Amidst all the crap in my poor brain right now (new institutionalism, nationalism, R.A.V. v. St. Paul, superbowl ads, the magazine closet in the Devil Wears Prada, chocolate donuts, returns to Blockbusters, a new pair of black pumps), I have a half-written post about Amanda from Panagon and Melissa from Shakespeare’s Sister working on the Edwards’ campaign blog. I was going to write a “go, girl” post.
A week into the gig, there’s already controversy. Amanda is getting flack for her take on the Duke rape case. For the record, we weren’t all that nice to the Duke Lacrosse players on this blog, and I have been remiss in writing a “sorry, frat dudes” post. I’m too tired to get into the details of the Amanda issue. Bitch, PhD has some links on it.
But it does prove my old suspicion that blogging does blow all chances of being involved in politics. Posts like this one have barred me from ever holding public office or assisting anyone else in a campaign.
UPDATE — It appears that much happened today while I was sequestered in a classroom for most the day. My faithful commenters sent me many links. Amy points to an article in the Times on the hoopla.
Dr. Manhattan points to a Salon article that reports that the two bloggers may have been let go. The Salon article points out that Marcotte’s critics aren’t so clean and shiny. More from My DD, abc, pandagon
Apt. 11d 
As initially presented, the Duke case was perfect (too perfect), appealing to all of our prejudices. I went for it hook, line, and sinker. On the assumption that they were guilty as charged, the players’ behavior after the charges (going out! having a good time!) seemed callous, and their friends’ support seemed callous, too.
That was true initially, before the evidence started to roll in, before we heard about the ATM record, the cell phone records, and the lack of any DNA evidence. It still seems unbelievable that anyone could be as reckless and irresponsible as Nifong has shown himself to be. How could he think that he could get away with it?
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AmyP – below is a comment I put up at Half Changed World when she wrote a ‘you go girl’ post about Marcotte’s job. Prosecutors can ruin people, usually with impunity. Even if they lose a case, it rarely comes back to bite them. Like you, I was appalled by the reported behavior of the Duke lacrosse players, and then watched the case go in the ditch. You said, how could he think he could get away with it? I think there are several things which went wrong for Nifong – and the world has changed – technologically – in important ways in the last ten years. The alibi case for Reade Seligman is based on bank records for his ATM withdrawal, and on the records at the taxi company for when he was picked up and dropped off. It’s new that that kind of thing is available. There are date/time stamped photos of Crystal Mangum stripping when she said she was in the bathroom being raped. There are the positive DNA results for four other men, but not for any of the lacrosse players, from her anus and vagina. All that stuff is really new, and takes the case away from a she said/they said situation. Class plays in this too – Nifong set out to railroad three students whose families could spend $80000 a month on their defense, usually the resources of the prosecutor dwarf those of the defendant. Below is the comment I put at Half Changed World:
“I posted on this site in early January, in response to an entry about the Hacker book Great Risk Shift (http://www.halfchangedworld.com/2006/09/tbr_the_great_r.html) “Here’s another risk: getting on the wrong side of a moral panic and an ambitious prosecutor. Doesn’t happen to a Hell of a lot of people, but when it does, wow. My sports-mad ten-year-old – suppose he gets what we think is a long straw in the college lottery and gets admitted to Duke. And we dig a little deeper than we thought we had to to make that happen, and he gets invited to a party at the lacrosse team house, starstruck, thrilled to be there, and a stripper shows up – yikes! This woman decides she hasn’t been treated right, and screams that she’s been raped, and picks random guys out of a line-up, and a prosecutor who wants to get reelected (lets call him ‘Mike N.’)gets a grand jury to indict him. If our family can come up with $15000 a month for really good defense lawyers to scrutinize everything about the case for flaws, and to get them into the national press, we can save him. If not, it’s twenty years.” – and I’ve been following the whole Duke lacrosse case train wreck since that time.
A lot of people are paying attention, appalled attention, and the political complexion of the commenters at sites like Durham-in-Wonderland (http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/) is interesting, the blog writer is an Obama backer, and the commenters go from rightists who write ‘nutroots’ when talking about Dean Democrats to, well, Dean Democrats. Governor Easley has just given a speech in which he stated that Mike Nifong is his single worst appointment, the NC Bar is considering censure or disbarment for Nifong, Susan Estrich has written her worry that the lies told by the claimed victim here will by themselves substantially worsen the tendency not to take sexual assault victims seriously when they report crimes. The President of Duke has invited the two accused who have not yet graduated to come back to Duke and rejoin the lacrosse team. What’s wrong with the case? Just about everything: the students charged were picked from a line-up including only lacrosse players. One of them has electronic evidence that he was at an ATM machine across town at the time the accuser said he was raping her. The accuser, after DNA tests showed DNA from four men – none of them a lacrosse player – in her anus and vagina, recanted her claims of penis penetration. All of the men who attended the party stated that the accuser’s claims were not true. There are time-stamped electronic photos showing the accuser stripping and appearing cheerful at the time she says she was being raped in the bathroom. So: tremendous uncertainty whether anything chargeable happened, and further uncertainty whether, if it did, the three guys charged were the ones who did it. AND Mr Nifong was running for reelection at the time, and wanted reelection very badly because his ultimate pension would go up dramatically.
Amanda Marcotte has posted on this set of events, one of her posts was quoted at Durham in Wonderland “In the meantime, I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good fucking god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out…” Further from Durham in Wonderland: “After James Taranto [Wall Street Journal] brought attention to the words above, Marcotte deleted them (so much for “transparency” in the Edwards campaign). Her new statement?
