The WaPo has fired blogger David Weigel over this and this. Of course, like virtually all MSM journalists, Dave’s a left-liberal, but now, with that out in the open, readers could have more easily judged his blogs on conservatives and libertarians. Did he wish death on Drudge and Limbaugh (or me)? That’s important for readers to know. But Murray Rothbard always mourned the fighting, openly partisan newspapers of the 19th century, and their supplanting by grey, establishment dailies that pretended to objectivity while actually running a regime agenda.

Once a year, long-time columnist Charley Reese used to tell his readers about his finances, the organizations he belonged to, and his general political outlook, so they could better judge what he had to say. There is nothing wrong, and everything right, with journalists having strong opinions, as long as they are in the open. The problem comes with pretended disinterestedness. If the Koch Oil Company-funded Reason Magazine—which hired Dave to cover, and, they hoped, destroy the “Paultards”—had been honest about their motivations and paymasters, and not attempted to pass off a liberal as a libertarian, it would have been harder to complain. Reason showed Dave the door as  a salaryman when their anti-Paul campaign burned the paper mag, but he landed on his feet. I think that will happen again, perhaps at Salon or HuffPo. [UPDATE: He’s more than landed on his feet: Dave has been hired by MSNBC.]

One of the great virtues of the internet is that there is no question about where web-king Drudge stands, or smaller fry like LRC. Too bad the WaPo, dedicated to demonizing the “small people with the pitchforks,” can’t copy Matt.

UPDATE from a friend:

You couldn’t be more right about Dave Weigel.  When he worked at Reason he would come to our Ron Paul Meetup Group get-togethers in DC; since he worked for a supposedly libertarian publication, we assumed he was a libertarian. But then the articles he’d write seemed not at all enthusiastic about the most libertarian major presidential candidate in memory, which left me confused.  Then I went to a Reason Magazine event at their swanky Connecticut Avenue digs — and, despite the election being only months away, found nothing but hostility for Ron Paul from the “libertarians” there!  Only after finding your site did I discover Reason’s and Cato’s provenance and true purpose — derailing libertarian movements from within.

The viciousness of Weigel’s e-mails don’t surprise me, either; viciousness is one psychological trait the Octopus looks for in young scribes. The sheer bile of young writers in DC against anyone who questions enormous government is astonishing.

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.