The Dish At Ten: Jonathan Chait

E-mails and posts are still coming in, so we are going to continue posting cheers and jeers semi-regularly throughout this anniversary week. To say I've been touched by them would be an understatement. Blogging is isolating in many ways, and when most of your interactions are debate-style, you can forget that many of your fellow-jousters actually even like you. In the classic House of Commons, there was a bar for the pols to patch things up after some brutal public fights - or the tea-room, or even the john. This week feels a bit like that - a friendly social truce in an ongoing intellectual argument. Here's Chait's addition:

[Andrew] cares deeply about politics, but politics, appropriately, isn't everything to him. That's a sensibility I've admired and sought to emulate. You can't go through life being angry at people for being wrong.

There's a line from the Godfather Part 2, in which Hyman Roth explains how we swallowed his anger at the murder of his friend Moe Green: "This is the business we've chosen." Opinion journalism isn't la cosa nostra, but it is a contentious business, and especially so opinion journalism blogging. I've always admired Andrew's ability to maintain, alongside his fierce, crusading opinion-mongering, a constant good cheer and capacity to keep his ideological crusades in their proper place. This is the business we've chosen.

I can't say Andrew wielded much of an ideological influence over me. But he influenced something that is more important than ideology.