‘Since people are determined to make hay over this quick shot of a post, I’m deleting it and here’s my official stance. The prosecution in the Duke case fumbled the ball. The prosecutor was too eager to get a speedy case and make a name for himself. That is my final word.’”
National Journal Buzz is now calling this the “First blog scandal of the 08 Campaign” [http://beltwayblogroll.nationaljournal.com/archives/2007/02/the_first_blog.php]
“Marcotte’s attempts to airbrush her past are fast becoming a black-eye for Edwards, even as he earned raves yesterday for a speech at the Democratic National Committee winter meeting in Washington . . . As often is the case in politics (and blogging) — and as a prominent blogger like Marcotte should have known — the cover-up is worse than the crime. And it doesn’t help that Marcotte has been both dismissive and defiant in response to her critics.”
The whole thing is doing Edwards a lot of harm with me – I hadn’t been considering supporting Edwards in the first place, I don’t think ‘Senator’ is a particularly good background for the Presidency, ‘Governor’ is much better, and his one term was not very accomplished. Hiring someone who has expressed herself on the side which is looking worse and worse on this case is just foolish on the part of his campaign.
As well, Edwards’ own choice to build a 30000 square food house – the most expensive house in the county – is also going to come back to haunt him. There will be aerial photos in the general election, superimposed on average houses. Does no one in his campaign remember what the aerial house photos did to Foley and Daschle in their defeats? These guys really do NOT look ready for prime time. How to give the election to the Reeps, again. Tone deaf.”
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Has AM addressed the shift in evidence in the case?
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AmyP, this is what Taranto posted on the WSJ site on Feb 1:
“…Here is a Marcotte blog entry from just last week:
‘Naturally, my flight out of Atlanta has been delayed. Let’s hope it takes off when they say it will so I don’t miss my connecting flight home.
In the meantime, I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good [obscene progressive participle] god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and [obscene past-tense verb] her against her will–not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out. Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.’
At the very least, this is potentially libelous, given that the lacrosse players–although still charged with sexual assault (but not rape)–haven’t actually been convicted of anything. It is also, shall we say, rather intemperate in tone, and one wonders if Edwards knew just what kind of blogger he was hiring here…”
So, assuming Taranto dated it right, yes, this post by Amanda Marcotte was from well after the wheels had clearly come off of this case.
This is, if you think about it, another example of how things have changed because of the Internet – two people who have never met (I do actually know an Amy P, but as far as I know you are not she) can talk about an issue, bring text to it from weeks and months ago without squirrelling around in the recycle bin or going to the library. And this is part of what has gone so wrong for prosecutor Nifong: national attention which doesn’t go away and doesn’t get bored and keeps grinding away at what he is doing.
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Actually, Dave, I completely disagree with you.
What Amanda said about the Duke lacrosse players was not that unreasonable. The players weren’t altar boys, Nifong had withheld information from the public, and many, many bloggers and mainstream papers had written very similar things. Her contempt of those guys wasn’t way out there.
Bloggers need a greater freedom than the traditional press. Different standards need to be applied. Part of what makes blogging great is the quick, hasty post. If we’re too fearful of being second guessed in the future, it is going to make this medium totally boring. When you read a blog post, you know what your getting — hasty, fun opinion. There’s a trade off between fun and perfect. I expect the Times to be objective and careful, and I expect the blogs to be fun and carefree.
I don’t even have a problem with deleting old posts. I have done it many times.
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I don’t think bloggers need greater freedom. If I write something in haste which turns out to be really cringe-inducingly dubious, here’s what I do if I’m called on it: I say, on reflection, I was wrong in certain ways, or I’m reconsidering this issue. Or if I’m still pleased with the original entry, or think people are making a big deal out of it, I say, “y’all are making a big deal out of nothing. And, by the way, I write this blog to please myself, and if it doesn’t please you, go away.”
Those are all valid options. But they’re no different than the options that present opinion writers in the MSM. (Reportage in the MSM is different not because it’s in the MSM, but because it’s reportage: almost no bloggers do original reportage or knowledge production in their blogs.) I think deleting a post that one has come to regret at precisely the point where others are calling you on it is not a good thing to do. That’s when you step up to the plate and say, “I’ve been thinking about this issue, and I’m going to try to explain why I still believe in what I said/explain why I agree it was wrong but why it was important to say anyway/agree that you’ve convinced me I was wrong”.
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Though I agree that Nifong was a dirtbag. I also love your discussion of the impact of technology in this case.
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Laura, the Pandagon post wasn’t put up in the early stages of the case, when people thought the case was legitimate. It was posted on January 21. By then, the non-existence of any legitimate case (other than the professional misconduct proceedings against Nifong) was clear to anyone who ventured beyond his or her initial prejudices and actually examined the state of the evidence. It is fair to criticize Marcotte for not taking that step. So yes, what Marcotte wrote on January 21 was, literally, “unreasonable.”
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Laura, I’m going to respond to the ‘altar boys’ comment – there were 30-40 guys at that party. Three of them were picked, by Crystal Mangum, and it seems more or less at random, from a lineup Nifong set up against all standard procedures to include ONLY the white lacrosse team members. So, whatever happened – if anything at all, unless you want some kind of group guilt for being there, three guys were facing huge prison sentences for actions which could be only marginally connected to them. Yes, being at a party where there is a stripper and people call her ‘nigger’ is not tasteful. It’s not improved by her having called them ‘little-dick white boys’. Unless you want to make being-at-a-party-where-people-shout-racial-insults-at-a-stripper a felony, though, I don’t see how you, in mid January, justify this prosecution. And if you prosecute anyone, why not all of them?
