Liberal Talk Radio

An insider’s account of why Spencer Ackerman was fired from the New Republic:

In what [TNR editor Franklin] Foer called the “proximate cause,” Mr. Ackerman had been using that personal blog — titled “Too Hot for TNR” — to disparage the magazine.

Again with the Web logs: On Sept. 1, senior editor Lee Siegel was suspended and had his culture blog removed from the magazine’s Web site. Mr. Siegel had been caught posting flattering comments about his own wit and wisdom in the third person under the pseudonym “sprezzatura” — a “sock puppet,” in blog parlance.

Mr. Siegel is still suspended, but he remains on the masthead. Then again, Mr. Siegel hadn’t previously sent Mr. Foer an e-mail offering to “make a niche in your skull” with a baseball bat, as Mr. Ackerman did during a dispute about whether the magazine should have a blog about the Major League Baseball playoffs.

“The Siegel thing was a first-time offense,” Mr. Foer said. “Ackerman involved repeated offenses.”

Mr. Ackerman said he had clashed with Mr. Foer over various editorial matters. But he said that he had fallen from favor after growing disenchanted with the invasion of Iraq, which he and the magazine had both supported in the beginning.

“I definitely, for lack of a better term, drifted leftward,” Mr. Ackerman said. “The Iraq war will do that to you. The Bush administration will do that to you.”

Mr. Ackerman had been acting out, by his own account: telling a colleague it “wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world” to get fired “for being too left-wing”; declaring in an editorial meeting that he would “skullfuck” the corpse of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to establish his anti-terrorist bona fides. And there was the baseball-bat remark, which Mr. Ackerman said was meant as a joke. After chewing him out for that, Mr. Foer agreed to let him edit the baseball blog.

Bruno, you know how I feel about my role in the BATP baseball blog . . .

And who knew he was such a big fan of early ’80s hardcore? I guess that explains all the F-bombs.