Dan Gerstein, who was ostracized by leading liberal bloggers for serving as Senator Joe Lieberman's communications director, writes in The Politico about the John Edwards blogger flap ("Pandagate") and the "angry, adolescent glory" of liberal blogs:
If the liberal blogs want to understand why so few people outside their narrow echo chamber take them seriously, and what it will take to gain the broader credibility they crave, they should look no further than their handling of the recent flap over John Edwards’ foul-mouthed blogger hires.
This ugly morality tale - which mercifully concluded Tuesday with the second of the two offending online staffers resigning from the Edwards campaign - revealed the Kossacks in all their angry adolescent glory: impudent, impotent, unreflective and unaccountable.
Throughout the course of the controversy, the left’s bigger digital diatribers never stopped to address the substance of what the Edwards bloggers actually wrote before joining the campaign. Had the bloggers done so, they might have found the postings were widely deemed by Democrats and Republicans alike as bigoted and patently offensive to many Christians, not just devout Catholics or evangelicals.
Nor did they ever stop to think how hollow and hypocritical it sounded for the same people who ravaged George Allen, for his “macaca” moment in last year’s Virginia Senate campaign to cry “free speech” when confronted with a far more nasty, vulgar, and hurtful display of prejudice from two of their own.
Instead, right until the bitter end, most liberal bloggers responded in their familiar mode – by lashing out at their critics and trying to marginalize them. This was, in their eyes, purely a manufactured controversy by the “right-wing smear machine” and a cynical attempt to silence and marginalize the Netroots.
He also points out an issue I mentioned below:
One sure way to . . . consign our party to minority status is to broadly tar Christians in general and Catholics in particular as “Christo-fascists” and misogynists, as the Edwards bloggers did.
Catholics are one of the biggest and most important swing-voting blocs in this country. They often tend to decide elections. So it’s probably not the smartest idea for a leading Democratic presidential candidate to hire people who openly defame Catholicism’s sacred figures by talking about the Lord filling the Virgin Mary with “his hot, white, sticky spirit.”
HT to the Beltway Blogroll.
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