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gotta run to class. quick comment.
Being at party with strippers and making racial remarks is not a felony, though it certainly harmed their credibility. Those actions, plus the supression of evidence, led many reasonable people to believe Nifong.
I still think expectations are crutial. I expect most bloggers to be intemporate and to push the envelope. I wouldn’t expect it of you, Tim, which is why I respect your remarks more than the average political bloggers. However, I like that there are these intemporate bloggers out there. I like to see how they are going to push things. I expect Howard Stern to be trashy and am glad that there’s a place for Howard Stern in the open sea of information. Same for bloggers. However, now that Amanda is workign for a campaign, I expect that she’ll be more careful in her remarks.
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Those guys were jerks. They appear to not have been rapists (and were fortunate in that they were rich enough that they could disprove their guilt, not the way our criminal justice system is supposed to work, and perhaps the reason why that we are finding that a shocking number of convicted rapists cannot be connected to the crime of which they were convicted when hard evidence becomes available). Although, the Duke lacross players weren’t guilty of rape, but they were men who I will cross the stree to avoid. I’m not ready to make it a felony to ask some one to work at your party, and then call them racial epiphets, but I would be perfectly happy to make it grounds for expulsion from my house (and perhaps from my school). It horrifies me that the malfeasance of the prosecutor has underplayed how ugly the behavior of the men really was. They shouldn’t be thrown in jail, but they should certainly be shunned by polite society.
I haven’t followed the blog controversy, but blogs are in an odd space in the communication enterprise, and deletion of posts depends on the kind of blog you run. There are deeply personal blogs that tell deeply personal stories; I can’t feel that those are anything more than journals (with fully copyrighted content) that the owner should be allowed to change at will.
Other blogs should follow different rules. Laura’s blog is a complicated case and point. She is non-anonymous (which I really respect), but she posts about both personal and political views. If she decided that she shouldn’t have said something about her son that she wrote on the spur of the moment, does she have to post a retraction? or can she just take it away? For example, what if she decided, when her sons became readers of blogs, that it would be better to delete all posts of her sons? I’d be disappointed, but I would respect her right to do so, without comment. A blog is an evolving site, not a publication.
As I said, I haven’t followed the specific blogging controversy, and I can’t support deleting a political post, but I don’t think journalists rules apply to bloggers, unless the blogger wants them to. Maybe blogs should post what their ethics are in the front page (like at I Speak of Dreams). Then, we could allow people to tell us their own ethical rules for their own blog, and we could hold them to that standard.
Care to start Laura? What rules would you follow?
bj
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The Duke lacrosse players are quite young, and have a lot of growing up to do, which is why I don’t think it is reasonable or productive to administer life-long shunning to them for misdeeds committed in their late teens. I think different (and harsher) standards of behavior have to be applied to the adults involved in the case who should all have known much better.
Incidentally, I think AM will have to retract her January remarks about the lacrosse players if she wants to keep her new gig. Until she does, she will remain a liability to the candidate she is supposed to be working for.
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One more thing: although I’m sure no one cares or remembers what I posted here initially on the case, I’d like to say that I was wrong to automatically assume the players’ guilt. They are clearly not guilty of the crimes they are accused of committing. I would invite Amanda Marcotte to say the same thing in some public forum.
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I never assumed the Lacross player’s guilt for rape (and have always felt this way about he said she said rape cases). With no other evidence, I might personally believe one participant over the other, but wouldn’t think there was enough evidence to meet the “reasonable doubt” standard for criminal convictions.
But, I think we might disagree about the egregiousness of their conduct (is that conduct admitted?). It was truly horrible. Lifelong shunning would be perfectly acceptable to me, unless I see clear evidence that they have changed (not just “grown up.”). And, frankly, I’d say the same thing if they had been guilty of rape (i.e. that at some point.
I read the active support of the players (as opposed to the opposition to their prosecution) as exposing the underbelly of american racism, especially with regard to sex crimes.
bj
PS: Yes, I am not white (though not black either). So, I usually don’t experience casual racism (i.e. no one has ever ever used the words described in my presence).
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I don’t know the backgrounds of the Duke players, but I would note that (at least up North), “the n word” doesn’t figure in adult middle-class life (and certainly not in adult upper-middle class life). So, the main conduit for that kind of language would be via black American popular culture, which is of course consumed voraciously by exactly the Duke lacrosse demographic.
As a 31-year-old white woman who’s lived in rural Washington state, gone to college in LA, gone to college and lived in Pittsburgh, and now reside in upper-middle class DC, I have only heard the “n word” uttered once by a real live white person outside quotation marks. (The perpetrator lived in rural Washington state, had strawberry plants planted in defunct toilets in his front yard, and complained that blacks had appropriated all those good last names like Washington, Lee, and Jackson.) The racism that I have heard from people an older generation is subtler, more of the variety: “We sat next to the nicest colored man on the plane” or “I wasn’t racist until [fill in blank with latest news story]” or “Don’t live east of Rock Creek or outside Northwest DC.” Now that I’m looking for a neighborhood and a school, I’m also running into the very subtle racism of the urban, mostly liberal, upper-middle-class, including my very own. It’s very easy (indeed almost unavoidable) to use race as place-holder for other qualities in a neighborhood or a school. Would I send my child to a school with fewer than 10% white students? No, I would not, unless the 90% were split evenly among a variety of different ethnic groups. There’s also a much more benign form of racism going on in the way that various people (like Obama, most recently) are immediately given bonus points for their race and taken to the bosom of the public, independently of their actual achievements.
