The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘The Written Word Is Forever’

Posted on | June 25, 2010 | 65 Comments

Do you remember this headline?

Dede Goes Down Upstate

That story was filed from the Carriage House Inn in Watertown, N.Y. Ali Akbar, Kerry Picket of the Washington Times and Dave Weigel (then with the Washington Independent) were all blogging in the same hotel room where I was trying to hit deadline for the American Spectator with my 793-word account of Scozzafava quitting the race. The next day, Joe Biden was due in Watertown to campaign for Bill Owens, while Fred Thompson was coming in for Doug Hoffman.

John McCormack of the Weekly Standard was on his way into town that Sunday night and was supposed to meet us at the local pub later. John called to get directions and I was right up against deadline, so I wanted someone else to take the call. But Ali, Kerry and Dave were like, “What are we, your personal secretaries or something?”

And I went nuts. Total Jekyll-and-Hyde screaming meltdown: Why couldn’t my f–ing friends do me this one little f–ing favor and deal with this f–ing phone call so I could hit my f–ing deadline?

NY-23 was crazy like that. Good times.

Sam Stein at HuffPo says the news of Weigel’s ouster “was greeted with shock within the close-knit community of Washington political reporters.” Well, yeah, a small group of people go through a certain crucible of shared experiences and a “close-knit community” develops.

Writing is an inherently lonely occupation — just you and that blank page — and unless you’re an anti-social introvert, the chance to hang out with fellow writers is a welcome relief from the maddening isolation. When you’re all covering the same story, fighting each other for scoops and racing to hit deadline, the basis of camraderie is understandable.

Which is a roundabout way of explaining why I see Weigel differently than some of the readers who seem to be viewing WeigelGate strictly through the prism of political allegiances. As a reporter on the beat, Weigel generally hung out with the relative handful of campaign journalists on the Right.

The stuff Weigel wrote on Journolist, etc., doesn’t match the guy who hung out with us. Kerry Picket summed it up best:

UPDATE: Two previous posts get the ‘Lanche, while I ponder the significance of praise from . . . Conor Friedersdorf?

After a few hours’ sleep, I’ve returned to find still more commenters telling me I’m full of crap for refusing to repudiate and denounce my friend Dave Weigel.

Let me make reference to my American Spectator colleague Philip Klein, whose defense of Dave prompted one commenter to label Phil a “Weigeltard.”

Phil responded on Twitter, “The day a friendship causes me to support abortion, higher taxes and bigger govt, they’ll have a point.”

Exactly. By the way, excuse me for speaking in parables. (Hey, where did I get that idea?) I told the story of my deadline conniption in Watertown as an example of where I had totally screwed up and been in the wrong, and yet Weigel is still my friend. As are Kerry and Ali.

WeigelGate became the No. 1 topic on Memeorandum — the blog topic du jour — because conservative bloggers see in this episode a sort of Rosetta Stone of how media bias operates:

“Ah, here’s how it works, see? Erza gets his buddy Weigel hired on at the WaPo as the token ‘conservative’ blogger, knowing full well that Weigel is secretly on Ezra’s side, as proven by the Journolist rants.”

In this perspective, Weigel is a black-hatted villain, and any conservative journalist who refuses to denounce Weigel becomes an accomplice to evil, either as a useful idiot or as an active agent of the liberal media conspiracy.

And therefore all journalists are “wild animals,” as Melissa Clouthier says.

OK, but this is exactly the same inductive reasoning by which Charles Johnson and others imagine that they have “proven” that I am a white supremacist — an example of all that is hatefully wrong about conservatism — and then demand that other conservatives either repudiate me or be guilty of abetting raaaaacism.

In other words, Weigel is getting the “Ransom Note” treatment.

Well, let us balance Weigel’s errors — the known evidence of mala fides that everybody is now discussing — against other evidence that is not known. (Being a top Hayekian public intellectual, I believe that unknown information can often be more important than that which is known.)

Ali Akbar called me to discuss WeigelGate and pointed out something: Weigel hung out with us in NY-23, in Boston during the Brown campaign, at CPAC and at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference.

During all that time, Ali remarked, not once did Weigel do a “gotcha” by disseminating reports of the off-the-record stuff he saw and heard. Whatever vicious snark and gossip Weigel dished out via his blog, or e-mails or Twitter, he did not abuse his journalistic privilege by burning the people who gave him access. (However, as someone else pointed out, Weigel did breach the confidentiality of Grover Norquist’s Wednesday morning briefing, which is always explicitly off-the-record. Grover will surely exact his pound of flesh in retribution for that burn.)

Those of you who don’t know Dave Weigel, and who are now judging him solely on the question of whether he is good or bad for the conservative cause, are free to think whatever you want about him. However, you can’t tell me what to think about the guy. If I’m giving him too much benefit of the doubt, OK, time will tell. Maybe I’m like Luke Skywalker, convinced there is still some spark of good left in Darth Vader.

