Amanda Marcotte, hired by the Edwards campaign to do their blogging, has decided to quit. Michelle Malkin's Feb 3 post went into great detail of Marcotte's ridiculous four letter rants. Rife with an adolescent spitting anger that belies reason and gives the blogosphere a bad name. Under pressure from right wing bloggers and the Catholic League, Edwards fires Marcotte and Mc Ewan and issues this statement,
The tone and the sentiment of some of Amanda Marcotte's and Melissa McEwan's posts personally offended me. It's not how I talk to people, and it's not how I expect the people who work for me to talk to people. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but that kind of intolerant language will not be permitted from anyone on my campaign, whether it's intended as satire, humor, or anything else. But I also believe in giving everyone a fair shake. 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. We're beginning a great debate about the future of our country, and we can't let it be hijacked. It will take discipline, focus, and courage to build the America we believe in.
You can see Edwards' dilemma, he wants to be the web 2.0 candidate. Flirting with the "netroots" far left anti-Israel peaceniks. So he hires a couple of "edgy" bloggers to run his blog. Now that they've turned out to be a foul-mouthed embarrassment, he's forced to choose between the voters who could push him over the top for the Democratic nomination, or rejecting the netroots for a chance to win the Presidency.
But if you look at Edward's statement above, he doesn't really condemn Marcotte and McEwan. "I take them at their word" suggests that Edwards thinks that Marcotte and McEwan don't really mean what they say.
By letting Marcotte resign, Edwards can claim allegiance to the netroots and placate his critics at the same time. Edwards emerges clean from the scandal, his bloggers get more traffic and sympathy from from the netroots, and the whole story has time to fade from memory well before nomination time. It's up to the right to remind the public of what the netroots really think come crunch time.
Trackposted to Perri Nelson's Website, third world county, Big Dog's Weblog, Adam's Blog, basil's blog, Pirate's Cove, Planck's Constant, Common Folk Using Common Sense, Dumb Ox Daily News, and Conservative Cat, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
