That title is intended to make absolutely sure that I will never be hired to blog for Sam Brownback's presidential campaign. Sniff. The sacrifices a goddess must make. I'm pretty sure Sam was almost ready to ask me.
But he can't ask me if I say bad words like "fuck" or if I have ever criticized Christianist fundamentalists for anything. Also it's very bad form not to have advocated genocide of all nonbelievers or not to have told the gays and lesbians that they're going to hell. Good form would be to write like Michelle Malkin and to advocate putting people into concentration camps.
Now you know. I learned all this from the ongoing right-wing campaign (led by such luminaries as Michelle Malkin and Bill Donohue) to get Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan, better known as the bloggers of Pandagon and Shakespeare's Sister, respectively, off the John Edwards campaign payroll. Now the very boil on the liberal butt, the New York Times, has joined in this witchhunt:
The efforts by 2008 presidential contenders to exploit the megaphone of the blogosphere has hit a bump, it seems, as former Senator John Edwards's hiring of two controversial bloggers gathers more attention than his health care plan or even his new McMansion spread in North Carolina.
We are catching up a bit on the controversy. We first saw a kernel of this mentioned on Instapundit last week, when one of the two new bloggers, Amanda Marcotte, was supposedly caught by some other bloggers "airbrushing" some of her cruder language out of a post at her site, Pandagon.
The campaign also hired Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister. [forgive our earlier typo making sisters plural by accident.]
But now, both are under the spotlight, or rather the glare, with at least one blogger (Dean Barnett over at TownHall.com) taking up a pool as to when the two might be fired by Mr. Edwards. Some are counting the hours.
On top of the pair's vulgar language in some posts, Bill Donohue of the conservative Catholic League called on Tuesday for their ouster from the campaign's nascent Internet foray, complaining about their anti-Catholic rants. (We can't repeat here some of their writings; they are quite frequently profane. Michelle Malkin has catalogued some posts here.)
The Salon has published a rumor stating that Amanda and Melissa have already been fired, but the Edwards campaign denies the rumor. Fun and games for all, huh?
So Bill Donohue of the conservative Catholic League called Amanda and Melissa "anti-Catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots". And we should take his arguments seriously? Some other things Bill Donohue has said:
* "People don't trust the Muslims when it comes to liberty." [MSNBC's Scarborough Country, 2/9/06]
* "Name for me a book publishing company in this country, particularly in New York, which would allow you to publish a book which would tell the truth about the gay death style." [MSNBC's Scarborough Country, 2/27/04]
* "The gay community has yet to apologize to straight people for all the damage that they have done." [MSNBC's Scarborough Country, 4/11/05]
* Addressing former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) in a press release, Donohue said: "[W]hy didn't you just smack the clergyman in the face? After all, most 15-year-old teenage boys wouldn't allow themselves to be molested. So why did you?" [10/4/06]
* "I'm saying if a Catholic votes for Kerry because they support him on abortion rights, that is to cooperate in evil." [MSNBC's Hardball, 10/21/04]
* "We've already won. Who really cares what Hollywood thinks? All these hacks come out there. Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, OK? And I'm not afraid to say it. ... Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions. I believe in traditional values and restraint. They believe in libertinism. We have nothing in common. But you know what? The culture war has been ongoing for a long time. Their side has lost." [MSNBC's Scarborough Country, 12/8/04]
* "Well, look, there are people in Hollywood, not all of them, but there are some people who are nothing more than harlots. They will do anything for the buck. They wouldn't care. If you asked them to sodomize their own mother in a movie, they would do so, and they would do it with a smile on their face." [MSNBC's Scarborough Country, 2/9/06]
This is not even the pot calling the kettle black, because neither Amanda nor Melissa has one speck of that general hatred-of-the-other in them. Neither Amanda nor Melissa have called for people to be put into concentration camps as a preventive measure. And I can't imagine neither Amanda nor Melissa doing something like this Malkin parody of Amanda as part of an attempt to bring Malkin down. Not that Malkin succeeds. All I could think of how good Amanda's prose sounded when spoken aloud, even by someone who tried to make it sound bad. But watch and decide (via Sadly, No):
Let's see if I get this right: Your career is destroyed if you ever used naughty words, but your career will soar if you advocate violence. And the only bloggers acceptable for political campaigns to hire are the non-controversial ones. But there is no such thing as a non-controversial blogger, not in the minds of the wingnuts and not if the person ever wrote more than a word or two, because ANYTHING can be made into a controversial issue.
I hope John Edwards understands this and that he also understands that any blogger he hires will be attacked by the wingnut phalanx. That's how they act.