This afternoon, my twitter feed erupted with references to Dave Weigel, a blogger for the Washington Post responsible for covering conservative politics. He made some derogatory comments about Matt Drudge and FOX news on Ezra Klein's Journolist that became public. He resigned from the Post. The listserv has been disbanded.

The Village Voice has a round-up of the affair. More from American Spectator and Blogging Heads. My, those DC bloggers are an incestuous little group, aren't they? Here's the Daily Caller. Ben Smith at Politico. Red State. Sounds like the guy is going to end up with a position on Huffington Post. Steve Benen.

Klein has a must-read post about the origins of Journolist and the "faux-intimacy" of the web. Wow. Love that phrase. I totally get it.

There's a lot of faux-intimacy on the Web. Readers like that intimacy,
or at least some of them do. But it's dangerous. A newspaper column is
public, and writers treat it as such. So too is a blog. But Twitter?
It's public, but it feels, somehow, looser, safer. Facebook is less
public than Twitter, and feels even more intimate. A private e-mail
list is not public, but it is electronically archived text, and it is
protected only by a password field and the good will of the members.
It's easy to talk as if it's private without considering the
possibility, unlikely as it is, that it will one day become public, and
that some ambitious gossip reporters will dig through it for an
exposure story. And because that possibility doesn't feel fully real,
people still talk like it's private and then get burned if it goes
public.

Sam Stein at the Huffington Post has more gossip about the resignation.

Most bloggers are outraged by this incident. Weigel, by all accounts, is a decent guy. You have to go to Ann Althouse and Pajamas Media to read posts that are gleeful about Weigel's departure.

And more from Julian Sanchez.

Jonathan Chait thinks that the WaPo didn't realize that Weigel wasn't a conservative when they hired him.

Only conservative reporters can interview conservative politicians? We're really in strange territory here.

Andrew Sullivan says that Weigel is a sane libertarian, not a liberal.

And from the other side. Jeffrey Goldberg says that Weigel said some really childish, unprofessional stuff on a public forum and should have known better. He also says the WaPo was stupid to hire him.

The sad truth is that the Washington Post, in its general desperation
for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much
adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training.
This little episode today is proof of this. But it is also proof that
some people at the Post (where I worked, briefly, 20 years ago) still
know the difference between acceptable behavior and unacceptable
behavior, and that maybe this episode will lead to the reimposition of
some level of standards. 

UPDATE: David Weigel explains ALL.