The trick of "insulting upward."

Ann Coulter uses it, and so does that lawprof columnist Paul Campos -- who went to University of Michigan Law School with her -- Dave Kopel observes.

[P]ick somebody more famous than you. Vilify the person in some outrageous way. Ideally, the target gets upset and responds, and the press covers your public argument. By engaging in a public fight with you, the target has implicitly raised you to his own level of importance....

His column ... insulted upward at University of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse (bizarrely claiming that she is part of a conspiracy to protect Coulter). Althouse is far more famous than Campos on the Web and in academia; her record of scholarly publications in law journals is significantly larger than his. She responded to Campos on her blog, thus giving him more publicity.

A couple of weeks ago, Campos also successfully insulted upward when he accused University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds of advocating murder, and urged that the school censor Reynolds. Reynolds too has a vastly larger record of scholarly publication than Campos, and Reynolds' Web log, InstaPundit, is the most influential in the world (based on incoming links statistics at truthlaidbear.com).

Kopel notes that Campos also tried the insulting upward trick on Coulter but she used the correct response of ignoring it, while Glenn and I fell into the trap by responding. Well, it's not as if I don't know not to ignore an insulter who stands to gain from the attention. I do ignore insults every day. Some days, like yesterday, I ignore a whole slew of insults. But I choose some to respond to for various reasons. One reason I responded to Campos is that he's a fellow law professor. Another is, I actually know him. Also, he's got a column in a major newspaper.

Hey, I guess I should perceive Kopel as using the trick of defending upward! He got me to write about his damn Rocky Mountain News column.... at 3 a.m....

(Can you trust your own judgment, blogging at 3 a.m.?)