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Catholic Group Wants Edwards Bloggers Fired

As noted this morning in Technology Daily:

A Catholic group on Tuesday demanded that two bloggers recently hired by Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards be fired for items they wrote on the Internet before joining the campaign.

AP reports that Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, called on Edwards to fire Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan for posts they wrote recently criticizing the stances of the pope and the Catholic church on homosexuality, abortion, contraception and other issues.

"John Edwards is a decent man who has had his campaign tarnished by two anti-Catholic, vulgar, trash-talking bigots," Donohue said.

The Edwards campaign did not provide comment in the story. Marcotte and McEwan were put the campaign's payroll last week.

National Review Online Editor Kathryn Jean Lopez also criticized Marcotte's writings about Catholocism.

UPDATE: The New York Times covered the story, too. And John Cole of Balloon Juice, a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, said he doesn't know "who to root for in this mess. My gut instinct is to treat this as a Browns/Cowboys Super Bowl, in which I would root for injuries."

Other commentary:
-- Ann Althouse: "I like to see bloggers use blogging to snag political jobs, and, on the other hand, I'm wary about this new activity of wrangling bloggers for the benefit of political candidates. For you bloggers seeking jobs: I hope you get them. But for you bloggers staying in this noble enterprise: Preserve your independence and don't let yourself get manipulated, even by some blogger wrangler you loved when she was one of you."

-- Tim F. at Balloon Juice: "In general I understand the instinct to incorporate bloggers into political campaigns. After all, few people understand a new media better than the new medianauts themselves. That said, in many cases it probably is not the greatest idea. ... [B]logging tech exists at a weird juncture between immediacy and permanence. We constantly communicate in first drafts, with all the attendant messiness that rushed communication implies, but our words stay out there forever, archived and easily accessed by Google."

-- Dean Barnett at HughHewitt.com: "On the one hand I can’t believe that Marcotte had become so comfortable in the left wing echo chamber that she actually believed her past didn’t preclude her from publicly entering a mainstream presidential campaign. On the other hand, I really can’t believe that the Edwards campaign apparently didn’t vet a high profile hire."

-- Duncan Black at Eschaton: "Uh, Edwards campaign? I'd suggest not taking campaign advice from the racist [Michelle] Malkin and bigot and professional outrage machine Bill Donohue."

-- Ed Cone: "They look weak to their friends and to their enemies if they cave on this thing. But they do need to get out in front of it and address the relationship of the campaign to bloggers and staffers, and to things that bloggers blogged before they were staffers."

-- Ezra Klein: "[T]he Edwards campaign chose her. They hired her. She left her blog for the position. And now they've got to defend their choice. To back down would either prove that their hiring process was incompetent and they didn't vet someone with anextensivepublic record, or that they'll collapse beneath even moderate pressure from rightwing professionals. Neither is a good look for the new campaign."

-- James Joyner at Outside the Beltway: "Having top bloggers on the staff makes sense, because these people have demonstrated not only that they have the ability to express themselves in writing but that they 'get blogging. As a bonus, they probably have a network of other bloggers that they can reach out to with more credibility than some flack on the communications staff. At the same time, however, there is a serious downside that Edwards is now discovering: Bloggers have a “paper” trail. The longer someone has been blogging, the more of their sometimes-developed thoughts are out there for public consumption."

-- Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters: "The blogosphere features many talented and rational writers on both right and left, and even in between. It's incumbent on the campaigns that hire bloggers (and media outlets, too) to distinguish those from the frothing lunatics at all points on the political spectrum. Their failure to properly vet bloggers reflects much more on the values and competence of the campaign than it does on the blogosphere in general."

-- Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit: "A lot of the lefty bloggers are up in arms that this has become a scandal. ... I suspect that this is because a lot of them would like to join the establishment and now fear that their prior anti-establishment rantings will get in the way. It'll be interesting to see if there's more Pandagon-like airbrushing of blog archives over the next few weeks."

-- Matt Stoller at MyDD: "If a campaign's first instinct is to grant credibility to manufactured complaints, then that campaign simply cannot make it through the right-wing gauntlet. This is also poor framing; the Edwards campaign knew what they were getting when they made the hires, and now to pretend like the bloggers did something wrong is not ok. It's a pure 'I'm going to offload responsibility onto the lower beings' play."

Posted by Danny | 01:40 PM

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