Dave Weigel: Piece of Shit

The most hilarious thing about how excited people got when the Washington Post fired Dave Weigel was that everyone and his uncle, including some very admirable people, bent over themselves to praise and defend him. Despite the fact that he's a really worthless piece of shit.

Take yesterday's tweet about the Wikileaks documents published Sunday:

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

That's clever and insightful, right?   Actual factual reporting on civilians killed by our soliders is just depressing crap to Dave.

And none of his defenders seem to actually have read the piece that made conservatives so angry they felt they need to fight back against him.  Do you remember when Bob Etheridge assaulted a young man who asked him if he supported the Obama agenda?

This is how Weigel described the encounter:

Last week Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-N.C.), who's seen as a safe bet for re-election this year despite representing a somewhat conservative (Cook R+2) district, ran into two self-described students with video cameras outside of a fundraiser.

"Do you fully support the Obama agenda?" asked one of the students.

"Who are you?" asked Etheridge, grabbing one of the cameras and pointing it down -- a move more typically seen from Hollywood bodyguards than congressmen. The second camera rolled as Etheridge, irritated, held the wrist of the first cameraman, then pulled the student to his side and grabbed him in a hug

Assault is not a hug.  Weigel showed absolutely no interest in the congressman's bad behavior and focused a lot of irritation on the kid who was physically attacked for asking an obnoxious question. When people called him on this, being the contrarian asshole he is, Weigel dug in his heels and pouted:

I've never seen such a hateful and, frankly, ignorant response to anything I've written. I was accused of "minimizing" the incident, of defending Etheridge, and of working off of Democratic talking points. (My post went live at 10:33 a.m., and Ben Smith obtained those talking points three hours later.) The Drudge Report gave this headline to my post: "WASH POST: NOT AN ASSAULT, A 'HUG.' "

And more:

That's a sample of the 256 e-mails I got about this, from people who decided that the proper outlet for their anger at a congressman who roughed up an a kid asking a question he didn't like was to attack a media outlet that used too soft a verb in describing the incident. They -- and, sadly, some once-influential bloggers -- insisted that a good journalist would have taken the video at face value and fired off a bunch of invective about the congressman. Well, I never defended what Etheridge did. And I'm never going to post a video at face value without asking whether it came from. People like these e-mailers will continue to whine, sneer, and hurl insults; I'll continue to be a journalist.

No, Dave,  People demand that when citizens (even obnoxious ones) are physically attacked on the street by politicians, that journalists not give them a pass to beat up on little people.  That's what you did.  Your immature repsonse, your inability to recognize that your initial hit on the story was not only wrong, but immoral-- this is why the Posy was right to fire your sorry ass.

And for all Weigel's inistence on not taking Andrew Breitbart video on face value, last week when people were doing that very thing to Shirley Sherrod, where was Weigel? 

Mocking her situation and that of Octavia Nasr:

Let's just compromise and make Shirley Sherrod the middle east producer for CNN.

Dave Weigel: piece of shit