When The Washington Post signed Dave Weigel on to blog on the wingnut beat, I really wish I'd had the prescience to mark down "That's brilliant, but it'll never last." Oh, I thought it. But I just didn't mark it down.
His work beforehand was very solid, he's not a DFH, and he actually was fair in his for-public-consumption work. The genius in having him was having someone covering the Tea Partiers who isn't of them. Anyone can be adversarial, and anyone can be partisan. The trick is to work at factual and objective. It worked until he was made the story. This is the "it'll never last part."
It seems to me that if you blog for awhile, ultimately you will end up saying something along the lines of "X should DIAF", whether in e-mail or blogularly. So he said Drudge should set himself on fire--in e-mail terms, that's nothing. That isn't even all that out there for blogs, where people are regularly encouraged to consume sackfuls of disincorporated genitals, self-immolate--or at least seek open conflagrations, and are discouraged from reproduction, whilst not necessarily being discouraged from employing upon themselves some of the ministrations whereby reproduction is acheived. (I cleaned that up pretty good, I think.)
WaPo, like many old-school publications, is satisfied that columnists only engage in cheerleading for war, or torture, or openly lie and plagiarize--but they shouldn't be mean. Mean is bad, and their editors get letters. It's a real PITA.
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