Senator Handsome’s Official Blogger

Amanda Marcotte is now John Edwards official blogger. She joined the Edwards campaign from Pandagon and I must say it is a rather disappointing pick. The problem with Ms. Marcotte is the following post she wrote (and later deleted…guess she didn’t like the criticism),

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 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. Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.

As I’ve noted the problem here isn’t that just that Nifong is some incompetent prosecutor, but that the entire case has completely fallen apart. The DNA evidence has come back (after being suppressed by Nifong and Meehan) and not only is there no DNA form any of the accused, there is no DNA from any team member who gave a sample. Further, there is DNA from multiple other males to whom we don’t know the identity. Reade Seligmann has a solid alibi complete with phone records, taxi cab records, video and ATM records that he was not at the scene of the alleged rape. The accusers story has mutated more times than a batch of fruit flies in a scientists genetics laboratory. And, we find out that there is no evidence from the rape kit consistent with a rape and that the nurse doing the rape kit was woefully un/under-trained.

Marcotte is so woefully ignorant of these facts and just goes off on the defendants simply because it fits with her pre-concieved notion of how things work. White males are apparently bad and hence the black female accuser is telling the truth. Any other facts to the contrary simply don’t matter.

K. C. Johnson who has been following this case from the start has a lengthy and scathing post on the complete lack of integrity on the part of Ms. Marcotte. And Jeff Taylor at Reason’s Hit & Run sums it up nicely,

So you might be thinking, at last and at least, a presidential candidate has had the balls to hire on a full-fledged, out-front propagandist, someone boldly willing to not just fudge facts, but fuck them in the ass. A Marcotte-led Net communications op may actually give the jaded among us some reason to pay attention to this 08 election-thing — there’d be no telling what she’d say.

Alas no. Marcotte chickened out. She went back and deleted the post, presumably after it was linked to today by a conservative North Carolina blog

If this is the kind of stupidity that Edwards will hire, it doesn’t look good for his Presidential campaign, and God help us if he wins.

FILED UNDER: 2008 Election, Blogosphere, Law and the Courts, US Politics, , , , , , , ,
Steve Verdon
About Steve Verdon
Steve has a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles and attended graduate school at The George Washington University, leaving school shortly before staring work on his dissertation when his first child was born. He works in the energy industry and prior to that worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Division of Price Index and Number Research. He joined the staff at OTB in November 2004.

Comments

  1. If you were John Edwards, wouldn’t you want your on line apologist to “not just fudge facts, but f*ck them in the *ss”. Its not like he has this great record to run on, so any manipulation of the facts has to help.

  2. Steve Verdon says:

    No, I think fudging is better, f—ing them in the a$$ is a bit too obvious, IMO.

  3. Ugh says:

    I stopped reading pandagon after she joined, every other post was “men are trying to steal my uterus!”

  4. Anderson says:

    Marcotte’s pro-choice stance is okay — from her p.o.v., men *are* trying to steal her uterus — but she is, shall we say, an impolitic political blogger.

    John Cole tangled w/ her some, not to her credit.

    I think her stint with Edwards will crash-land even sooner than his campaign does.

  5. Sam says:

    Is anyone really surprised that Edwards hired her??? Let’s see he bad mouths wages at Wal-Mart while doing a book signing at Barnes and Noble only to learn Wal-Mart pays more. One of Edwards’ aides tries to get the local Wal-Mart to let him cut to the front of the line to get some video game that was just released.

    He ain’t that smart.

  6. Thomas says:

    “So you might be thinking, at last and at least, a presidential candidate has had the balls to hire on a full-fledged, out-front propagandist, someone boldly willing to not just fudge facts, but fuck them in the ass.”

    Yeah, it’s called FoxNews, and Tony Snow.

  7. ken says:

    James, your questioning the integrity of another blogger is rather ironic as you too repeatedly ignore facts in order to make political points.

    Although this is not as common among liberal bloggers as it is conservative bloggers I am not really surprised to see it employed by partisans such as yourself, or Ms Marcotte.

  8. John Burgess says:

    Invest in flamethrowers now. They’re going to be the ‘in’ thing come 2008.

    And Ken: Nice to see you’ve decided to condescend for a visit down from Heaven 6.5. You can go back now.

  9. Anon says:

    ken,

    Even though I often disagree with his politics, I have found James to be intellectually honest and consistent. I would be interested in seeing a case where you think he ignored facts to make a political point.

  10. Anon says:

    Oops, just realized that this was a post by Steve, not James. So, ignore my comment in response to ken, since it is all irrelevant anyway, since the post was not made by James in the first place.

    But while I’m at it, I’ll add that I although politically I align more closely with Amanda than with Steve, I agree with him on this one.

  11. Pug says:

    One of Edwards’ aides tries to get the local Wal-Mart to let him cut to the front of the line to get some video game that was just released.

    So?

  12. bains says:

    James, your questioning the integrity of another blogger is rather ironic as you too repeatedly ignore facts in order to make political points,” says Ken.
    I guess he missed that by Steve Verdon tag in his hurry to make his political point.

  13. ken says:

    Thanks for pointing out this was a Verdon post instead of Joyner. Verdon and Joyner are pretty much cut from the same cloth however so it is hard to tell their mendacities apart.

    Here is how they lie: Like Marcotte they repeat accusations they know, or should know, are false.

    Unlike Marcotte, however, where the original accusation was backed up by police work, the conservative blogger doesn’t even have this cover of legitimacy, however slight. They blithely repeat lies first told by others so as to not have to make up their own lies. This way they can claim the dubious moral distinction of just reporting ‘news’. But there is no escape from moral responsibility with this tactic because repeating a lie is just as dishonest as making one up.

  14. Steve Verdon says:

    ken,

    Where have I lied? The statements about the DNA evidence are, to the best of my knowledge, true. Dr. Meehan testified as such on the witness stand. Now maybe he is lying, but there is objective procedures and verifiable results here when it comes to DNA testing. The bottomline appears, very much, to be that there was no DNA from the defendants or any lacrosse players who gave DNA samples. If I am lying in regards to Seligmann then so is most of the media and K.C. Johnson, whose politics more closely align with yours.

    On top of this there are reports of serious methodological flaws in the police work. The line-up for example. There were no filler pictures and whomever was picked during the last photo line-up was going to be the one’s charged. Then in looking at all the testimony by the accuser we know who the real liar is: her.

    The sad fact is we are witnessing injustice at work and at the same time women who have a legitimate accusation of rape will no have a somewhat harder time making it, IMO. Many people will have a hard time not seeing the alleged rape of the accuser in this case with later accusers in completely different cases.

    So you are, once again, completely wrong.