And as to the question of whether Weigel has done anything good for the conservative cause . . .

Well, you are free to speculate that Dave may have done me favors which I am not at liberty to discuss. A good reporter never burns his sources, and a good source never burns a reporter. “Ethics, shmethics.”

Category: Blogging, Neutral Objective Journalism

Comments

65 Responses to “‘The Written Word Is Forever’”

  1. Scott
    June 27th, 2010 @ 3:51 am

    If you know the guy, tell him to stand up on his hind legs and take what’s coming to him, and move on, perhaps with less fruitcakery, if that suits him and if it’s possible. I suspect it ain’t, but there’s a lot of things I don’t supect that are all up in my grill.

  2. Scott
    June 26th, 2010 @ 11:51 pm

    If you know the guy, tell him to stand up on his hind legs and take what’s coming to him, and move on, perhaps with less fruitcakery, if that suits him and if it’s possible. I suspect it ain’t, but there’s a lot of things I don’t supect that are all up in my grill.

  3. JadedByPolitics
    June 27th, 2010 @ 2:19 pm

    How can a guy who wishes death upon former Vice President Cheney and Druge be a “good” guy. I don’t have “friends” who email me wishing death upon anyone but then I am a Conservative and he is obviously not.

    The story btw is NOT about him personally though he is CREEP it is more about the “jourolist” and their creating the meme for the day via email with each other. It is no small thing that Americans are fed LIES either outright or by omission from the Corrupt Media daily to find out that they do indeed “chat” about how to do so.

    the 4th Estate has truly jumped the shark and landed right on the payroll of the Democrat Party.

  4. JadedByPolitics
    June 27th, 2010 @ 10:19 am

    How can a guy who wishes death upon former Vice President Cheney and Druge be a “good” guy. I don’t have “friends” who email me wishing death upon anyone but then I am a Conservative and he is obviously not.

    The story btw is NOT about him personally though he is CREEP it is more about the “jourolist” and their creating the meme for the day via email with each other. It is no small thing that Americans are fed LIES either outright or by omission from the Corrupt Media daily to find out that they do indeed “chat” about how to do so.

    the 4th Estate has truly jumped the shark and landed right on the payroll of the Democrat Party.

  5. JadedByPolitics
    June 27th, 2010 @ 2:20 pm

    gak! I cannot stand typo’s but there they are so it is Drudge and journolist.

  6. JadedByPolitics
    June 27th, 2010 @ 10:20 am

    gak! I cannot stand typo’s but there they are so it is Drudge and journolist.

  7. Bob Belvedere
    June 27th, 2010 @ 10:44 pm

    Stacy: Just had the time to read your Update. Bravo. Conservatives have to understand that we’re not just fighting to restore our freedoms and liberties, but also honor, decency, and traditional standards of conduct in a world gone mad with vile behavior. Your standing-by your friend is what gentlemen do.

  8. Bob Belvedere
    June 27th, 2010 @ 6:44 pm

    Stacy: Just had the time to read your Update. Bravo. Conservatives have to understand that we’re not just fighting to restore our freedoms and liberties, but also honor, decency, and traditional standards of conduct in a world gone mad with vile behavior. Your standing-by your friend is what gentlemen do.

  9. Bob Belvedere
    June 27th, 2010 @ 10:46 pm

    As for Mr. Weigel’s burning of Norquist, I can only say that Norquist deserved it because Grover Norquist is a useful idiot of The Jihad.

  10. Bob Belvedere
    June 27th, 2010 @ 6:46 pm

    As for Mr. Weigel’s burning of Norquist, I can only say that Norquist deserved it because Grover Norquist is a useful idiot of The Jihad.

  11. Weigel out… « The Tiger on Politics
    June 28th, 2010 @ 8:42 am

    […] I can see why Stacy McCain has sympathy for […]

  12. Rick Ellis
    July 1st, 2010 @ 5:14 pm

    The thing that strikes me most about this thread of comments is how closely it matches similar stuff I read from those on the left when Bush & the Republicans were in power. Every opponent is an evil bastard, every opinion you don’t agree with is the final result of some carefully crafted conspiracy.

    The truth is that things aren’t as coordinated on the left or the right as their opponents always suspect. And it’s possible for someone to have an opinion different than yours for honest intellectual reasons.

    Yeah, self-righteous anger is a lot more fun. But it’s not as illuminating.

  13. Rick Ellis
    July 1st, 2010 @ 1:14 pm

    The thing that strikes me most about this thread of comments is how closely it matches similar stuff I read from those on the left when Bush & the Republicans were in power. Every opponent is an evil bastard, every opinion you don’t agree with is the final result of some carefully crafted conspiracy.

    The truth is that things aren’t as coordinated on the left or the right as their opponents always suspect. And it’s possible for someone to have an opinion different than yours for honest intellectual reasons.

    Yeah, self-righteous anger is a lot more fun. But it’s not as illuminating.

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