"No letters to display"? Let's just start with that. That's a tragedy in itself and, now that you mention it, a travesty of artistic dharma. Hello? Whoever's reading this--I know some of you are--click the comment button, like, we're down here, hello?

But as I suspect you know well, AL, comments or not, you have your considerable reservoir of silent admirers among the Salon-influenced pools of the blogosphere, and that's nothing to sniff at. You turn one guy on to what you're saying, that guy turns on several others, they do the same: I can vouch that this happens. So I suspect quite a few people are paying attention.

As they damn well should be. The main point of my commenting tonight is not so much the topic of your piece, fascinating though it is, as its (for you) fairly predictable superior quality. It’s certainly not the best thing I’ve read by you in the past week, and even so, you pulled off the feat of planting a brand new pregnant idea in my head; that doesn't happen every day. I don't know enough to have any idea how you stack up against the whole blogodeck, just my corner readership of it. By that standard at least, you measure better several ways than most of it, than a vast majority in smoothness of thought and sharpness of tongue. And by that premise, it's a crying shame how few people are probably paying attention, if you know what I mean. But you're young yet (your blog anyway), so give it time and it will surely grow.

In short, keep at it, brother Andrew. Keep doing whatever it is you're doing, keep working that magic, and speaking of which, you might give us a little more insight once in a while into the full, unedited browse list of, say, any old day in your worklife at the screen. I'm sure it would enthrall.

I thank you on behalf of the silent masses, some of whom are up here in the greater Garberville area, reading you by sublight and satellites alone.

deeply troubling. hilariously written. no heat here yet with the iBook, but i'll keep the fire extinguisher checked on schedule anyway.

accessories? you left out the iPants -- they come in some rather hip styles -- which i hear are a pretty fair patch for the problem, letting you sit on your couch and enjoy the macMagic undisturbed.

With all due respect, gradysu, I couldn't disagree more -- both on the general value of having more in-depth pieces in War Room, and on the worthiness of this particular story for such treatment.

I agree that many WR snippets are best left as snippets -- even ones that are about bigger, more important topics than Rove's possible indictment -- because in many instances, those stories either have been or will be developed in more depth by other reliable sources. We all love the fact that WR covers as much ground as it does every day, so depth usually must be sacrificed somewhat to breadth.

But Tim is way too good a writer to limit himself to 300 words on every subject, and I relish those days (not common enough, unfortunately) when he sees fit to take an idea or emerging story and run with it. This one is no exception.

I think this story -- Tim's story here, that is -- is doubly important, both because of the specific content and the wider issues it touches upon. The content is important because Leopold has been a journalistic player of some note, but of somewhat dubious credibility, in the unfolding of a saga (Plamegate) that's likely to have long-term historic reverberations. If Rove does, in fact, get indicted, that will escalate the importance of Plamegate to a whole new level. So both both those reasons, I for one appreciated him bringing his finely-tuned judgment to bear on the matter of whether or not there's any "there" there in this go-round. To do justice to that question alone -- is there merit to the scoop, and who is this Leopold character exactly -- would have made this a longer-than-usual WR segment.

But the larger implications for online journalism generally are, of course, what make this story really worth teasing out, in my opinion -- particularly when the WSJ uses it to make some partly baseless, but partly valid, observations about blogs and "scoops." And because (I assume we can mostly agree on this) War Room is among the finest practitioners of the kind of responsible, nuanced, well-sourced, equitably skeptical reporting and analysis that online (and other) political journalists ought to strive for and we ought to expect, it behooves Tim to take seriously the charge that Leopold's (possible) errors here are proof of the failure of the medium generally. Of course, that's not the case -- as TIm notes, there's no lack of skepticism about the Leopold "scoop" to be found in the more trusted corners of Left Blogostan. To the extent that the WSJ's failed to reflect that (and it surely did), that's a failure well worth dissecting.

Finally, though, I agree with gradysu on one point -- the "blogger defensiveness" that was, I think, warranted could have been balanced with a few words of scorn for those in the blogosphere who failed to treat Leopold's story with the skepticism it deserved (including many of the comments found posted in the threads discussing the story). In that sense, the Journal piece, and Jay Rosen, hit on a kernel of truth that we ought not to dismiss out of hand. As someone else noted here, the system generally works because forums like War Room take time to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Tim (and Peter Daou) are an important part of making sure the system worked in this case. But they ought not to be shy about taking all of us to task when we don't hold up our end of the bargain.