Wonkery

Our dear old friend Ana Marie Cox , aka Wonkette, has certainly had a hard time staying out of the limelight these past twelve months. As James Woolcott points out today, there are good reasons to worry for the welfare of the funny, smart, cute little pill in D.C.—a town where, we have to admit, someone with a real sense of humor stands out like teats on a boar.

Now the NY Daily News reports that Wonkette may be sniffing around Richard Leiby’s gossip-mongering beat at the Washington Post—this despite her declared preference for humor over reporting. We’ll take her word for it, but we know that Ms. Cox has considerably more staying power than her fleeting daily output of punchlines would suggest— her real strengths lie along editorial lines, both in story concepting and editing, but also oversight.

Now we’re not going to dwell too much on Q-Rating here, but she does seem to have the knack for somewhat less substantive media forms like TV punditry. Her metoric rise to the cover of the New York Times magazine occurred about the same time she stopped answering our emails, so we have no inside information here. But we can say it made us feel a little disappointed, knowing that she deserves to be writing in that magazine, rather than being glorified on its cover.

We may have the distinction of being the last print publication to publish a piece from her that exceeded the blogging threshold of about 150 words with twelve bullet points. As we say, we would not presume to make career decisions on her behalf, and they say you gotta dance with the one that brung you—so we may not see her get off the carousel of blogging conferences and panels anytime soon.

In the meantime, we’re happy to have her doppelganger firmly in place doing the things HE does best.