Fenstermaker agonistes

I’ve been wondering when this part of the Khalid Sheik Mohammed story was going to get a little air ever since I heard them interviewing one of the members of his “dream team,” Scott Fenstermaker, on the radio.

Ed Morrissey is very smart, but he’s missing something here about Fenstermaker: He is very, very stupid. I know this because I he was my adversary in a small case once–a case, in fact, in which he represented his own law firm, and thereby proved the ancient adage about what sort of a lawyer the self-represented get for themselves.

Fenstermaker stunned me with this obtuseness. The experience was more akin to attempting to interact with masonry than any other I have had in my litigation career. He was dumb, and he was childish.

Fenstermaker was infuriating because he never, ever processed what you tell him and responded with an answer premised on the new information — not merely that he didn’t agree. He just didn’t absorb a thing you were saying. Some lawyers are manipulative, or misstate what you’ve said, or are playing dumb, but not this guy. He was just thick as a brick.

I know his resume makes it appear that he has been somewhere and done something, but I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that somewhere between then and now, there’s a serious head injury in the mix.

And I have nothing per se against dumb-dumbs, even in the legal profession. But the point is, Ed’s looking for a way to get through to Fenstermaker, and it isn’t going to happen. There’s no there there. He is not just trying to confuse you, Ed. He is thoroughly confused.

And the other point is this: The fact that this guy is both a lawyer for this mass murderer or a member of his family — or whatever — : and his chief spokesman, means something very weird is afoot, the precise nature of which leaves me feeling kind of dumb, too. But at the end of the day, it’s probably nothing more than just… Scott Fenstermaker.

UPDATE: : Hey, was I wrong about Scott?

Cross-posted on Likelihood of Success, Ron Coleman’s pretty good blog. His really good blog is LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION:®.

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