Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards' inflammatory new campaign bloggers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan will be retained by the campaign after making public apologies for past postings that were controversial, to put it mildly. In a surprise, the Times played the story on Friday's front page, albeit under the mild headline "Edwards Learns Campaign Blogs Can Cut 2 Ways").
Marcotte is notorious fora January7 post on the Duke lacrosse "rape" case, oneshe later eliminated after it became an issue after her hiring: "Can't a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair."
Marcotte has also made many incendiary anti-Catholic statements, as Tim Graham detailed [1] at NewsBusters.
But in the interest of balance, reporter John Broder devoted several paragraphs to conservative blogger Patrick Hynes, now blog liaison for Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign. In what's surely just coincidence, Hynes hadbeentargeted by the left-side of the blogosphere as a potential reciprocal scalp, should Marcotte and McEwanhave beenfired by Edwards as a result of pressure from conservative blogs.
The three accusations Broder dredged up against Hynes are pretty weak, and none involve anything Hynes actually wrote on a blog.
"Problems with bloggers have already bedeviled other campaigns. In last year's Democratic senatorial primary in Connecticut, some bloggers who supported Ned Lamont [2] attacked his opponent, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman [3], and one posted a picture of Mr. Lieberman in blackface."
(Since Broder won't name her, that blogger would be Jane Hamsher [4].)
"Last summer, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, hired Patrick J. Hynes, a conservative blogger and political consultant, to be his campaign's blog liaison. Mr. Hynes quickly ran afoul of fellow bloggers by initially concealing his relationship to the McCain campaign while he was writing critically about other Republicans [5]."
"He then came under fire for declaring that the United States was a 'Christian nation' in a book and television appearances that predated his work for Mr. McCain. Last November, while employed by Mr. McCain's campaign, Mr. Hynes posted on his personal blog a picture of Representative Henry A. Waxman [6], Democrat of California, and invited readers to submit nicknames, some of which were anti-Semitic."
(Does the Times hold left-wing bloggers responsible for their commenters as well?)
Broder apparently took his cues from left-wing blogger Glenn [7]Greenwald [7], who wrote Wednesday: "Does McCain countenance his consultant's calling Henry Waxman 'pig man' and encouraging his readers to mock the size of Waxman's big nose (a standard [8], highly offensive stereotype [9]) and to spray vulgarities at Waxman?" The links go to blog posts suggesting that pointing out that someone has a big honker is a sign of anti-Semitism.
Rather than relying on the Times and Greenwald, you can try and discern any actual anti-Semitism in the comments [10] in question.