the personal cost of political invective

Matthew Yglesias finds himself in the extremely awkward position of having to praise Tim Russert after having damned him mere months ago.

It’s a bit hard to know what to say when an important public figure whose work you didn’t really care for passes. … Nobody can become as important as Russert was without doing some stuff that some people think was bad. [Ooooh, they did "stuff" that "some" people "think" was "bad," so that "bad stuff" warrants articles by pompous whippersnappers titled "The Unbearable Inanity of Tim Russert"?   ---ed.] Thus, when The Atlantic asked me to do a Current item on Russert’s passing, I thought I’d take a mixed approach that doesn’t back down from criticism, while trying to be magnanimous in recognizing his considerable accomplishments.

How very magnanimous from the deep new-media thinker (and, I can’t help but note) supporter of Barack “Mr. New Politics” Obama.

Yglesias’s commenters need to be dressed down, says Ann Althouse, who isn’t normally given to policing.

I think the whippersnapper should produce a respectable body of work before he casually slings arrows at writers whom he attacks as somehow unfairly privileged [e.a.]:

Similarly, given Packer’s dystopian vision of American discourse, it’s hard to understand how Packer’s book, The Assassin’s Gate, sold so many copies and attracted such wide praise or how Packer came to have a job with the most prestigious magazine in the country – a magazine which published a lot of basically pro-war material in 2002 and 2003 and went on to vociferously denounce George W. Bush in 2004.

But there are peasants with pitchforks everywhere we turn these days.