Let Slip The Unhinged
By Mitch Berg
Amanda Marcotte has apparently resigned from the Edwards campaign.
Malkin links to a number of bloggers who’ve had a very low profile, to date; liberal Christian bloggers. One such is “Faithful Progressive” from the “Christian Alliance for Progress” blog, who writes:
Little has been written (at least as far as I have seen), about the need for blogs on the left to demonstrate more respect for the majority of Americans who are religious. We have made that point at least five times in widely linked posts. These two posts in particular generated a lot of debate:1.)An Open Letter to Liberal Bloggers; 2.)I’m Not Sick of Atrios or Digby: Building a Team Means Religious and Secular Liberals Hearing Each Other Out. But most of the responses were hostile and the debate generated more heat than light.
No shock, that last bit there. Crossing the nutroots is a good way to get your comment section pumped full of hot, black, sickly bile.
Rent-a-blogger Jeff Fecke – a local long-time leftyblogger who spent the last campaign season on the payroll of an organization that has never made its finances public (to my knowledge) but that shares office space, agendas and talking points with George Soros’ Media Matters for America – has been working overtime to rationalize Marcotte.
No, rationalizing is the right word. After spending most of the last week saying “Oh yeah? Your bigots are worse than our bigots! (Note to Jeff: Bill Donohue doesn’t work for a presidential campaign, and never will):
I don’t believe Amanda’s characteristically blunt comments crossed a line, and I certainly don’t believe that one angry line in an angry essay is proof of anti-Catholic bias. It may be a sign that one strongly disagrees with the Catholic Church, but those are not the same thing, and in a pluralistic society cannot be the same thing; if we are not free to criticize other religions we are not free to practice our own. Amanda didn’t say Catholics were evil, or weak-willed, or (as my Grandmother was once taught) that they drink the blood of newborn babies. That’s anti-Catholic bigotry. Show me where Amanda wrote that, and we’ll talk.
Strawman, of course. She never wrote that. She’s spent most of her misbegotten, splittle-flecked career panting about what idiots Christians are; yapping about “godbags”; gargling about how pro-life Catholics just want to create more titheing Catholics. Her entire body of work is suffused with a contempt for christians and Christianity that only the willfully obtuse, or someone who has an interest in obfuscation, or just someone whose entire worldview is slanted that way, could miss.
And while Fecke spent several posts focusing on talking points about one Bill Donohue – a Catholic writer/editor with a way for agitating anti-Catholics – the fact is that Donohue’s anti-Catholicism was just one noxious weed in her boquet.
If you have faith in anything higher than Al Gore, Amanda Marcotte has a problem with you.
Don’t want to call it bigotry? Fine . Amanda Marcotte has some really sick attitudes about people of faith.
Does she have the right to criticize religion? Sure. She can do it any way she wants; she’s chosen to do it in a hateful, cliche-sodden, degrading, insulting way.
That’s her right!
But rights have consequences. Insult, degrade and hate people, and they have a right to call you on it.
It’s that part that the nutroots seem to have trouble with; rights with consequences.
February 13th, 2007 at 10:40 am
Let Slip The Unhinged
Wasn’t it you Mitch that was saying that the taunt “unhinged” was a liberal taunt?
February 13th, 2007 at 10:50 am
“let’s see – cherry-pick intelligence, say the insurgency is it’s death throws, say the problem is we’re just not getting the “good news”, no consequence..”
No consequence? None? Not even a single critical op-ed piece? Are you fricking kidding me?
February 13th, 2007 at 11:29 am
But I’m making no claims about entire classes of people.
Merely noting the selective ethics with which many leftybloggers have been viewing Marcotte.
February 13th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
I have been monitoring the comments in the blog at democrat.org and they seem to feel that her comments were acceptable as they were just an expression of her right of “free speech”.
February 13th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
PB-jbauer-donkeyman1 said:
“What disgusts me is that NEITHER SIDE can live in the house they build, neither, no way, no how, never, not for one second. I am repulsed by both parties, and any ludicrous claim that one side owns the moral high ground, is just that, ludicrous.”
There is a difference. The Right generally condemns their kooks; the Left embraces theirs.
Jeff Fecke’s rationalization of Marcotte is a shining example of this; it also demonstrates the point I made in another thread about John 8 being hijacked as the “Everyone Does It” defense: “Oh yeah? Your bigots are worse than our bigots!”
February 13th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
“If you can point me to an article Mitch wrote regarding….”
So on top of all that’s written elsewhere, you need Mitch to cover your grievances before he can dare criticize anything else. You are fricking kidding now.