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At the risk of being a thread hog, Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO has a Feb. 6 article up entitled “Unholy Hires,” listing various un-PC things Amanda Marcotte has said about Catholics. The quotes are standard blogosphere fare, I suppose, but they are going to put Edwards in a very uncomfortable position very soon. Catholics are the new swing voters, after all.
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I do think that it’s incredibly unfair that falsely accused people get such a raw deal in the press. Even if the NYTimes used the word “allegedly,” those boys were tried and convicted in the papers. Their innoncence should garner the same front page stories, and bloggers who decried their guilt should retract their words.
Dr. Manhattan makes a good case tearing down my “reasonable” point. No comment right now.
It actually never occured to me that deleting content on a blog was a no no. I’ve had to do it several times, because I started off as an anonymous blogger. A few of my earlier posts would have hurt feelings, so those posts had to come down. Sometimes I can’t help writing posts that involve people I know. For me, personal stories often segue into the political. Also, it’s good for a laugh. However, I think better of it later and it comes down. I have some major concerns about writing about my kid’s disability. I’ve steered away from giving specifics, because it might alter the way friends and family see him. I’m also not sure how much we want him to know about these early years. Would I delete pure political content? I haven’t done it yet.
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bj, here is a time line which the lacrosse players’ backers have put up – http://johnsville.blogspot.com/2006/04/duke-lacrosse-rape-timeline.html
as far as I have seen, it’s been relatively consistent, while the Mangum/Nifong time line seems to have shifted to account for the inconvenient facts and records which come to light. The events at the party were tawdry. Lifetime shunning? Jeez, I have a couple of young boys – 10 and 8. I hope they have more sense in ten years, but I’m not confident. And I am, of course, crazy about them. Part of my reaction to the whole case is that I can see my kids getting sucked into something like it.
And let me remind you – the people who hired Crystal Mangum are NOT the people on trial. She was hired by the team captains. They skated. Mangum chose people from the lineup – who knows how? She was blind drunk at the party. The Roman Army used to decimate, kill one soldier out of ten if there was an offense and they couldn’t find the perpetrator. That hasn’t been an approved part of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, nor ought it be.
I like Timothy Burke’s stance on deletions: you should post stuff because you believe it. If other people convince you to change your mind, you should own up to it. That’s what makes the conversation authentic.
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“I like Timothy Burke’s stance on deletions: you should post stuff because you believe it. If other people convince you to change your mind, you should own up to it. That’s what makes the conversation authentic.”
My husband and I were just talking about this thread. He also mentioned that he liked Burke’s stance on deletions. I agreed. It is definitely the mature way to deal with errors. However, I would hate to put under the ringer like Amanda is right now. Edwards-haters have now gone through her blog with a fine tooth comb and taken statements out of context. Michelle Malkin is doing interpretive readings of Amanda’s posts. I’m not sure if a retraction post would hold them back.
Amanda does seem to have given them a lot of material. As Amy says she has written some really dodgy anti-Catholic stuff. But then again, I’ve read similar statements on respected academic blogs. Blogs breed extreme thought. Cass Sunstein has made that point many times. Good or bad? Depends on my mood.
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The first lines of White’s R.A.V. concurrence are among my favorite in the United States Reports…
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I’m the midst of the doing the 1st Amendment in my media class. All so relevant.
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Apparently, Pandagon has a long history of archive losses for technical reasons. Ezra Klein’s written (over at Tapped, I think) that all of his work for Pandagon has vanished into the luminiferous ether.
Also apparently, the guy writing for the National Journal did not bother to contact anyone involved with Pandagon before writing his article. Seems to me that if you’re going to write as if you’re reporting, you should report.
Though these snippets may not be new to anyone here, I add them on the chance that they may.
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I find Dave S’s comment about his sons very interesting. I am the mother of 2 girls, and I react so viscerally to any mention of rape charges that I’m not really all that sensible about it.
We all have more info about the Duke thing than we started with, and my opinions have changed along with everyone’s. Do I want a world where no one is ever sexually assaulted, and no one is ever falsely accused? Absolutely. But in my heart of hearts I still think that the occasional ruined reputation may be an OK price to pay for keeping women safe from rape. I wonder if I’d feel differently if the reputation belonged to one of my children?
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I don’t think that that is the choice that we are faced with. No matter how many innocent men go to jail or have their reputations ruined, there will always be rapists freely walking the streets. Women are never going to be 100% safe from rape, no matter what we do.
Furthermore, the effect of this case is going to be the further undermining of the ability of women to successfully pursue rape prosecutions. The traditional “nuts and sluts” defense is going to take on new life, thanks to the Duke case.
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I also found dave s’s comment about his sons very interesting. Tucked it away for another time.
I’ve been in class all day and came home to some juicy e-mails. Amy points to an article in the Times on the hoopla —
Dr. Manhattan points to a Salon article that reports that the two bloggers may have been let go. The Salon article points out that Marcotte’s critics aren’t so clean and shiny. Off to get the dirt…
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I think that AM is tempermentally unsuited to work on a presidential campaign, since the point of campaigning is to keep and make as many friends for your candidate as you can.
