The blogosphere claims another scalp

I have little doubt that Marcotte would regard this post as damning with faint praise rather than a modest defense, but since I'm a Republican, she probably wants me dead anyway.

For me, this is an issue about Edwards, not about Marcotte. If he didn't know about her posting record before he hired her, he isn't fit to manage a Burger King, let alone a nation of 300,000,000. If he did, then (a) he must have agreed with her to hire her, and so (b) he's thrown her to the wolves in the hope that everyone will think he was just incompetent. And that means he not only agrees with her, which disqualifies him from the Presidency from the outset, but is a shameless user with no sense of loyalty to anything but his own ambition, which doesn't exactly commend him to the oval office.

I don't much like Marcotte, and part of me wants to think "well, she's a vicious, nasty piece of work who's said some completely unfair and unpleasant things about several people who I rather like, and now she's got hers," but I think the story here is about Edwards, not Marcotte.

to compel you not to get the terms liberal and lefty mixed up. One might get the impression that every left-of-center blogger is as you described. I'll be honest and admit my personal stake in such a formulation, and simply say that the description applied here fits the average far-left nutroots blogger, but hardly most liberals.

Also, I think you're right when you point out that it's silly to attack someone simply for doing what she's hired to do, albeit in a very unconstructive way. It does kind of reflect badly on Edwards, making him appear either foolish, or self-serving. Marcotte is a lefty, but at least she's an honest lefty.

Hey, it seems I still have liberal street cred after all! :)

"In the world you will find tribulation, but be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world."

John 16:33

I'm not sure Edwards did know what he was getting. He probably got some recommendations from the staff and never even knew the work. Edwards has always struck me as the kind of guy who probably does very little on the internet. He is not going to be the last candidate to get caught up in something like this. You can have one heck of a tech savvy staff; but if the one at the top is not into it, you are going to end up with this kind of stuff. I would be willing to bet an adult beverage that Edwards may have only read a couple of things that Marcotte ever wrote and he was not shown to vicious stuff.

The whole thing probably was a case of Edwards saying we need a blogger and then everyone passing the buck down the line to some tech savvy person in the media area who was radical left. Probably won't be the only campaign to do it, either.

With that said, still Edwards fault because he is the top guy.

Seriously, exactly how many of the folks here would have voted for Edwards for President

I might! Who's he running against? Lesser of two evils, ya know. And what do Coulter and Malkin have to do with it? Have they been hired by someone's campaign, or did we just need list filler? If the latter, I'll match with William Arkin and Markos "Screw 'em" Moulitsas, and raise you a Randi Rhoades. (We could play that game all day. Silly, isn't it?)

I read your link to Patrick Hynes (who I had never heard of before, just as I had never heard of Marcotte before this Edwards flap), and I don't see any comparison. Nowhere does it quote Hynes as cursing, engaging in bizarre rants, or condemning whole swaths of our society, particularly not based on their faiths.

The linked post seems to think it "scores" on Hynes by catching him "attacking" the LDS, with this comment:

Hynes "defends" the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its leaders by noting that if they did as the Globe reported (in a very thinly-supported article), the Church's tax exemption should come under scrutiny.

But what Hynes actually said was:

"If?and that if is an iffy one?the Romney camp and the LDS church collaborated on a pro-Romney fundraising scheme, as a chief Romney friend and consultant contends, the FEC should rebuke and fine the Romney campaign and the IRS should consider whether the Mormon Church deserves its tax exemption."

That's a simple statement of the law. Churches cannot engage in politics without losing their tax exemption. And in context, he was in fact defending Romney and the LDS from claims in a Boston Globe story that suggested some shadowy "network" of high-ranking Mormons conspiring to assist Mormon political candidates.

What exactly do you think is the comparison between Hynes and Marcotte? Neither Simon nor I ever attacked Marcotte for not disclosing her connection to the Edwards campaign; she did fine in that regard.

And what did your cousin Evelyn think of Marcotte's column on the Duggars? Most people I know (and I don't know anybody with that many kids, find her rants against more traditional ways of life pretty offensive, just as offensive as Marcotte would find some soccer mom ranting on in foul language about Marcotte's own selfishness in deciding not to have children, in thinking that the whole world should revolve around her. Show me those kinds of rants from bloggers working for candidates on the right, and I'll be happy to join you in condemning them.