It looks like John Edwards will not fire the left-wing bloggers whose incendiary comments caused a minor media storm.
I’m not all that surprised — Edwards knows that the radical “netroots” have a disproportionate influence on the Democratic Party, and he needs to kowtow to them as much as possible in the early days.
However, what Marcotte wrote was bigoted, incendiary, and childish. It was tantamount to hate speech, and is certainly not anything resembling decent and thoughtful political discourse. Like it or not, by retaining Marcotte and McEwen, Edwards has given a tacit endorsement to their comments. That is certainly his choice, but it also the choice for the electorate to make inferences based upon it.
Lay down with dog, wake up with fleas.
Hint: tolerance is supposed to work in both directions.
Because Chris Clarke from Creek Running North is a better writer than I am:
“Here are a few basic ground rules for religious tolerance. Not everybody believes what you believe. This includes the existence of an afterlife, the existence of a soul, the existence of any gods at all much less one all-encompassing one. A person’s failure to believe what you believe does not constitute disrespect for your beliefs. Failure to be obsequious in the face of your religion’s central story does not constitute disrespect for believers in your religion. One can respect Christians as human beings and still opine aloud that the New Testament is a bunch of nonsense, just as one can respect traditional Hopi culture without writing in your Pleistocene paleontology paper that the ancestors of the Hopi emerged into this world from a sipapu in the Grand Canyon.
It’s clear to most thinking people that Opus Donohue and his like aren’t interested in tolerance at all, but in theocratic subjugation. What’s apparently less clear to some? That subjugation rests on the assumption that everyone secretly believes in a Christianist god and heaven despite their pagan or atheist or pantheist poses. A tolerant ecumenicism, these people seem to think, consists of granting the possibility that the All-Powerful One God in an afterlife heaven might go by more than one first name. A little-considered fact about even the most strident atheists: they spend most of their public lives not challenging people’s false assumptions about what they believe.”
The blogosphere works itself into a frenzy about a Presidential candidate most people wouldn’t immediately recognize who hired a consultant from the blogosphere that virtually nobody has heard of. America’s response: shock and awe….over the death of Anna Nicole Smith.
If the GOP is this desperate this early in their efforts to discredit the third-place Democratic Presidential candidate, I can’t even imagine the level of derangement we can come to expect AFTER the primaries.
Yup, stuff like this is the epitome of tolerance:
“What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?”
Here’s a deal, if you think that kind of comment is appropriate, I dare you to go up in the middle of any college campus and say “Mohammad was a camel-raping pederast who could only sustain an erection by slaughtering Jews.” After all, that’s no less vitriolic than what Marcotte has said on numerous occasions.
Somehow, I doubt you’d jeopardize your academic career by saying such a thing, which only highlights the hypocrisy involved in this case.
Let’s see what comments of Jay’s could be taken out of context and used to show that he’s a big meanie:
“Mohammad was a camel-raping pederast who could only sustain an erection by slaughtering Jews.”
Can you believe Jay said that? I can’t believe he hates on Muslims so much!