And The Hits Just Keep On Coming
by digby
It's so interesting that the NY Times is concerned enough with the use of "explicit and inflammatory language" and the huffing and puffing of a rightwing gasbag like William Donohue that they actually reported the phony right blogospheric brouhaha over the Edwards' campaign hiring Amanda Marcotte and Shakespeare's Sister.
The two women brought to the Edwards campaign long cyber trails in the incendiary language of the blogosphere. Other campaigns are likely to face similar controversies as they try to court voters using the latest techniques of online communication.
Oh lordy, I'll bet reading through all that "incendiary language" sent poor John Broder right over to the fainting couch. I hope Modo had some smelling salts handy. Profanity is uncivil and should not be tolerated by decent people:
A brief argument between Vice President Cheney and a senior Democratic senator led Cheney to utter a big-time obscenity on the Senate floor this week.
On Tuesday, Cheney, serving in his role as president of the Senate, appeared in the chamber for a photo session. A chance meeting with Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, became an argument about Cheney's ties to Halliburton Co., an international energy services corporation, and President Bush's judicial nominees. The exchange ended when Cheney offered some crass advice.
"Fuck yourself," said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency.
Gleeful Democrats pointed out that the White House has not always been so forgiving of obscenity. In December, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry was quoted using the same word in describing Bush's Iraq policy as botched. The president's chief of staff reacted with indignation.
"That's beneath John Kerry," Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. said. "I'm very disappointed that he would use that kind of language. I'm hoping that he's apologizing at least to himself, because that's not the John Kerry that I know."
This was not the first foray into French by Cheney and his boss. During the 2000 campaign, Bush pointed out a New York Times reporter to Cheney and said, without knowing the microphone was picking it up, "major-league [expletive]." Cheney's response -- "Big Time" -- has become his official presidential nickname.
Then there was that famous Talk magazine interview of Bush by Tucker Carlson in 1999, in which the future president repeatedly used the F-word.
Now they've got Bill "anal sex" Donohue working the NY Times like it's a cheap whore, braying in faux outrage that he's "offended" by something that Marcotte wrote in the past about Catholicism. Please. This game has gone on long enough.
Republicans write books calling Democrats traitors and calling for the internment of all American Muslims. They have hate radio shows with listeners in the millions, in which they call liberals cockroaches and compare them to terrorists and child molesters. These same radio show hosts are invited to the white house for strategy sessions and are feted by the conservative press as if they are heroes.
The press has let this go on for over a decade now without ever raising a peep. Indeed, it took Rush Limbaugh making a blatantly racist remark on national television before anyone even noticed that he is a bigot of the highest order. All ESPN ever had to do was listen to the hypocritical blowhard's show for a hour to know that. And it didn't stop George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from both appearing on his show last fall.
And campaign bloggers? You've got to be kidding. From Glenn Greenwald:
Let's begin with Patrick Hynes, the paid consultant for John McCain's presidential campaign. Hynes continuously blogged about political matters, including ones involving McCain and the GOP field, while concealing that he was on McCain's paid staff. That was not the first time Hynes has been caught using deceitful tricks to manipulate the blogosphere into writing content on behalf of his undisclosed clients.
[...]
Hynes' public writing is devoted to pure religious divisiveness -- he focuses almost exclusively on the claim that Christianity is superior and that those who attend church live better lives, and specifically to the belief that the Republican Party is the true party of those who believe in God and that Democrats are "anti-Christian." He wrote a book entitled In Defense of the Religious Right, and in an interview about that book in July, 2006, this is what he said:
Miner: Is it fair to call America a “Christian nation”?
Hynes: Yes. America is a Christian nation. As I write in my book, “Is America a Christian nation? Of course it is. Don’t be ridiculous. What a stupid question
.
Does McCain agree with that view, or think it is acceptable to label as "stupid" objections to the notion that "America is a Christian nation." Is that not as divisive and offensive, at least, as anything Marcotte wrote?
And then there is the controversy which Hynes tried to create several months ago by continuously disseminating anti-Mormon stories in order to damage Mitt Romney's standing among evangelical Christians, with claims like this:
But many evangelical Christians are not. There is growing concern among high-level evangelical leaders that the Romney campaign may have duped them after it was revealed by the Globe that Romney's team has constructed a Mormon political machine in secret after repeatedly stating in private to them that Romney would not run with the Mormon Church's backing.
The controversy over the Romney camp's use of church resources to support his political ambitions has the potential to widen the rift between Romney and the important evangelical bloc of votes he says he is pursuing.
Dr. James Dobson, one of the most recognizable faces on the evangelical scene has stated earlier in the month, “I don’t believe that conservative Christians in large numbers will vote for a Mormon but that remains to be seen, I guess.
And two weeks ago Ted Haggard, the President of the National Association of Evangelicals called Romney's religion a cult.
“We evangelicals view Mormons as a Christian cult group. A cult group is a group that claims exclusive revelation. And typically, it’s hard to get out of these cult groups. And so Mormonism qualifies as that, Haggard told the LA Times.
Does McCain approve of his consultant's attempt to use Romney's Mormonism to scare off Christian evangelicals from supporting Romney and to promote bigoted anti-Mormon accusations that Mormonism is a "cult"? Why would John McCain want someone on his campaign staff who traffics in such ugly, divisive, sectarian-based rhetoric?
These are things that one finds within 60 minutes or so of searching Hynes' blog. The blog he previously maintained throughout the 2004 election, Kerry Crush, is no longer online. Its archives undoubtedly contain ample content which would generate many more questions for McCain. The ones here are a good start.
Michele Malkin and her ilk seem to have gotten that paragon of decency and civil discourse, Bill Donohue, to punk the NY Times into going with this non-story about the Edwards campaign bloggers. The Times frames it by saying that "other campaigns" are going to have similar problems. Fine. Let's see the story on Hynes. (And there's more where that came from.)
Perhaps you would like to help the NY Times with their research on this matter. The reporter didn't seem to be inclined to check into similar problems with Republican campaigns. Apparently, they were even too busy to check whether William Donohue is a trash talking political hitman and whether or not this is an organized takedown coming from the right blogosphere. So it appears that only Democratic bloggers are deserving of stories in the NY Times sniffing about their "inflammatory language" and alleged anti-catholic blog posts while Republican bloggers who lie about their campiagn affiliations and openly preach religious intolerance are given a pass. I'm sure that's not what they intended.
Here's the email for John Broder. Perhaps you can politely point him in the right direction.
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