I've tangled with Berlinski before, but this e-mail at Evolutionblog is incredible.

Dear Editors:

Thank you for your response. I am uninterested in posting this letter anywhere. It is intended for your eyes. I am obliged to ask you to attend precisely to what I, in fact, wrote, and not what you imagine I wrote. The sentence in question is as follows:

1) At Internet web sites such as /The Panda's Thumb /or /Talk Reason/, where various eminences repair to assure one another that all is well, it is considered clever beyond measure to attack a critic of Darwin's theory such as William Dembski by misspelling his name as William Dumbski.

a Note that my reference to /The Panda's Thumb/ and /Talk Reason/ is disjunctive and not conjunctive; and that b as a matter of logic and English grammar, 1) does /not/ imply that William Dembski's name was misspelled at /either/ The Panda's Thumb /or/ Talk Reason, although, /in fact/, it was misspelled at /The Panda's Thumb /and not /Talk Reason/.

In this regard, compare 1) with 3) At Internet web sites such as /The Panda's Thumb /or /Talk Reason/, where various eminences repair to assure one another that all is well, it is considered clever beyond measure to attack a critic of Darwin's theory such as William Dembski by insisting that his mathematical results are written in Jello.

That Dembski's mathematical results are written in Jello was a claim made at /neither/ The Panda's Thumb /nor/ Talk Reason; still the claim was considered clever beyond measure at both sites, no doubt because it /was/ clever, if not clever beyond measure.

What is at issue is whether you regard infantile verbal abuse ranging from the distasteful /(William Dumbski, How creationists suck/) to the contemptuous (/The Art of ID Stuntmen/, /Icons of Obfuscation/) as clever. I have no way directly of knowing, of course. For all I know you may collectively wince when you read such stuff. If so, you have not winced conspicuously, the more so, I am minded to add, since you seem either to have written or to endorsed some of the stuff in question.

Sincerely yours,

David Berlinski

I'm accustomed to creationists trying to bamboozle their audiences by babbling fast enough that no one can keep up; the Gish Gallop is standard operating procedure among them. This is a new tactic, an attempt to stupify the victim with superciliousness, and I hereby dub it the Berlinski Badger. I don't expect many to emulate it; the practice of focusing on irrelevant trivia and dancing dishonestly around the issues with unbelievable circumlocutions while maintaining a facade of snooty hauteur is something only a king among pompous twits can pull off.