By Alan Breslauer on 2/9/2007, 5:07pm PT  

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Don't trust bloggers! Chris Cillizza explains in his Washington Post blog the "potential perils" presidential campaigns face when hiring bloggers who, it turns out, usually have their own blogs where they write their own opinions. The controversy centers around Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister whom Tom Donohue of the Catholic League referred to as "two anti-Catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots" for their "hate-filled, blasphemous and obscene remarks" written before joining the Edwards campaign. Donahue, joined by Michelle Malkin and others on the right demanded Edwards fire the two bloggers.

But Edwards made the surprising decision to keep the bloggers considering that Donahue and Malkin are two of the country's foremost experts on "hate-filled" "obscene" "vulgar" and "bigoted" speech. Even the New York Times appeared to take their side writing Marcotte "used vulgar language" in a post last year on the Immaculate Conception. The paper of record also quotes from an unrelated Marcotte post about the Duke lacrosse players despite acknowledging it was written sarcastically about the news media:

“Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.”

Whether or not you find these statements unworthy of an employee of a potential president of the United States, can we all agree that there is an unprecedented amount of rank hypocrisy at play here? Imagine if mainstream media regulars like Bill Kristol or the New York Times' own Thomas Friedman were held accountable for past statements? And what about Malkin who, despite her vile rhetoric, appears regularly on Fox "News"? For truly "vulgar" journalism it is worth reviewing just about any 2002/2003 Judith Miller column in the New York Times.

Similarly, the Washington Post's Cillizza did not seem overly concerned about the hiring of Terry Nelson to run presidential hopeful John McCain's campaign printing nary a word about his checkered past. Clearly, links to Tom DeLay money laundering scandals and illegal phone jamming scandals that subvert democracy and result in four underlings receiving prison sentences are chump change when compared to the hate-filled words of McEwan who called George W. Bush's base "wingnut Christofascist."

Well, I'd hate to ruin my chances of being picked up by a presidential campaign. So, from now on I will not repeat McEwan's mistake and will only refer to Bush's base as "Christofascist wingnuts" and you'll never hear me making sarcastic statements about the MSM. Fact is, I don't know much about Anna Nicole Smith anyway.

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