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Those of us who were familiar with Amanda Marcotte’s oeuvre were stunned when the Edwards campaign hired her. The angry atheist cum feminist routine isn’t just a shtick for her. If you kno\ew her work, you knew that she was a chronically furious and barely-in-control individual. I would never have taken the chance of hiring such a person at my company, and we weren’t doing business with 300 million people watching.
Thus, the denouement of her relationship with the Edwards campaign is strangely appropriate. She was trying to play nice. She even scrubbed her most recent blog-postings of all obscenities. Believe me, this was a departure from ordinary practices.
But even when she was trying, Marcotte just didn’t have it in her. She couldn’t be made presentable for public consumption. This was one Eliza Doolittle that no Henry Higgins could transform. Amanda Marcotte is, and believe it or not this is the kindest way to put it, an extremely abnormal person who has the barest acquaintance with reality and what’s considered appropriate in the real world.
Her blog post yesterday that put the ultimate endgame afoot is revealing. In case you forgot, Marcotte wrote:
“The Christian version of the virgin birth is generally interpreted as super-patriarchal, where god is viewed as so powerful he can impregnate without befouling himself by touching a woman, and women are nothing but vessels."
Mind you, she wrote this while she was trying to be a perfect little lady. She thought this was so mundane a sentiment that it wouldn’t raise any eyebrows. Such is life in Amanda’s world.
LAST NIGHT, AMANDA WROTE HER angry resignation letter at her Pandagon site. Typically and tediously, she vowed to fight the patriarchy. More revealing than the post were the comments she sprinkled in the thread throughout the evening. As the evening wore on, her remarkable anger and her even more remarkable detachment from reality became increasingly apparent.
At 10:00 p.m. she wrote:
I 100% agree that this was a targeted hit on atheists in politics.
By 10:43, her sense of victimhood was congealing into an ideological framework:
On the why did I apologize thing—I never apologized for my opinions or beliefs. I do feel bad if people read my comments out of context and are hurt, but I don’t think that’s my fault so much as the fault of people who take my writing out of context.
By 11:49, the old fighting Amanda had returned to full flight:
All people claiming to be good Christians who agitated for me to be fired, one question:
Who would Jesus witchhunt?
Think hard before answering, assholes.
What can one say about such a sorry spectacle? Personally, I think her reader Lizz summed things up best, commenting:
Amanda, I am SO sorry about this : I feel Ill! F*CK F*CK F*CK the Rethuglc*nt noise machine!! All I ask is that you keep fighting the good fight against the f*ckwit Cirstians. Remember - ‘Keep your rosaries off of my Ovaries’
For readers who weren’t familiar with Pandagon prior to last week, take my word for it – Lizz’s comment is a typical day at the virtual office.
SO NOW WHAT? Specifically, where do the Edwards campaign and the Nutroots go from here? As of this writing, the Nutroots have maintained an oddly monolithic silence on the matter that had them so agitated and united not 5 days earlier.
While they’re thinking things through, I’ll extend a helping hand. The Nutroots’ play is obvious: The Edwards campaign gave Marcotte not one but two chances that she didn’t deserve. Marcotte blew it. If the Nutroots can summon a little maturity just for a moment, they’ll realize that Edwards did the right thing in belatedly swinging the axe and forego the ritual declaration of hostilities.
Even if that weren’t the right thing to do, it would be the smart thing. If for some bizarre reason the Nutroots feel that Marcotte’s dismissal was unwarranted, they’ll still look ridiculous if they don’t fall into line behind the Edwards campaign. They’ve threatened vicious rants and non-support – Edwards will look to have defied them if they take a hissy-fit this morning.
And in spite of said hissy-fit, the world will keep spinning for the Edwards campaign much as it did while Amanda Marcotte was spewing spittle on an Edwards-owned keyboard. Other candidates will note the paper-tiger qualities of the blogopshere, and will put on their calendars a date for a far more decisive Sister Souljah moment than the one John Edwards had.
As for Edwards, he looks irredeemably pathetic. There’s a simple reason for this - he is irredeemably pathetic. He hired someone who had no business being legitimated by a mainstream political campaign. He then bowed to pressure and fired her. He then bowed to pressure again and unfired her. And then he left the stage to let her resign. In the wake of all these stumbles and pratfalls, he looks like a careless fool. He also may have alienated the Fightin’ Nutroots to boot. Well played!
As for larger lessons in this ridiculous saga, I can only think of one: You can take the girl out of Blogistan, but you can’t take Blogistan out of the girl.
Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.
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