PAUL MIRENGOFF couldn’t get a straight answer out of Dick Durbin, but he enjoyed the interview anyway. “If this is what reporters get to do regularly, I may have made a bad career choice.”

UPDATE: An interesting bit from Mark Tapscott:

A veteran Senate GOP staffer who requested anonymity offered this observation about the significance of the Durbin-Mirengoff exchange:

“The mainstream news media that covers Congress is tightly controlled by the House and Senate press galleries and they would never be so aggressive in pressing a Member of Congress. So this was big, it was unprecedented to have a blogger asking such questions. We need more bloggers up here asking questions because they aren’t controlled by the galleries.”

I agree, the more bloggers are covering Congress, the more likely it is that Members will be asked and, as Durbin discovered today, have to answer questions they never expect to hear from mainstream journalists.

It is exactly the kind of aggressive, don’t-let’em-off-the-hook questioning by Mirengoff that I have long lamented as being a thing of the past among establishment media journalists. They are either afraid to ask the tough questions, or they don’t know the tough questions.

So come on up to Capitol Hill, bloggers!

Oh, I think you can count on that.

MORE: Reader C.J. Burch emails:

If that sort of questioning, which as Bill Quick points out, is relatively mild for the internet, discombobulates Senators so thoroughly then the Senate is going to have a rocky, rocky future.

Yes, there was nothing rude about the questions; they were just, you know, actual questions.