After 5 years of reading Catholic blogs, I can confidently say that Catholics are very much in play for the ’08 election. Catholics belonged heart and soul to the Democratic party for much of the twentieth century, and there are many theologically conservative Catholics who are economically liberal and would love to vote Democratic, if their consciences would permit them to. There is a lot of blogospheric handwringing over this issue to this day. Under the circumstances, it would be crazy for Edwards (or any other presidential candidate) to have a major staffer who is in the habit of indiscriminately insulting Catholics. The same holds (though probably to a lesser extent) for non-Catholic American Christians.
I don’t think Hillary Clinton is going to make this particular mistake.
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I’m a Catholic. My folks are uber-Catholics. Dad’s a regular contributor to First Things. But I’m really not all that offended by Amanda’s posts. I kinda see Amanda and other bloggers as experimenting with politics. Testing out certain ideas and seeing how far they’ll can take them. When I was their age, I talked shit in smoky bars for hours, sometimes taking one political opinion and then switching to the other side for kicks. The trouble with blogs is that every word is recorded. Most commenters (not you guys) don’t call bloggers on their shit and just suck up, so that makes the blogger even more extreme. When I was talking shit in bars, you can be sure that my friends were constantly smacking me down.
I’m not sure that Amanda would have continued on with this stuff after she had a paid gig. She seems smart enough to know that writing a blog is different from writing professionally.
Ann Althouse had an interesting take on all of this. Althouse is no friend of Amanda’s, but did seem to feel bad for her. She knew what it felt like to have quotes taken out of context. She also didn’t like how politicians were using bloggers. I’ll get the link later. Gotta watch Idol.
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Well, I was wrong on 30000 square feet – Edwards’ new house is 28000 square feet. And he has the bad luck that his across-the-road neighbor has posted a Giuliani sign. http://www.newsday.com/news/politics/wire/sns-ap-edwards-house,0,7508354.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines
Somebody should have looked at Marcotte’s history – the Duke stuff was bad enough, and the anti-Pope posts were ruinous. Somebody in the campaign should have had a tantrum and reminded the guy about how badly it hurt Foley and Daschle when aerial photos of their (much more modest) homes got splashed around in South Dakota and Spokane. This is not a tight and disciplined and forward looking campaign. I can’t imagine that Edwards will capture the nomination, or that if somehow he did he could beat either Giuliani or McCain.
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I think that creating a revolving door between the blogosphere and campaign staffs is a bad idea. It’s bad enough that there is such a revolving door between journalism and politics (and between politics and the business world), but it doesn’t even make sense to put one between the blog world and the respectable political world. As Althouse would say, good blogs are free-wheeling, anarchic, funny, and not infrequently bawdy, and a political functionary can’t afford to be any of these things. It’s a pity, but it’s unfortunately true. “Official” blogs are monstrosities: dead, boring, inert, embalmed. They look like blogs from a distance, but there’s no life. To take a blogger in from the wild and put him into an official blog, you need to shoot and stuff him first.
I agree with dave s about the monster house. Being a Democrat who talks about “the two Americas” and has that house is the equivalent of being a Republican with two underage mistresses and a meth habit.
Sorry for that bit at the end–I was hanging out at ace.mu.nu and proteinwisdom.com today and the example is infectious!
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Quite a few bloggers are like teenagers: They want freedom without responsibility. Marcotte’s supporters are trying to have it both ways. Yes, you can say whatever provocative thing you like online, but you then can’t get indignant when someone holds it against you later.
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Quite a few bloggers are like teenagers: They want freedom without responsibility. Marcotte’s supporters are trying to have it both ways. Yes, you can say whatever provocative thing you like online, but you then can’t get indignant when someone holds it against you later.
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Coupla things to add to the mix (condensed here from other places and maybe a smidgen of my own cogitation): Bill Donahue and the people who fervently listen to him are never ever ever going to vote for a Democrat for President. Why should any Democrat cede him any power in the primary process? Really, if Kos were advising Republicans to nominate Gingrich or Tancredo because the Democrats were so scared of those two they wouldn’t even campaign, do y’all think the Republicans would listen?
Also on Donahue, he’s got a pretty foul mouth in his own public remarks; he’s got no standing to talk about someone else’s civility. (“Hollywood likes anal sex” and “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular,” just for example.)(And really, the other driver of this story is someone whose claim to fame is defending the closest thing America has had to concentration camps. Is there anything a right-wing person can say or do that is beyond the pale? Anything?)
This is the right wing trying to slap the Democrats around just to see if they can, and the establishment media willingly carrying water for Republican operatives and reinforcing their favorite narrative: Democrats weak, Republicans tuff. Is there a story about Republican bloggers working for campaigns having to meet similar bogus standards? There is not. Will there be such a story? No, there will not.
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Doug, I think Edwards would prove to be ‘Gingrich or Tancredo’ if nominated. He would be in real trouble in the general election with the Marcotte albatross around his neck, Donahue is one voice among many that Catholics hear and my guess is that having Marcotte on staff would turn some number of centrist Catholic voters against him. As well, her Duke comments – my guess on the trajectory of the Duke case is that by the time of the election the lacrosse players will be pretty fully exonerated, and the folks who were attacking them will make, for example, parents of college students pretty nervous.
