Pam Bondi about to enter into full dignity wraith status, plus thoughts on the essence of blogging
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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Donald Trump is increasingly unhappy with Pam Bondi, describing her as weak and ineffective. This I suppose is because she is sometimes still pretending that the DOJ is at least a little constrained by laws and stuff, instead of just imprisoning and expropriating all of Donald Trump’s enemies at a speed that would placate that demented ball of narcissistic rage (this speed exceeds 299,792 k/s, in defiance of the laws of physics, which Trump naturally also breaks).
Bondi’s replacement will probably be Nick Fuentes or Alex Jones or Pepe the Frog: in any event someone who will make Bondi look like Clarence Darrow by comparison.
Speaking of Josh Marshall, Andrew Gelman points to and expands on Marshall’s meta-ruminations on blogging, on the recent 25th (!) anniversary of Talking Points Memo. Quoting Marshall:
One: You can’t cover political news well unless you’re familiar with and care about the substance. You can’t cover a piece of new health care policy legislation if you don’t have a solid grounding in health care policy. And you can’t do it well if you don’t care about the outcomes. You can’t cover a Hill story or a campaign well if it’s just a game. Your investment doesn’t need to be partisan. But it should be real. You can’t possibly chart the incremental developments in a story without a basic grasp of how those developments connect up to civic or human outcomes. Otherwise you’re inevitably skimming over the surface, trying to write a novel while being indifferent to the human condition.
Two: Good political reporting should be something you’re dying to read. It shouldn’t be a chore. Headlines should punch you right between the eyes. The story should be as captivating and entertaining and fun as the substance is important. If it’s boring that’s because it’s boring, not because it’s too sophisticated for the audience. TPM should be a thinking person’s tabloid, engaged and engaging. We’re not above and never want to see ourselves as above our audience.
Three: Fundamental honesty with readers. That starts with not lying to our audience. But hopefully that’s a given. What it means to me is that the delta between what we know as editors and reporters and what our readers can learn from reading our pages should be as small as possible. We won’t share rumors we can’t confirm or the identities of confidential sources. And the nature of editing means we focus on what is important and substantial, not every quanta of information we came across. But there shouldn’t be a deeper, insider understanding of the story that isn’t there in the story itself. If we have a set of assumptions or commitments we bring to a story, we should be open about those — not because it’s some admission but because it gives readers a deeper understanding of the story. We should also share what we don’t know as much as what we do. That can mean entertaining hypotheticals and giving readers as much visibility as we can into the process and mechanics of reporting. We did these things originally because it’s the way I like to write about and report political news. But the process of doing this — sharing what I didn’t know in advance — invites reader participation and tips, making the audience into a reporting arm of the publication. It also builds trust and loyalty, which is why TPM has a wildly committed, loyal readership, and why we were able to build a membership business, which is why TPM still exists today.
Gelman has further thoughts of his own, all of which seem sound to me, especially these ones:
We care about the substance. Whether it’s Bayesian computation, American politics, the sociology of science, sports, literature, or Jamaican beef patties, we either have a solid grounding in the area or we’re open about what we don’t know. We’re not the world authorities on everything we write about, and we’re not always experts, but we come into each story with some base of knowledge, interest, and personal experience, and we work from there. And we give reasons for our opinions. . . .
Part of blogging is the sense that you’re part of a community, including characters (co-bloggers, objects of admiration, foils, and people who write for other blogs) and story arcs, with a shared history and catch phrases. There’s a balance here–you don’t want to be too insular, you want current readers to feel included without new readers feeling excluded–but I think this feeling of community is important. Marshall notes that his community is so strong that he can support the business using a subscription base. We don’t do that here, but we enhance the feeling of community in this space in other ways: by writing posts in response to readers’ tips, stories, and questions; by providing service such as statistics tips, job announcements, and interesting links; and by engaging respectfully with readers in the comments section . . .
The following applies in particular to controversies that don’t involve the struggle between fascists and anti-fascists, which is the defining feature of political life in America in 2026:
No need to come to a strong conclusion. In scholarly journals you’re supposed to have some big finding. In popular writing you’re supposed to tell a coherent story. But most of the time we don’t have a big finding, and lots of stories are not so coherent. Details matter! Of course I say that; I’m a statistician. When blogging we can do lists (as here), we can have ambiguous conclusions, all sorts of things. That’s true of Talking Points Memo too: Marshall and his co-bloggers can and do often come to the conclusion that they’re not sure, they make conjectures while expressing uncertainty, and they don’t need to make each person they write about be either a good guy, a bad guy, or any variants of those categories.
Blogging has, over the past quarter century — Marshall was a true pioneer — created a new and valuable kind of political and social community, at a time when alternatives to the traditional forms of such things are more necessary than ever, for reasons we’ve discussed and will do doubt discuss again.
And to Marshall himself . . . Salud!