The Jon Swift List: Best Blog Posts of the Year

A reflection on blogging gone by, plus Jon Swift's venerable list for 2025

Modern Political Blogging

2004 was the year of the Howard Dean campaign, the year it was killed for the crime of opposing the bipartisan war, and from it professions were born.

People who worked in that campaign and those in the Near Left world who supported it formed bonds that have carried them through the next 20 years of their professional lives. The Internet’s little blue dress was still largely unstained by years of later mauling by the great and the greedy, and blogging became a thing that could get you acclaim. (I remember Jon Aravosis, of the once-great AMERICAblog, saying after a trip to France, “I told them I was un blogueur, and I was mobbed.”)

I could name names, but I won’t — there are far too many. Anyone of Near Left note who’s now in their forties or fifties, if they’ve had long careers in political action or writing, likely came from that era and have bonds with others that did. DailyKos came from that time, as did Netroots Nation. Howie Klein started his DownWithTyranny! blog in 2000, as always ahead of his time.

This post-Dean garden of green was the core of the “progressive base” until 2016, when Hillary Clinton, in her eager-to-win candidate wisdom, tried splitting that base from the rest, and partly succeeded.

Those years are gone, the flowering years of the late George Bush presidency and the rise of “Yes We Can” hope.

That never occurred; it turns out we couldn’t, not then. But dreams still survive.

Shadows of Blogging Past

They’re with us in part, these bloggers, in shadow and memory.

Part of that shadow contains those no longer alive. Of those, one name stands a little apart from the rest. The blogger known as “Jon Swift”, in real life the writer Al Weisel, was already in his forties with a promising writing career, when his post-Dean blogging commenced. Writing as “Jon Swift” and claiming to be a conservative, Weisel regularly skewered the Right of his time.

For example, in what appears to be his last substantive post, March 12, 2009 (“Why Bristol Palin Is Different”), he wrote:

What is the difference between [lesbians] Mary Cheney and Rosie O'Donnell? Again, it's obvious. Mary Cheney is a good conservative woman who will no doubt teach her children that they shouldn't become lesbians like their mother and Rosie O'Donnell is a foul-mouthed liberal who will teach her children that homosexuality and bestiality are acceptable lifestyle choices.

You get the idea.

Weisel died in 2010. In his honor, a tradition he started has been maintained — the writer Batocchio, host of his own site “Vagabond Scholar,” has published each year the “Jon Swift Roundup” — the best blog posts of the year, “picked by the bloggers themselves.” Here’s the list from 2007, and the one from 2008. If you’re of that era — many of you aren’t, I know — reading these will remind you of much.

The Jon Swift Best Posts of 2025

All this is to honor the dead — Al Weisel for sure, but also the time as well, the era now gone. Blogging doesn’t have the caché it used to have; that’s reserved for podcasters now and the soon-to-die TikTok crowd. But many former small bloggers have still survived, and others have joined them — quite a few thanks to Substack.

The 2025 list of Best Posts of the Year is released. You can find it here:

• Jon Swift Roundup 2025

I urge you to check it out.

To start, consider this from This Is So Gay: “Making the Homosexual More Modern and Relatable”, or this from Batocchio’s own Vagabond Scholar: “Dick Cheney and the Dark Side”. Cheney in particular seemed the true American ghoul, heir to others with no trace of conscience or guilt. Then the next one showed up; perhaps we’re breeding them faster.

Next Year at God’s Spies

Here we have exciting plans. We’ll continue our substantial look at the nature and (non)inevitability of nations and states, through views of the past and the future, as well as a unified field theory of that all means. (Are states inevitable? Or good? Do they represent progress? The answer to all three is no. Resoundingly so.)

We’ll comment on the news that shows up with an eye on the middle distance rather than what’s up close; with a mind that generalizes rather than raises the hackles of the daily-and-transient outrage; and take note of the crises to come as they come near, the ones that have already arrived if you know where to look.

I’ll continue our theme of hope, its source and effects, how to find joy, and probably introduce humor — we all need a laugh — and likely some fiction as well, scenes from a novel or two, mine and some others.

That said, may everyone who supports and reads in this space — and in truth, everyone else — enjoy a healthy and personally peaceful 2026. See you next year.