It is a continual problem for both parties that their primary bases are way out from the political center, and the people who are most attractive to their primary voters are not the ones who will do best for them in getting support in the general. I see Edwards (besides being tone deaf on things like insulting and unnecessary public language about Duke and Catholics and the message sent by his mansion) as being too far left of center to win the election.
It is very possible that the Reeps have so poisoned the well that they will LOSE it, and whoever the Dems nominate would then get the office sort of by default. But if it’s a close race, the Dems will do better with someone like Clinton or Vilsack.
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“Do I want a world where no one is ever sexually assaulted, and no one is ever falsely accused? Absolutely. But in my heart of hearts I still think that the occasional ruined reputation may be an OK price to pay for keeping women safe from rape.”
I have to say, I find myself agreeing with Jen here. (A parent of daughters thing? Or just because I’m a moralistic authoritarian?) I definitely don’t want the Nifongs of the world to be able to randomly grab people and smear them for the community’s greater good. But smearing some privileged kids who go to drunken parties with strippers and then write racist and misogynistic e-mails about it afterward? Mmm…might be worth it.
But then, I also think Bill Clinton should have resigned because of his adultery, not because of his lying.
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Russell,
The result of that kind of “justice” would be to make the public more and more skeptical of accusations of rape. Women don’t need that kind of help from the legal system.
Doug,
1. No Republican is going to hire Ann Coulter as a communications director. And if they did, they wouldn’t get anywhere near the nomination.
2. As I’ve said earlier on this thread, Catholics are in play for ’08.
3. You may not like Donohue’s quote about Jews in Hollywood, but it has the virtue of being at least partially true. There are whole respectable books with titles like “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood” and “From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture.”
4. (this one is not about what you wrote) Foreclosures are sky-rocketing and if the housing bubble bears are correct, this is just the beginning. Under the circumstances, Edwards “Two Americas” could hit exactly the right note. Unfortunately for him, he’s gone and built that house, just when thousands of Americans are going to be losing theirs. That’s terrible timing.
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Dave S,
Thanks for the light relief, “Marcotte albatross” is a good one. Compared with the Iraq albatross that’s hanging from Bush and — unless they repudiate a sitting president — the entire set of Republican candidates, any putative sins of A. Marcotte are light as a feather. Republican partisans are desperate to talk about anything but Iraq because they know that Bush in well into the process of losing Jacksonian America, and without that slice, their electoral prospects are about as bright as a black hole. The big question about public approval for the leader of the Republican party is whether the electorate is against him by a three-to-one margin or whether it is more like a two-to-one margin. If I were a Republican in these circumstances, I would certainly want to talk about blogging coordinators or house floor plans, and I would be thankful each and every day for a supine media that was willing to carry these messages to the body politic. But in Iraq, the US government, under Republican leadership, is getting Americans killed every day and spending hundreds of billions for no very good reason. That’s what this next election will be about, make no mistake.
And that house? I’ll bet Franklin Roosevelt had a pretty damn big house. In fact, I’d bet he had more than one. Didn’t stop him from doing more for regular working people in America than any president of the 20th century. (For which the Republicans of the time hated and reviled him, too; it goes with the territory.)
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Doug,
There is a school of thought that says that the Great Depression was so long precisely because of FDR’s economic policies.
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Russell,
Should GHW Bush have resigned because of his adultery? JFK? Eisenhower? FDR? There’s something to the trustworthiness and commitments arguments, but 1) they apparently only apply to Democrats, and 2) their application would have deprived America of some good leaders. I don’t have an easy answer either.
Amy P,
Have a look at Glenn Greenwald on McCain’s blogging coordinator. And I think it’s McCain who has also recently hired a guy, though in what capacity I don’t immediately recall, who was implicated in the 2002 New Hampshire phone jamming business. That resulted in criminal convictions and the NH Republican party paying damages to the NH Democrats for the next five years. I think there’s a big difference between using strong language on a blog and breaking the law for partisan advantage. That the media are focusing on one and not the other is yet another sign of a double standard.
And speaking of double standards, would Marcotte be taking nearly as much flak if she were male? What do you all think?
Partially true things about particular groups are some of the most insidious slanders available. That many Jewish people played important roles in building the film industry (Germany’s loss was often America’s gain) is one thing; to say that “they hate Christianity and Catholicism in particular” — and then to get up on a high horse demanding civility for one’s own denomination — is quite another. Chutzpah of a schmuck, I would say.
But that’s a side issue. As one of the commenters over at Unfogged put it, “I don’t think that he can win the election to become President if he can’t even put a Father Couglin-wannabe and a two-bit racist in their place.”
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“There is a school of thought that says that the Great Depression was so long precisely because of FDR’s economic policies.”
There is, but it’s wrong.
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“Should GHW Bush have resigned because of his adultery? JFK? Eisenhower? FDR? There’s something to the trustworthiness and commitments arguments, but 1) they apparently only apply to Democrats, and 2) their application would have deprived America of some good leaders. I don’t have an easy answer either.”
I don’t mean to be flippant about what is, to me at least, a pretty difficult issue–namely, figuring out how to hold be people to moral standards and accountability when there is so little agreement on the former (though that doesn’t seem to have taken away any of our very human desire for the latter). I suppose all I can say is that I believe we’ve gone much too far in the direction of undermining the power of shame, and that Bill Clinton ought not have simply been told that what he did was shameful, but that he really did deserve some shaming, and so do the Duke lacrosse players, because of their teams’ collective behavior. Is a rape charge, or an impeachment attempt, the best way to institutionalize such shaming? Clearly not. But if there really are no other tools available…again, this is a difficult issue for me.
