Going Mainstream

First, one of my favorite bloggers, Ross Douthat gets picked up by the NYT, now Ezra Klein - another favorite - moves over to the Washington Post. Congrats, and good for him. But Matt makes a good point:

...to be perfectly honest I do have some concerns about this. After all, one thing all decent progressive blogs do is point out semi-regularly that the Washington Post opinion section is a pretty rotten operation. You have liars like Charles Krauthammer and George Will penning regular columns, alongside less-egregious but still pretty pernicious stuff like David Ignatius’ apologia for war crimes and so forth. There are also good people working there, of course, like E.J. Dionne and Harold Meyerson. But while both of those guys write a lot of great stuff on a lot of important topics, you don’t see them ever writing great stuff on the important topic of how grossly irresponsible it is for an influential entity that wants to be taken seriously as a purveyor of information to be publishing the likes of Krauthammer and Will. That, of course, is the world we live in. People don’t go after their bosses with hatchets. So while hiring Ezra makes the Post less hatchet-worthy, it also means that we’re down a hatchet-wielder. That’s the dark lining in my silver cloud.

On top of that - I'll do my best to find some new, underground, bloggers to keep it hip :)