Interesting use of the gif there. I wonder if there will be a migration of these gifs from meme-based humor sites to more "legitimate" blogs and news sites. They are, after all, the visual equivalent to using quotes by famous people.
But, seriously, someone is going to write a thesis on gifs one day. It is "literally" an innovation in communications. While we currently associate gifs with memes, etc, you can see quite a few very creative ones on ffffound.com, for example. And,as you say, TheAtlantic now uses them.
