Amanda Marcotte and the Right-Wing Hate Machine

Technorati Tags: Amanda Marcotte, John Edwards, Duke Lacrosse rape case, feminism, gender politics

It's jaw-dropping, how much venom bloggers on the right have been directing toward one liberal blogger, Amanda Marcotte, because John Edwards chose to hire her to blog for his campaign.

Amanda started out in the blog world with Mouse Words, then started blogging at Pandagon, eventually taking over ownership of that blog when Jesse Taylor and Ezra Klein moved on to other projects. Now she has accepted Edwards' offer of a paid position to write for his campaign blog.

A few things are obvious here:

First, Amanda Marcotte is more than qualified to be the official blogger for a national political campaign. Second, Amanda Marcotte is strongly feminist and a leftie (politically speaking), which for the wingnuts is a nonstarter. Third, by asking Amanda Marcotte to be his official campaign blogger, John Edwards is clearly signaling that he plans to run an unapologetically left of center campaign. For me, this is one of the reasons I like Edwards so much. But bloggers like Michelle Malkin, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Jeff Goldstein, and others of their ilk, are absolutely crazed with fury that a major Democratic contender for the presidency would be so unintimidated by the right's liberal-bashing that he would actually have a proudly and strongly liberal blogger in a prominent place on his election team.

Amanda has been relentlessly attacked ever since her move to Edwards' campaign, for her feminism, for her use of curse words in her posts, and for what is alleged to be her habit of deleting comments she doesn't like.

The fem-baiting is par for the course with this crowd. Any woman who speaks out with anger and passion about the way rape is trivialized and accommodated in this society, or about the absolute, unequivocal right of a woman, or any human being, to make her own medical and health decisions for her own body without any interference from the government or anyone else, is going to get the "extreme radical man-hating feminist" label slapped on her forehead.

I'm not a big fan of relying on words like "fuck" to express outrage, but anyone who applauds this kind of garbage has no business calling anyone else's language "vulgar" and "vituperative."

Oh, and about Amanda's supposed habit of deleting comments she disagrees with: That was settled here. And the guy who made the accusation apologized. Too bad none of the others who've been piling on Amanda have that minimal level of intellectual honesty.