Just days after the John Edwards campaign seemed to have made it through a rock-and-hard-place moment involving the Catholic League's Bill Donohue and two bloggers on its payroll, one of those bloggers has announced her resignation from the campaign. In a post at Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte says she has left the Edwards campaign because criticism from Donohue -- whom she calls "an anti-Semite, right wing lackey whose entire job is to create non-controversies in order to derail liberal politics" -- has made the job impossible.
Donohue's campaign against the Edwards bloggers was "creating a situation where I felt that every time I coughed, I was risking the Edwards campaign," Marcotte writes. "No matter what you think about the campaign, I signed on to be a supporter and a tireless employee for them, and if I can't do the job I was hired to do because Bill Donohue doesn't have anything better to do with his time than harass me, then I won't do it. I resigned my position today and they accepted."
Salon's Rebecca Traister and Alex Koppelman reported last week that Marcotte and blogger Melissa McEwan had both been fired from the Edwards campaign. They subsequently reported that the two had been rehired.
In a statement released Friday, Edwards said that while the tone of some previous writings by Marcotte and McEwan "personally offended" him and he wouldn't tolerate "that kind of intolerant language ... from anyone on my campaign," he had talked with the two and thought they deserved a "fair shake." In a movie review posted at Pandagon two days later, 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." In her next post at Pandagon, she solicited questions about Edwards' healthcare plan from her fellow "Pandagonians."
In a statement posted this morning on the Catholic League's Web site, Donohue says that Marcotte's departure is "not enough" and calls on Edwards to fire McEwan as well. Meanwhile, one of Marcotte's colleagues at Pandagon seems to be orchestrating a campaign to get the Catholic League's tax-exempt status revoked over the incident.
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