Nope, They Get to Stay

It looks (via Instapundit) as if the two hate-spewers get to stay as John Edwards’ house bloggers. Edwards says he was “personally offended” by their past blogging but that he believes in “giving everyone a fair shake”.

Here’s the part of the statement that rings false to me:

I’ve talked to Amanda and Melissa; they have both assured me that it was never their intention to malign anyone’s faith, and I take them at their word.

I find it impossible that any rational person could write what they have written and not know that it would “malign anyone’s faith”. Go back to Terry Moran’s post and read some of what marcotte had written. Does Edwards really expect me to believe that when someone writes “Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit? A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.” they’re not intentionally maligning someone’s faith?

What part of saying that “fundies” (an intentional slur in itself) believe that Muslims are “going to hell anyway” and accusing them of asking “why should god get all the fun of punishing them and making them suffer?” thus saying straight out that fundamentalist Christians of all faiths are intentionally torturing Muslims isn’t an intentional maligning of Christian faiths?

You and I know very well that they wrote what they wrote as an intentional insult. It’s a huge insult to our intelligence to try to convince us otherwise. If they hadn’t intended on insulting anyone’s faith, they wouldn’t have written so very many posts that did that very thing.

John Edwards is gullible if he accepted the crocodile tears – too gullible to be trusted with the lives and security of hundreds of millions of Americans. If he swallowed this tripe, how easily would he swallow the phony excuses from truly dangerous people like Mad Mahmoud or Kim Jong-Il?

I don’t think he’s gullible. I think he’s false-faced and playing us for fools in order to bag a few widely-read lefty blogs. Apparently he didn’t pay much attention to how well Howard Dean did using that tactic.

He finished behind John Kerry and Dick Gephart. That’s not what I’d call a winning maneuver.

Glenn Reynolds thinks that this, largely, is much ado about nothing. He thinks there’s “nothing really wrong with cursing or overwrought blogging in itself” but he misses the point. What Marcotte wrote wasn’t simply “overwrought”. It was seething hate and bigotry borne of incredible ignorance. Consider if the quotes I used above had been about Muslims, homosexuals, women, blacks, hispanics…well…pick a group other than Christians. Perhaps he would give them a pass or dismiss them as “overwrought” but I really doubt it. I tend to think that Reynolds is a reasonable man with a very good head on his shoulder but I think he’s downplaying the implications for what John Edwards has done. The rule established today is that any campaign can choose any writer – regardless of that writers’ body of work – essentially without consequence. Reynolds may be perfectly fine with that but I’m not. John Edwards has opened the door wider for hate and crass vulgarity to become acceptable and we’re all worse off for it.

UPDATE: It looks like some Christian groups on the left are not happy at all with the decision. I don’t imagine they would be.

No related posts.

Category: Blogs and Blogging, The 2008 Horse Race