When your favorite athlete or team has been eliminated from a tournament and you're not particularly fond of any of the remaining contestants, the quandary you face may not be having to decide whom to root for but whom to root against.
Depending on who faces whom, and how much you dislike the two of them, you may find yourself wishing that they could somehow both lose – or that one could lose and the other get disqualified, or the winner in the present round go on to defeat in the next.
Some of the “players” in real life can be repugnant and repellent, too, leaving “spectators” with no clear choice as to whose side to take when they battle each other.
For instance, when private investigator/blogger Philip Klein challenges an attorney like Brett Coon or Jeffrey Dorrell, can you really hold your nose and pick one over the other? Or, do you use your imagination and try to figure out a way that both sides can suffer defeat?
Klein once invoked the First Amendment to defend himself against a defamation suit relating to posts on his blog, then later sued Google to reveal the names of anonymous bloggers posting comments about him. He petitioned the court to have Coon included in the suit, because someone at Coon’s firm had emailed the anonymous bloggers.
Coon filed a motion for sanctions against Klein, calling the litigation frivolous. It was quite a spectacle.
Now a client of Dorrell's is suing Klein for more than $2 million in damages, following a harrowing encounter with a bounty hunter who, Klein insists, was not working for him at the time.
“Jeffrey Dorrell is using the civil justice system to litigate our firm out of business,” Klein charges, accusing his adversary of violating the state law against barratry by recruiting litigants to file suit against him.
There’s plenty of wrongdoing accusations by both sides. We can only hope that there will be appropriate punishment for both.