HYPOCRISY on Marcotte!

So goes the charge from the left. We on the right are all degenerates and hypocrites who condemn in Marcotte what we practice ourselves.

Except the charge doesn't quite work. It would be hypocritcal if I called for Marcotte's firing while also claiming that, say, Rudy Giuliani ought to hire me. But 1, I didn't say I think she should be fired, and 2, I said I Giuliani would be crazy to hire me. I described myself as "radioactive."

Here's the deal: Some bloggers have made a conscious, and conscientious, effort to remain "respectable." Some of us haven't. Some of us are in the middle.

I'm one of the ones who made no efforts whatsoever to preserve my respectability for any job, pretty much anywhere, but definitely not for the position of official campaign blogger for a major presidential candidate.

I have no illusions about that. So I don't get the whole "hypocrisy" thing. Would I like to contribute directly to the campaign of a candidate I like -- and get paid for it to boot? Of course I would. I'd feel like I was at the grown-up table. Or, well, not the grown-up table exactly, but at least not at the toddlers' table where they're all shoving mashed potatos up their nostrils and blowing spit-bubbles with gravy. Kind of in the vicinity of the grown-ups' table, close enough to hear what they were talking about. (Sex and investments, of course.)

But I don't think I've earned that right. Other bloggers have. Not me. And not, I have to say, Amanda Marcotte, either. Sure, it's fun to write all sorts of over the top stuff and indulge in personal attacks and use the f-bomb a lot and talk about vaginas and menses and pensises and even poopies. But I assumed doing so disqualified me from ever holding a position more respectable than, say, assistant political blogger at Gent Magazine (Home of the D-Cups).

I assumed the same of Marcotte.

So it's not really hypocrisy per se -- it's the surprise that a left-leaning candidate would imagine the rules as most of us have long imagined them to be don't seem to apply to those on the unhinged left. Yes yes, we're all used to double-standards by now, but this one seemed particularly egregious -- why would Edwards assume he could get away with hiring the hateful Vaginal Avenger Marcotte when no candidate would even consider hiring me or even Jeff Goldstein?

(And at least Goldstein intersperses his cock posts with stuff about deconstructivism.)

It's not hypocrisy so much as amazement at the brazenness of the move. All around the blogosphere, people heard that Marcotte had been hired as an official campaign blogger, and asked, as Michael Bluth so often did, "Her?"

Yes, her. She was the one who was so scary-talented with the word-ninja skillz she could overcome her past history of making repeated flagrant politically-disqualifying remarks on her blog. She was The One, the Net Neo, who was so insightful and wise as to be able to overcome a long digital-paper trail of otherwise scandalous remarks.

Her?

Whereas, for the rest of us, the GOB Bluth rule seemed to still apply:

GOB should have known he was on thin ice with "Fuck Mountain." But he charged ahead anyway, and got fired for it. He had the heart of a blogger -- and soon the paycheck of one as well.

That's sort of how we all expect the world to work. And, as it turns out, it still does. Mostly.

So I just don't think this "hypocrisy" charge flies. I've said here that, for personal, self-interested reasons, I'd've sort of have liked Marcotte to be the foul-mouthed anti-Christian Jackie Robinson, breaking the off-color barrier for the rest of us degenrates. But I was just amazed to think the rules had been relaxed that much, and, again, for a writer of such modest talents.

It's not anti-woman. It's anti-mediocrity. There may be a blogger out there who's so damn astute and entertaining as to get away with offending millions of voting Americans and yet still being counted as an asset to a campaign, but we're just all still in a bit of shock that John Edwards thought that blogger was Amanda Marcotte.

Her?

Come on!

Some things may be "satirical," but you just can't sing them and expect to work on a political campaign.

Language Warning: I'm annoyed at the left's attempt to use the word "satirical" to mean "ironical."

They keep saying that Marcotte's posts were "satirical." So they were, I suppose. But satire can be vicious, and intentionally so -- as Marcotte's anti-Christian rants were.

The left seems to be hoping that the public will confuse "satirical" with "ironical," the latter of course meaning "conveying an meaning differing from the superficial meaning."

But Marcotte's posts about the Catholic Church and Christianity were not "ironical." She meant every damn word; she meant precisely the meaning it seemed she meant. Irony is, in fact, in very short supply on the hyperpoliticized left.

Memo to the left: My constant posts about being afraid of "brown people" and vaginas are "ironical" -- I'm making fun of the left for constantly making this charge by spoofing it.

Marcotte's posts are decidedly not ironic, and the left should really stop trying to spin them as such.

posted by Ace at 12:09 AM

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