The Impolitic has the following to say about Amanda’s treatment by right-wing blogs:
And that’s the real point. Amanda is not running for president, Edwards is, and what she says, or has said, on her personal site has nothing to do with his candidacy. He hired her to blog about his platform, not counsel him on policy positions. If the wrongnuts want to contribute to the debate, they should address Edwards’ statements, not Amanda’s past and personal remarks. And if they want to behave like teenage miscreants maybe they should give up the pretense that they’re blogging politics and start a MySpace page instead where they can still measure their popularity without diluting the debate on the vital issues of the day.
I don’t care that Amanda’s working for John Edwards, and you’re right, Libby, that I’m not drawn from the pool of potential voters for the Bunnyman. I don’t even suppose that it necessarily reflects terribly badly on Edwards that his staff has made such a bizarre gaffe in choosing the Edwardian Blogatrix to run their blog. I simply believe that Marcotte is a delusional bitch who manages to shoehorn by deliberate violence any and all evidence into her bizarre ideology of victim and victimizer. What I would like to see is Amanda Marcotte and similarly inclined blogres and blogresses apologize for their libellous insistence that the Duke Men’s Lacrosse Team are rapists, or even rapists by proxy, and that those who have defended them from the campaign of vilification, such as the Duke Women’s Lacrosse Team, are mental midgets complicit with the patriarchy that represses them. Because I am one of those small-minded people who believes that guilt or innocence ought to be decided on evidence of what specific people specifically did or didn’t do, and that prosecutorial misconduct and academic prejudice are corruptive to society at large.
Because what we’ve got here is a kind of McCarthyism, Charlie.
Did you see Edwards on MTP this morning?
He completely befuddled Russeteater by answering his cul-de-sac ‘gotcha’ questions with some aplomb.
Other than the smokescreen enabled by who works on his campaign, does it affect the veracity of his
candidacy?
BTW, I guess Goldsteins ban has expired due to default, and will shortly be renewed.
This is an interesting war of relevance. Who can be the most? Amanda’s job? or those who are snipping at her and the edward’s campaign heels? Hell, i even read some wingnut bitching that hiring a blogger is different than a press secretary. Are we so stuck on the blogger exceptionalism that corporate and other organizational blogs are different than other forms of communication?
nope, just his judgement.
No. His candidacy is true.
Does it speak to an error in judgment to have your representative on the web espousing views about your own state (blacks and women are treat as subhuman, I think she averred) and about how justice should work (regardless of what the evidence shows, these Duke Lax players are nevertheless guilty of having privilege and being white, so their continued harrassment is warranted) that must necessarily redound to you?
You bet.
Alternately, as BumperStickerist put it, Mr Edwards can put up a disclaimer saying that “the views expressed on the John Edwards blog, and the views of its expressor, do not necessarily reflect the views of John Edwards.”
If he wanted Marcotte as a web administrator, he should have hired her for that. But as her introductory post suggested, she was hired to provide content, and she made it clear that she and Edwards are aligned in their beliefs about fighting against poverty and for a particular kind of social justice.
So it is certainly important that her beliefs about social justice be exposed.
And I reject the ridiculous “ChickenEdwards” argument being espoused by the likes of The Impolitic that, because one has no interest in voting for Edwards, one should be unconcerned—or at least, keep his or her concerns private—about the constituency Mr Edwards is looking to seduce with such hires.
This man wants to be President of the United States. So both his supporters and his detractors have every right to know who, exactly, Mr Edwards is actively courting.
And you can be damn sure that were, say, Rudolph Giuliani to hire me to provide content for and administor his website, we wouldn’t be hearing these arguments about how such doesn’t reflect on the candidate from the likes of The Impolitic. Hell, within an hour, Sadly,No! and Tbogg will have dubbed Giuliani the “proxy cockslapper”.
I’d say it’s curious, given the amount of time the left has spent discussing, say Rove, that we are now supposed to NOT discuss those helping candidates. Almost like we are supposed to have 2 sets of rules, one for the “cool club” and one for the “wingnuts”.
This is where we will get some kind soul to tell us that equating Amanda with Rove is ludicrous, because really it’s all about the power, not the message or the messanger.
Who Edwards hires to help during his campaign is a sign—only one, but one none the less—of the type of people he would hire for his administration.
Let me summarize:
SHUT TEH FUCK UP, WINGNUTZ!!!
Thanks but no thanks, Libby. Color me like Chris Matthews. Let’s play hardball.
Someone had to vet the foul mouthed trollope. Surely they read her blog. My guess is that this poor staffer sleeps with the fishes. We’ll see if Ms. “Screw the Whiteys” Marcotte makes the cut.
I think she’ll be gently shuffled from public view, so that she can spend more time with family. After all, third rate lefty bloggers aren’t exactly hard to find.
