I was on Jim Braude’s show on NECN tonight. Video is posted:
I wish I had gotten in two more points about the Edwards bloggerfuffle. First, having laid out just how extreme Bill Donohue and Michelle Malkin actually are, I should have gone on to explain why it mattered that they, rather than some more mainstream folks, were the ones beating the drum for the bloggers’ dismissal. If Edwards had knuckled under to Donohue and Malkin, it would have been a concession to the most extreme fringe of the Republican party; it would have allowed that element to dictate the terms on which he will run his campaign. That’d have been very, very bad strategy for someone trying to win the Democratic nomination, as well as generally being the wrong thing to do. That’s why what Edwards actually did was right.
Second, Braude read a quote from this annoying post by ABC blogger Terry Moran (whose brother Rick runs the blog — wait for it — “Right Wing Nuthouse“), which includes the following rhetorical question:
If a Republican candidate teamed up with a right-wing blogger who spewed this kind of venom, how would people react?
Funny, I pointed out — a Republican candidate by the name of John McCain has done just that! He’s hired Patrick Hynes and Terry Nelson, both charter members of the rabid right whose own past actions and statements, while perhaps not including as many four-letter words as Amanda Marcotte’s, should give any sane person pause. But what I should have followed up with is this: why isn’t the media making a stink about those guys? That’s what’s so frustrating about the whole Edwards thing — the double standard applied to Edwards’ hire of relatively low-level campaign staffers who used naughty words, vs. McCain’s hire of high-level policymaking staffers with seriously shady pasts.
But oh well. You never get to work everything into these TV things.
There’s a guy in Boston–forget his name, though I’ve hired him–who preps executives for dealing with the press. He drills your talking points into you until you’re saying them in your sleep, then attacks you from every single blowdryer angle possible. After a while, it all becomes second nature: You can seamlessly pretend to answer questions while delivering your prepackaged spiel, and you get away with it.
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So, don’t compare yourself to expensively-trained professionals. You already accomplished more than any of the Democratic pols have on this issue.
You should have compared Edwards’ hiring of Pandago and McCain’s of donohue with Guiliani’s hire of Pat Riffini – a competnet consevative blogger who makes his points without personal abuse. Rational alternatives DO exixt.
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THAT is what bothers mwe about this – if you hire somebody abusive, why does it matter who calls you on it? Isn’t it just as bad a decision? If Miclele Malkin tells you the building is on fire, are you going to wait until a liberal tells you too, or do you just leave the flaming building?
Actually, I don’t have a problem per-se with either situation. What a blogger has written on their personal blog shouldn’t disqualify them from working for a candidate, nor should we act as though the candidate necessarily supports everything that blogger has said. We can point it out as useful information for the activists: here are some people working for this candidate, and here are some things those people say or believe. But that’s different from creating a media scandal aimed at forcing their firing. I don’t want to force McCain to fire Hynes, either.
I hit ‘post’ by accident before clean-up.
Has a useful free spelling checker for posts; you may know of it. But, in any event, the idears get through fine spelt or notspelt.
And he will be judged by the choices he makes.
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Marcotte and McEwan are no better, no worse than any other vile, hate filled knuckle-draggers, left and right, wasting bandwidth these days.
Had the same screed been written about any of the sacred cows of the left, and not about their most convienient whipping boy Christianity, there would would be, I dare say, outrage (justifiably) across this forum.
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In the end, probably, nothing will come of this. The msm will give it a pass, and not too many real people read these types of obscure wingnuts anyway.
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But it was right for someone to bring attention to the Marcotte/McEwan story.
Voters should know when a candidate is aligned with people whose writings are so vicious and malignant.
Amanda’s writings are “vicious and malignant”?
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I’ve been reading Pandagon for over a year now. I consider Amanda to be a surgeon carving out the malignancies in our culture. Sometimes she cuts deep, and it ain’t pretty, but she’s calling out the BS of the rightwingers with a voice that rings loud and true.
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It’s entirely possible that I’m not representative, but I would never have seriously considered supporting Edwards until he hired Shakespeare’s Sister and Amanda. And I’m psyched that he was smart enough not to kowtow to idjits like Malkin.
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My only concern is that now that Amanda and her vocabulary are famous, my school is going to filter Pandagon so I won’t be able to read it there.