The Other McCain

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.”