Dave Weigel was the first Journolista to fall in the recent Daily Caller series.
Weigel was fired from his blog at The Washington Post (resignation accepted) after emails in which he bad-mouthed conservatives were revealed. Weigel ended up at Slate.com, owned by WaPo.
Weigel either was a scoundrel or a victim, or bupkis, depending upon your perspective.
Weigel has an op-ed at WaPo which actually is kinda, sorta fair and balanced, Five myths about the ‘tea party’.
I thought Myth 2 was mostly fairly presented (except for the first part of the last sentence):
2. The tea party is racist.
It’s a phenomenon that some activists call “nutpicking” — send a cameraman into a protest and he’ll focus on the craziest sign. Yes, there are racists in the tea party, and they make themselves known. But tea party activists usually root them out. Texas activist Dale Robertson, who held a sign likening taxpayers to a racial epithet at a 2009 rally, was drummed out of that event and pilloried by his peers. Mark Williams, formerly the bomb-throwing spokesman for the Tea Party Express (he once told me he wanted to send the liberal watchdog group Media Matters “a case of champagne” for calling him racist), was booted after penning a parody that had the NAACP pining for slavery.
Liberal critics of the tea party argue that conservative opposition to social spending is often racially motivated. That’s not new, though, and it’s not the basis for the tea party.
I had not heard the term “nutpicking” before. Sounds kinda weird, but does capture the flavor of the methodology by which the Tea Party movement is under attack.
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