By extension, the Impoletic should admit that a right-libertarian Goldstein blogging for a left-authoritarian Edwards could raise no eyebrows—it’s only a job. Indeed, cockslapping, as parody of the Left’s empty moral sanctimony, would then be completely forgotten, and that by the same liars that want to find it so offensive today.
Because obscenely berating the literal victims of her politics is standard procedure, Marcotte has no such defense.
Marcotte was hired for her politics and precisely for her politics. If she’s editorially dishonest, Edwards gets the heat. If she gets canned, it’ll be some proof that what she says and said is absolutely relevant to Edward’s message, such as even it is. The rightwing voter’s mind is already made up about Edwards; only the Left’s anticipated reaction at the polls can fire Marcotte.
Snow burned no FOX tee shirts, fearing for his new job. But at the time, how loud was the Left?
I can understand all of those views, Jeff, but the main thing that I would like is an apology to those that she, and others attached to her, have libelled.
The idea that that is not, somehow, as important as the “nastiness” being visited upon poor Amanda is absurd, since that nastiness largely consists in her being held to account for some of the evil nonsense that she’s published on the web. People want Amanda protected from the true characterizations of others, whereas they don’t believe she ought to be held to account for the false ones that she’s generated.
Boo-fucking-hoo. They’re concerned that Amanda might lose her job? Where’s the compassion for the guys who Nifong and company wanted thrown into jail for a long, long time for a crime they didn’t commit, because it served a political campaign of one and the ideological preconceptions of others? Where’s the proportionality between losing a job and having one’s life destroyed?
Bite me, you Marcotte defenders.
And antisemiticleo,
Russeteater? What, is the guy a fuckin’ Mick or something?
Nice. Heartily seconded.
The Left has moved from simply ignoring its unintended consequence to revelling in it while it guts society like a fish. Meanwhile the intended consequence, as poorly composed as it once was, is nearly lost from view. The Marcotte’s of the world now feed on the rage of The Lie.
There’s not a dime’s worth of proportionality because there’s not a dime’s worth of ethical perspective.
I never did care for sexists, and Marcotte is a doozy. Hardcore haters should not work for Presidents. People who hope to hold that job should avoid them like the plague.
Apparently works for leftist bloggers as well.
I Marcotte had been picked at random from a Texas phone book, then I’d agree that her vile outbursts and penchant for libelling presumed enemies on grounds of their sexual/racial/class attributes wouldn’t be an issue at all – it was just the luck of the draw. But given that this was no random selection, we need to ask what qualities (meager though they apparently are) drew Edwards to Marcotte and whether her intemperate snarling, brazen libel and Orwellian airbrushing didn’t offset said virtues.
So Libby’s in a tiff that the focus should be on Edwards, not Marcotte’s inane and intellectually immature ramblings.
Sorry Libby– if Dubya is to be castrated in the forum of public opinion for a DUI he got 30 years ago, then Edwards should recieve similar scrutiny for hiring a such an emotionally unbalanced individual to run his website, particularly when said individual expresses the opinion that she and Edwards are in sync politically.
Guilt by association is a fallacious road to follow, but if Edwards didn’t take the time to investigate Marcotte’s screeds, then how careful is he going to be when asked to name the individuals responsible for administering the military and negotiating with world leaders? A candidate who doesn’t pay attention to detail is not the kind of person I want running the country, no matter how syrupy smooth his talking points.
Is there anyone, anyone, out there who is so naïve as to believe that candidates do not take hits for the performances of their staffs?
If Rudy Guiliani had hired, say, Fred Phelps to be his staffer on religion matters, don’t you think the left would be attacking that from
dayminute one?Hey Jeff:
So , in post-modern politics, Edward’s campaign is as divorced from the writing and views of his blogger as Original Meaning is divorced from the text in post-modern Lit Crit?
(I’m an engineer, so I’m in waaay over my head with that kinda comment. Heh….)
Dubya’s been castrated? woah!
Seems Dan is a woman hater.
You’ll never land the ladies that way, Dan.
Remember: if someone is an idiot or mistaken, acts in a foolish manner or does something wrong, you are the bad guy if you point it out. That’s how it works on the playground, because doing something boneheaded or stating something totally wrong – especially if its otherwise politically correct – isn’t as bad a making someone feel bad.
Thanks, Jeff. Why am I always the last to know?
Because what we’ve got here is a kind of McCarthyism, Charlie.
Hey, leave me outa this.
Not “wanted.” Want. They’re still charged with imaginary crimes carrying 30+-year sentences. Case-watcher enthusiasm aside, there’s no sign that those charges are going away anytime soon.
Not a very good “say.” Phelps is a dedicated, Presidential-inauguration-attending Democrat, and Rudy hearts fags–which is the only thing about him I don’t find abhorrent. If Guiliani were prosecuting, the Duke boys would have been railroaded competently.
The thing I find sad about all this is that the heroine of Another Roadside Attraction was called Amanda.
Man, I do love a good blog war!
Especially one where the other side’s shooting rubber bands…