Reading Amanda Marcotte’s piece in Salon recounting her short tenure at the Edwards campaign makes me furious all over again at John Edwards.

Marcotte writes:

As one of the thousands, possibly millions, of bloggers out there holding forth on everything from cooking to politics, I’d always felt especially fortunate. I’d ascended from having a small, low-traffic blog to joining Jesse Taylor at the big-time liberal blog Pandagon to actually controlling Pandagon in the course of three years. Still, my good fortune amounted mostly to being good at what was still essentially my hobby, since I worked full time outside of my blog life. So it surprised me that my streak of luck would result in the John Edwards campaign calling and recruiting me for the position of campaign blogmaster. Of course, when I was informed that the general gist of the job played to my strengths of writing about progressive politics and building a blog audience, then the recruitment made much more sense. I was also heartened to find out that Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare’s Sister would be joining part time as a consultant, tapping her talents at organizing bloggers.
After not very much time weighing my options, I put in my notice at my day job and decided that I’d be happy to move to North Carolina. It wasn’t hard to see that this was a great opportunity and a chance to do what few people get to do, which is turn a hobby into a living. Or at least, to a degree. Pandagon was a personal blog, where I wrote in my own voice; clearly the blog for the Edwards campaign would be a campaign blog, where the campaign dictated the directions of my posts.

Unless John Edwards actually likes the vulgar style over at Pandagon, someone on the campaign did their man wrong — and the campaign did this young woman wrong. It’s a free country and she can diss religion and Republicans in whatever way she wants. But for no one on that campaign to see this coming and to have gotten this gal to pick up and leave her job, etc., was a campaign malpractice.

Mind you, as with some of the blog posts folks have been reading from her colorful archives these past two weeks, much of what Marcotte writes in her piece is a bit off — including a seemingly completely random shot at the Heritage Foundation. She writes of this whole incident as if folks on the right had a meeting and decided to start shooting arrows at some defenseless woman.

The right-wing noise machine’s favorite trick, possibly its only trick, is to select a target and start making a fuss, hoping that by creating the appearance of smoke, just enough people will be fooled into thinking there’s a fire. Unfortunately, it works. It was the method used to railroad Bill Clinton (Whitewater, Vince Foster, state troopers) and the method that ushered the nation into war with Iraq (WMDs and so on). This time they were only attacking a lowly rookie staffer on a Democratic campaign, but the M.O. was the same.

If there were one of those famous vast-right-wing-conspiracy meetings called they forgot to invite me again! Over a decade in the conservative movement and I’ve yet to be invited to one, or get their talking points for that matter. It’s the weirdest thing.

I have to tell you, I was ignoring the entire Edwards blog incident — which I was lazily reading as “left wing blogger says crazy things” and so it didn’t seem like news — until I read some of her quotes about Catholics — which were easily found thanks to a “religion” category on the Pandagon site. I wrote this piece on some of them and then William Donahue at the Catholic League, Fidelis, and others took note and did what they do — bring attention to such things.

Highlighting her comments wasn’t anti-woman(! there’s that silly girl thing again ) as her Salon story and others suggest. Fact is, John Edwards should feel uncomfortable with someone on his staff who wrote of one of his Senate colleagues:

The problem with Rick Santorum is that every time he talks about sex, that little part of all of us that wants to run into a preschool and yell “f**kslut” or go to a born-again church and scream about how God loves to come in our backyards for our milkshakes, well, it just grows a hundredfold, and the restraint that most of us show just flies out the window. As a Senator, however, Santorum finds himself frequently faced with many of the most pressing issues of penis insertion that have ever faced America—and so he must speak, lest his lack of self-control be manifested by f**king his desk on the Senate floor. (There’s a knothole that’s just the right size, y’know.)

John Edwards should feel uncomfortable hiring someone who would write:

There’s a pragmatic reason that the Vatican might be a little hesitant to come right out and say that there’s no limbo (definition here, for those who don’t know much about Catholicism) is because the concept is wielded by everyday Catholics to explain where the souls of unborn babies go, which is just an extra way to guilt trip women who have abortions. But it’s sort of a balancing act, as far as I can tell, because as most people understand it, unbaptized children go to limbo but when Jesus returns, they all get to go to heaven. So it’s a way to guilt trip women who have abortions without casting god as such an uncruel monster as to throw souls into hell that never even had a shot at sinning. So that’s limbo: it sucks enough to make women feel guilty about abortion, but it doesn’t suck so much as to run people off.
I suspect Pope Ratz will give into the urge eventually to come out and say there’s no limbo and unbaptized babies go straight to hell. He can’t help it; he’s just a dictator like that. Hey, fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, the Pope’s gotta tell women who give birth to stillborns that their babies are cast into Satan’s maw. The alternative is to let Catholic women who get abortions feel that it’ll all work out in the end, which is just not doable, due to that Jesus-like compassion the Pope is so fond of. Still, it’s going to be bad PR for the church, so you can sort of see why the Pope is dragging ass.

That kind of stuff is trouble for Democrats, as Mary Eberstadt writes, as Democratic candidates make obvious effort sto court people who would be especially bothered by that kind of writing. John Edwards was bound to be uncomfortable mixed up with that kind of sentiment and he sure was when outsiders did the work his staff should have done. And now she’s gone from his campaign — but not the scar left behind by the incident.

Anyone who sent this woman a threatening or nasty or otherwise inappropriate and rotten e-mail should be ashamed of themselves. I’m sure they did send them and often because I get the same kind of e-mails regularly — rude, crude e-mailing is not a hobby the Right has a monopoly on. It’s wrong whatever the topic and whatever your politics are.

A long-term lesson for politics intertwined with the blogopshere is: The Edwards campaign made a big mistake and did Amanda Marcotte a wrong by not simply using Google before they hired her.