Melissa McEwan (Shakespeare's Sister) also resigns from the John Edwards campaign. Her announcement is here and she makes an excellent point at the end of it:
There will be some who clamor to claim victory for my resignation, but I caution them that in doing so, they are tacitly accepting responsibility for those who have deluged my blog and my inbox with vitriol and veiled threats. It is not right-wing bloggers, nor people like Bill Donohue or Bill O'Reilly, who prompted nor deserve credit for my resignation, no matter how much they want it, but individuals who used public criticisms of me as an excuse to unleash frightening ugliness, the likes of which anyone with a modicum of respect for responsible discourse would denounce without hesitation.
This is a win for no one.
She is quite correct, in the moral sense. But in the nasty, narrow-minded and hateful sense of certain extremists it is indeed a win for them. They got their way. They affected the political campaign staff of a presidential candidate whom they would never ever vote for.
And this is something that must change.