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The problem with the “you’re an X too” approach Marcotte’s defenders are taking is that drawing attention to the nastiness of some of Marcotte’s attackers does nothing to diminish the power that her words have to turn people in the middle off.
I don’t have the time of day for Michelle Malkin, who has taken the time and effort to publish an entire book defending Japanese internment during WW2. And the best I can say about Donohue is that he’s a slightly less successful opportunistic slimeball than Jay Sekulow. But I’ve been skimming Pandagon for several months now feel I can safely say that it’s a limitless font of bile presenting a political windfall to anyone who wants to attack Edwards.
Katherine Lopez’s Pandagon quotes weren’t taken out of context or cherry-picked. They are representative of much (not most) of Marcotte’s postings there. She consistently assumes bad faith on the part of her opponents, attributes nefarious and unlikely motivations to them, then calls them f——ds (albeit eloquently). It’s tremendously entertaining if you’re an atheist vegetarian feminist. But it’s not going to win anyone else over, within the Democratic party or outside it.
The question is whether the public is willing to treat statements issued during private blogging — not offhand comments, but well-crafted essays — as something that tarnishes Edwards. I have no idea. But I do know that whenever a blogger links to Malkin’s site, it lowers my opinion of them. So I suspect that people will remember (and be reminded of) some of Marcotte’s nastier rants when they read her more temperate cheerleading at the Edwards campaign.
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Doug,
1. I don’t think a man with AM’s blogging record would find it any easier to hold a job with a serious presidential campaign.
2. McCain’s employee is the least of his issues. First of all, he hasn’t up until now made nice with conservatives. Secondly, there’s McCain-Feingold. Thirdly, there’s his age. Fourthly, there’s his own habit of talking a bit too freely. He did use the term “gook,” and I’m sure there’s plenty more lapses that didn’t get that much attention.
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I guess Edwards gave them a spanking, but has kept them on.
I want to clarify something. I was not offended by Amanda’s statements on religion only because I give bloggers more latitude to mouth off than a reporter or a political official. If those words showed up in the op-ed page of a major newspaper or were echoed by a politician, I would start making phone calls.
Ben is right, too. It doesn’t matter if that one post about the Duke lacrosse players was lost; any random post would likely offend the average reader, not just crazy right wingers. I think that Pandagon people have forgotten that their ideas are not mainstream. Their tone does freak out the average American voter. Lots of Catholics, not just the this Donohue fella, would be repulsed by her posts. Catholics are a rather large voting block; Edward would be foolish to dismiss them.
So, like Amy, I enjoy the feisty, over-the-top blogosphere. It just doesn’t play well in a political campaign.
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Hi Amy,
Male vs female, I’m glad to hear what you think on taking flak. Many folks at Unfogged, where there are at least two v good threads on this topic, took a different view. I’m undecided, but I have to admit that my male perspective on how women are treated is not always the best informed or most closely observed.
Indeed, sleazy employees are the least of McCain’s problems. In addition to what you rightly point out, the fact that his views on Iraq are to the right of at least 90 of his Senate colleagues (and thus presumably well out of the mainstream of the electorate’s views) is very important.
On Laura’s comment, I think that how Marcotte writes is only partially congruent with how she will work as a blog coordinator. Edwards (and all the other Democrat candidates, for that matter) has got to know that he/she and his/her people will be subject to vicious, personal and at best partially reality-based attacks throughout this campaign cycle. There is no biography or paper trail so virtuous and clean that it will render the owner immune to attacks from Republican operatives. There is no blow so low from Republicans that the establishment media will not pick it up and run with it. None whatsoever. Any Democrat running in this campaign has got to be prepared to deal with those facts. 2008 is going to be one vicious run, particularly in the rapid cycles of blogland.
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yeah, I agree. I’m sure Amanda will be more restrained on the Edwards campaign and do a great job for him. And your predictions about the 2008 election are probably dead on. So much for policy talk.
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Here’s a few early predictions:
Hillary Clinton can beat Edwards. He will continue to make mistakes (perhaps connected to his bloggers). She won’t make any.
McCain can beat Edwards.
Hillary Clinton can beat McCain.
Beyond that, the crystal ball is foggy.
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Um, Doug, the battle right now is for the Dem nomination. Any low blows being landed on Edwards are likely from another Dem candidate – particularly because the Reeps regard him as easier to beat than, Obama or Clinton. My guess is that Hillary people are working this, to the extent that it’s being masterminded by anyone who is for somebody. The folks who are trying to beat the Nifong railroad of the Duke Lacrosse players are probably not aligned with anyone for president, and the Donahue stuff is from his perspective, not particularly for anyone else.
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There is a huge comment thread at Durham in Wonderland on all this: https://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=32542246&postID=3428203599736504523
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Exactly, dave s. I have seen quite a few conservatives expressing glee over the fact that the two bloggers are staying with the Edwards campaign, since these conservatives think that AM is going to be a gift that keeps on giving.
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If I[*] were heavily invested in the defeat of Edwards, I’d be rejoicing too. Feeling as I do that there appear to be plenty of candidates of both parties that I find both more and less appealing, I’m fascinated with how this is going to play out. My opinion of Edwards’s integrity has risen by about as much as my opinion of his judgement has fallen.
[*] I’m not (quite) a conservative, but I play one on the internet.
