my livelihood as a solo attorney depends mainly on referrals from others lawyers.  To top it off, I am in a relatively small community. I haven’t figured out yet whether that aggravates the risk that I’ll lose business or mitigates it, but for now, I’m staying under wraps.

(For anybody curious as to how I came up with “Deuce Geary,” it’s derived from the nickname we had in the Marine Corps for our field gear: canteens, cartridge belt, helmet, etc. Every Marine had to sign for his gear on a Form 782. Hence we referred to our field gear as “782 gear” or “deuce gear.” From that, I decided on Deuce Geary.  I wanted a cool name derived from my Marine Corps days, but all the cool names like “Razor Wire” were taken.)

H/T: Riehl World View.

UPDATE: Rick Moran puts it colorfully at RightWing Nuthouse: “I am very happy Ed has enjoyed his Captain Queeg moment and solved the mystery of the missing strawberries.”

UPDATE #2: Whelan posts in self-defense and does himself no favors:

A blogger may choose to blog under a pseudonym for any of various self-serving reasons, from the compelling (e.g., genuine concerns about personal safety) to the respectable to the base. But setting aside the extraordinary circumstances in which the reason to use a pseudonym would be compelling, I don’t see why anyone else has any obligation to respect the blogger’s self-serving decision.

An odd comment, coming from a conservative.  And this:

[Blevins aka Publius] wanted to present one face to his family, friends, and colleagues and another to the blogosphere. That’s understandable but hardly deserving of respect. If he wanted to avoid the risk of being associated publicly with his views, he shouldn’t have blogged.

Who says Blevins was presenting two different faces? What if, like me, his family and colleagues know is general political drift but he is otherwise politically enigmatic? How is being more forthright under a pseudonym misrepresentative? If he’s like me, Blevin is not contradicting anything he’s told anyone else. He’s just writing about topics that he doesn’t discuss with anyone else. I’m sure even Ed Whelan has friends that run the gamut from a person in whom he would confide his deepest thoughts to those with whom he is much more on guard. Is his distinguishing among those friends an associates not deserving of respect?

UPDATE #3: William Jacobsen — who, like Blevins, is a law professor — posts a reminder at Legal Insurrection that not not all the criticism is credible.

UPDATE #4: Simon Owens interviewed both Whelan and Blevins. His write-up is at Bloggasm.

UPDATE #5: Whelan apologizes online. Blevins graciously accepts. Whelan vouches for the sincerity of his apology.