Wonkette Pours One Out For Michael Hastings

Here's a video of Michael Hastings, the reporter for Buzzfeed and Rolling Stone , who died in a car crash Tuesday, giving Piers Morgan the sort of dressing down that Piers Morgan so richly deserves on a daily basis. People who knew Hastings are mourning him, and people who didn't are mostly wishing they had.

Wonkette readers may recall Hastings from a story we covered last fall,* when Hastings got into a fine email shoving match with Hillary Clinton's spokesman, the mellifluously named Philippe Reines. Frustrated by what he saw as stonewalling, Hastings asked Reines to please, if it wouldn't be too much trouble, "give answers that aren’t bullshit for a change," and Reines offered some suggestions on just how deeply he valued Hastings' contribution to the discourse: "have a good day. And by good day, I mean Fuck Off." We sort of fell in love with Hastings for his sign-off in the exchange: "I’ll take that as a non-denial denial."

Go read Ben Smith's lovely remembrance of Hastings and come right back, OK?

Smith has this to say about the Hastings/Reines emails:

But there was a problem: Michael had not exactly conducted himself as [a] well-mannered professional in the exchange. “You will look,” I pointed out to him, “like an asshole.”

“Everyone knows I’m an asshole,” he said. “The point is that they’re assholes.”

Michael had a great nose for conventional wisdom and conventional taste, and a visceral, irresistible urge to run the other way.

Count Yr Doktor Zoom among those who wish they'd known more about this guy's work before finding out about it from the obituaries -- Hastings seems to have forgotten that journalists are just supposed to type what the government says. Sure, we'd read his best-known story -- not a bad day's work, getting a general fired by showing the world that the guy was maybe a bit on the psycho side -- but beyond that, Hastings wasn't really on our radar much, and he probably should have been. Just look at this piece from last week, on Democrats' smiling complicity in the construction of a surveillance state.

Also, Hastings had a corgi named "Bobby Sneakers." How can you not like a guy with a dog named Bobby Sneakers?

* True fact: That September 25 post marked the first appearance of ponies on this mommyblog. Make of that what you will.

[ Buzzfeed / Rolling Stone / YouTube ]