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Let’s not forget that there have recently been concerted Democratic efforts to rebuild relationships with religious believers. Note how much we’ve been hearing about everyone’s church-going habits, and how after the 2004 elections, Democrats quoted yards of scripture. All that labor is what is at risk right now.
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AmyP, if you’re still hanging around, I want to challenge you on your statement that your unwillingness to send your kid to a 90% nonwhite school is ‘racism’ on the same continuum as the one on which your ‘strawberry toilet’ man is situated. If you’ve got twenty minutes, go off and read this Mother Jones article by Sara Catania: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1329/is_5_31/ai_n16726423
A grim time for a little girl in a totally incomprehensible situation not of her making. There’s nothing wrong with understanding that your kid would be in rough waters in a majority-black school, and wanting to spare the kid that experience. And that’s a very different thing from being (as Mr. Strawberry Toilet sounds to have been) hostile to black people, thinking that even their names should somehow be separate from his.
I’m really quite happy with my kids’ school on racial issues – haven’t seen any race-based bullying or insults there, there seem to be a reasonable number of friendships between kids of different groups. Though it’s majority-white, there are a good number of Latino and black kids. If anyone feels isolated, it might be the few Mongolians. If there are problems, I’m not aware of them. Why are things so good? Partly because school staff are watchful, and ready to take action any time things look to be going off the rails. Because it’s not, as you suggested, 90% one group and a small group of others seen as ‘others’ by everyone. Also class reasons: it’s a middle-class neighborhood. Kids are there (mostly) either because their parents bought breathtakingly expensive houses there or because their parents applied to transfer them in from elsewhere in the County because they wanted what was offered at that school.
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I didn’t read the whole article when I first saw it, but it did shape my thinking on the subject. And that was a parochial school! My SIL also had an unsatisfactory experience at a nearly all Chinese girls’ parochial school in Canada.
My current favorite in Maryland is a school that’s 37% white, 26% Asian (largely Chinese, I believe), 21% black, and 16% hispanic. It is 37% reduced/free lunch. It has good test scores, rates as an 8 at greatschools.net, and has a class-size reduction, so there are a maximum of 15 kids in the lower grades. It does have the standard “progressive” reform math curriculum, which will undoubtedly mean either Kumon or afterschooling with Singapore Math or Saxon Math. Unfortunately, it looks like the reform math curriculum is ubiquitous in large metropolitan areas like Washington DC.
I toured my favorite yesterday, and I have two other schools in the area to look at.
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Also, the elementary school feeds into a well-liked middle school and a powerhouse high school. The elementary school assistant principal runs tours twice a month, and she was visibly glowing with pride when she was talking about her school’s test scores.
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Amy, in re Democrats and religious groups, two quick observations. First, that both Carter and Clinton were more regular churchgoers than any of the intervening Republican presidents. Second, that there’s also a more concerted effort by Christians on the left to re-assert that the right wing does not speak for their faith, and that these views are not confined to the black churches either.
ps Jak sie Pani ma?
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Dobrze, dziekuje! Troche pamientam po polsku. How did you know I know I’ve studied Polish?
As dave s points out, we are still awaiting the primaries. There are going to be several Democratic candidates who haven’t made the particular mistakes that Edwards has been making, so he is putting himself at a disadvantage compared to the other Democratic candidates. Your two points explain why the move to hire the two bloggers was such a mistake–it has the potential to undo literally years of work.
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Tesz dobrze; pamientam tesz tylko troche jenzyk polskiego. Dla pytanie: Google wie wszystkich.
The front-loaded calendar means that we’ll have nominees very early next year, so the race is clearly on. But I think this is small potatoes, except as a test run for sliming Edwards. The Clinton Rules are clearly back in force, and we’ve seen (madrassa) the first efforts to gin something up about Obama, too. These efforts look like permanent fixtures in our public discourse, unless they stop working.
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Doug, it seems to me that the Dems are benefited by anything which can bring one of their candidates down early – better now than in the middle of the general. So, the scorpions-in-a-bottle quality of this current unpleasantness may give the Dems their strongest champion. If the Reeps are watching this I expect they are mostly making notes for something to bring back into play if somehow Edwards survives into the general.
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Here’s Beltway Buzz on the resignations:
http://beltwayblogroll.nationaljournal.com/archives/2007/02/the_risks_of_em.php#comments
http://beltwayblogroll.nationaljournal.com/archives/2007/02/the_risks_of_em.php#comments
I thought the Geraghty quote made sense: “Presuming it was a genuine resignation … if you’re a Democratic candidate, don’t the netroots look like heavily shaken nitroglycerin right about now? Think about it, you embrace them, they embarrass you by alienating a demographic you’re courting; you consider firing them, they raise hell and promise campaigns of vengeance; you stand by them, take the hit … and then they quit on you, and everybody thinks you fired them anyway. With scenarios like this floating around, how in the world is embracing the blogs worth the trouble?”
I think the blogs are what they are, and that they are not proving to be a magic carpet for expanding the influence of part of the electorate.
This does make Edwards look weak and foolish – since I think he is not the Dems’ strongest candidate, nor the one who would do the best job of governing if elected, I’m not unhappy with this.
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Here is some interesting speculation about Elizabeth Edwards, on the not-ready-for-prime-time theme
http://www.blogpi.net/will-elizabeth-edwards-resign-too
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I wouldn’t be surprised if EE did have something to do with the debacle–I certainly remember hearing that she has been active on political blogs in the past. Shades of Hillary Clinton, of course–how do you fire the president’s wife when she screws up?
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