Quote of the Day: I'm a Cool Kid

Dave Weigel bravely breaks the No. 1 cool kid rule: Don't say you're a cool kid

"It’s not rocket science why she started taking an interest in me... I had [thousands of] Twitter followers. I had a big audience already. When you’re running something like Fishbowl, it’s your job to figure out who the ‘cool kids’ are. If you aren’t one of them, you write about them."

--Slate's Dave Weigel, on why Betsy Rothstein of Fishbowl DC began obsessively writing about him and eventually posted his JournoList emails that cost him his Washington Post job, as reported by The Washington City Paper's Moe Tkacik.

Tkacik adds:

This statement is striking for many reasons, most conspicuously for the fact that Weigel is to the ’80s movie definition of “cool kid” about what Etheridge’s chokehold was to a “hug.” This is in large part the source of his appeal: He’s a lovable dork who makes no apologies for it. (He later told Rothstein in an interview that he spent much of his high school days playing Final Fantasy.) This is, of course, why Rothstein found herself drawn to him. But it is true that such people truly are the “cool kids” of this town, which points to the less endearing truth of Weigel’s comment: That the backlash against Rothstein is to a large extent the rallying of D.C.’s wonky media “cool kids” around one of its foremost boy-band bloggers.