Pre-Internet, back when information highway meant a road with lots of signs, the guy who incessantly barraged strangers with ill-informed and incoherent opinions about current events was considered a public nuisance.

The poor soul who sits in the corner of McDonald's muttering to himself over a cup of coffee about the government.

Or he might have been known as a pompous windbag; the person you have the misfortune of being seated next to on an airplane.

Today, he's a blogger.

And celebrated.

Quoted frequently by journalists who are too lazy to pick up the phone, pound the pavement or interview experts.

Why should bloggers have any credibility?

It's a safe bet that only a minuscule fraction of those who leave what New York Times columnist Clyde Haberman calls blogorhea all over the information highway have ever written for money. Some don't even write under their own names.

They have, generally speaking, no editors. No fact-checking. No nothing except whatever opinions happen to pop into their precious little heads.

Rebetzin Esther Jungreis, known as the Jewish Billy Graham because she proselytizes other Jews, once said at her Torah class that Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky epitomized everything wrong about American life.

Ditto for bloggers.

Mistaking feelings for facts. The public discussion of what was once private. (Today, women "blog" about their sex lives; they once kept the details in carefully hidden notebooks.)

Self-absorption. The demand for immediate gratification. Do whatever feels right. Talk before you think.

This is the stuff which demoralizes society.

What then is chimpstein.com?

It is a news website, with an investigative bent, named for the most illustrious Simian-American since Ham the Space Chimp.

Chimpstein breaks stories and finds overlooked material, rather than just comment on whatever the New York Times or the Washington Post publishes; or comment on the commentary. Its chief writer and investigative reporter, Eric Breindel's only protégé, once specialized in turning liberal sacred cows into kosher red meat for neo-cons but now accords the right equal scrutiny. Chimpstein exclusives have been quoted by the Washington Times, Forward, Washington Jewish Week, Lloyd Grove's New York Daily News gossip column and Radar magazine

Advertisements for myself:

"You have the best sense of humor of anyone at the editorial page. You are the first one in and the last one to leave. That kind of thing counts a lot with me."
--New York Post Editorial Page Editor Eric Breindel, October 1995

"You have done a brave and courageous thing. You're learning a lesson about the right that I learned about the left a long time ago ... They are guilty of grotesque double standards, worst of all the Jews among them."
--TNR Editor-in-Chief Marty Peretz, May 2001 and June 2001

"We should remember that Gahr's 'offense' was ... something that everyone except those who put service to the cause above all us would be a form of public service."
--New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch, May 2001

"Keep up the adequate work."
--Washington Times political reporter Ralph Hallow, June 2001

"Give [your parents] my best from this ex-demented you know what. Tell them they must have done something right to have raised a son who sticks to principle. Rare indeed in this city."
--Free Congress Foundation chairman Paul Weyrich, right after his remarkable visit to the Holocaust Museum, for which he refused to seek advance publicity, April 2002

"I have an Uncle Bertram."
--Todler-American leader BeccaChimp, 2004