Category: Middle East

On his Twitter feed Monday, Dave Weigel, journalist, posted the following (emphasis mine):

The WikiLeaks Afghan dump is depressing. Very tired of our effort there being subjected to this kind of crap.

When Glenn Greenwald pressed Weigel to clarify what “kind of crap” he meant, Weigel answered:

I mean the disclosing in a way that hurts us. It’s not like we’ve been prevented from knowing things are going poorly.

This caused a minor stir among Weigel’s Twitter followers, with one responding:

You prefer being lied to? You really *have* crossed over to the dark side…

To which Weigel replied:

I support the war and agree to disagree with a lot of people on this.

Greenwald continued to prod Weigel for clarification, but Weigel ignored the questions, huffing, “I don’t ‘debate’ on Twitter. If it’s important I take it to email. This is a wretched medium for debate.” Meanwhile, some members of #teamweigel began tweeting their disapproval, distaste, and even shock.

I can’t imagine why.

Dave Weigel supported the invasion of Iraq, and he continued to ridicule and slander war opponents until the precise moment that it was no longer professionally advantageous for him to do so. He is a shape-shifting seeker of the Inner Ring who has already been called a liar twice by his former bosses. Here’s Matt Welch of Reason on Weigel’s suggestion that he was let go from that magazine for being too mavericky (a recurrent form of self-gratification for Weigel):

To the extent that this gives the impression that Dave’s job was in any way tied to him voting for Obama, I need to shout from the rooftops that this is emphatically not the case. If it were, Ronald Bailey would no longer be our Science Correspondent and Tim Cavanaugh would not be our back-of-the-book columnist. …

There were multiple factors at play in the Weigel/Reason separation, none of them having to do with voting records, and many (though not all) pointing to what Dave alludes to in his post: What he wanted to write about, and what we needed him to write about, were two different things. …

Another clarification, especially for people unfamiliar with Reason: There is, to put it mildly, zero professional sanction at this magazine for being “a little less favorable to Republicans,” or being “pro-gay marriage and pro-open borders.”

And here’s Nick Gillespie:

In his public mea culpa (which like all examples of the genre is long on mea and short on culpa), former Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel suggested his long journey upwards began with his being fired from Reason magazine.

Full disclosure: I was editor in chief of Reason from 2000 to 2008 and hired Dave, who was eventually let go by my successor, Matt Welch. Dave suggests that the separation came about because he had strayed too far off what we sometime call the “libtard” reservation. …

As Matt Welch has written, Dave certainly didn’t earn any supervisory ire by voting for Obama-Biden or even for being from Delaware (though this latter condition has never been a clear plus for anyone except maybe George Thorogood and Cesar Romney). Similarly, the implication that Reason would be bothered by a staffer’s attacks on Republicans or support for gay marriage and open borders makes about as much sense and holds as much value as fiat currency.

Actually, while Maverick Dave was with Reason, he made some pathetically strenuous efforts to ingratiate himself with the herd (another recurrent theme in Weigel’s career). In Reason‘s 2008 presidential election survey, Weigel gave the following answer to the final question:

5. Leaving George W. Bush out of consideration, what former U.S. president would you most like to have waterboarded? Lyndon Baines Johnson. While his children watch.

Leaving aside the warped question and the demented reply – Weigel and his pal Spencer Ackerman seem to have studied rhetoric at the Mel Gibson Finishing School – do you think for a minute that Weigel would say such a thing (or anything negative at all) about the father of Medicare and Medicaid in his new gig as an MSNBC commentator? More recently, in an odd act of self-defense, Weigel actually admitted that he wrote things he didn’t believe on Journolist in order to “suck up to the liberals.” And that was for a tiny, exclusive audience that was supposedly organized to allow “extremely smart people” to say what they really thought! What ulterior considerations inform Weigel’s reporting and analysis for us dumb yokels drooling over our Hungry-Man dinners in front of the tube?

Anyway, now Weigel’s “supporting” “our” war in Afghanistan, the It War of the militant center that employs him, and people are surprised? Please.

P.S. I’ll go ahead and write the rebuttal for Dave and his clique. Yes, I’m a loser nobody who blogs for the objectively pro-fascist Antiwar.com. I only wrote this because I envy Dave’s sweet job at the Washington Post (oops!), his large circle of friends, and the cool, emotionally mature professionalism he demonstrated in Boogiegate. Did I leave out anything? Oh, right. Yada yada yada anti-Semite. (Hey, you said it, Adolf!) When you get through with me, maybe you can respond to Welch and Gillespie.

P.P.S. For more on the Weigel-Journolist fiasco, if you’re not sick to death of it already, I strongly recommend two posts by Arthur Silber: 1, 2.