So I haven’t updated felixsalmon.com in forever, and I feel I’m very late to the Dave Weigel party, having spent most of my day doing other things like watching the World Cup and swimming in the Atlantic. So this goes here, rather than at Reuters:
The bien-pensant consensus surrounding l’affaire Weigel is that it’s wrong he got kicked out of his position blogging for the Washington Post. And that of course is entirely correct. But even many of the people who are on #teamweigel will quickly add that he demonstrated poor judgment in writing what he wrote, and that this should be a lesson to us all.
I don’t think that’s true. Our wired and Twittered world is increasingly blurring the distinction between the personal and the professional, and in such a world honesty is a much greater virtue than mealy-mouthed meekness when it comes to expressing the truth as you see it. Especially in a blogger. People have opinions, and it’s kinda hilarious to see conservatives try to simultaneously complain that Weigel had erroneously been counted as one of their number while at the same time complaining that he wasn’t “objective”.
I do believe that Weigel resigned rather than was fired, and it’s easy to see why he’d want to do that after reading the absolutely horrendous column by their lame, sad toady of an ombudsman today. Weigel is a great talent, and he’ll land somewhere which will be positively encouraging to say in public what he was confined to saying in private while housed at WaPo. He’s a very funny guy, and he should be able to let rip as much as he likes, without then feeling the need to apologize for being who he is.
Meanwhile, a horrible little turd somewhere is gleefully if quietly celebrating his coup (I’m sure it’s a guy) in leaking Weigel’s private correspondence to Fishbowl DC and the Daily Caller. Maybe he’s genuinely disturbed in some way. But, to coin a phrase, this would be a vastly better world to live in if he decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire.
If we look at the root it would seem that people are people in a much larger world. There is little difference between the two worlds other than we categorize people into one or the other. Ultimately our business trust lies between the actions of people and they way they have been socialized.