Photo by Hitchcock Creative

Washington Post columnist and DCist friend [and occasional DCist contributor — ed.] Dave Weigel took some heat for his choice of words to report the story of the day here in Washington, in which he described an incident between Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-NC) and a guerrilla student videographer: “The second camera rolled as Etheridge, irritated, held the wrist of the first cameraman, then pulled the student to his side and grabbed him in a hug.” His critics saw his verb choice as too soft, if you can fairly call Drudge minions blindly doing Drudge bidding “critics.”

That kind of response to a story is all in the game, as they say on The Wire. But yesterday, Weigel was the subject of a rather more vicious story — a gossip item in the Washington Examiner about his attendance at his close friends’ wedding. Nikki Schwab and Tara Palmeri took to the their Yeas and Nays column to report that — breaking! — Weigel danced so much he was sweaty. Worse still, at times, he danced alone.

It would be enough to write off Schwab and Palmeri as hacks (and don’t let me stop you from doing so) for passing this story off as gossip, when the consequences of dancing have been common knowledge since at least 1993. It’s extra hackish to invent an item about Weigel in order to hang it on the peg that Weigel got mobbed by the Drudge Report over diction. This writer attended that wedding too, and the most dramatic thing that happened was that some of us (including, item!, the Post’s Ezra Klein) took off our jackets during dinner. Scandal. (Call me.)