TNR in its weird way invited me to write a response to Jonathan Chait's big article on the netroots and here it is. I have almost endlessly complicated thoughts on this subject, but since I was writing in TNR I focused primarily on Chait's rather odd understanding of the netroots/TNR relationship rather than the many other issues that are in play.

I think it's interesting that Atrios says he named Jon Chait as his favorite columnist just a few years ago. When I was interviewing for jobs in journalism back in the spring of 2003 this question came up a lot and I always named Jon in this regard. It occurs to me that this probably isn't a coincidence. More than anything else, Chait's brand of "ass-welt reporting" prefigured blogging in a significant way. His method was, is, and probably always will be fairly marginal in the magazine world but has really come into its own on the internet.