Amanda who?

Yeah, that’s what I thought too when I first read that she’s apparently some-kinda “big deal” blogger from the Left-o-sphere.

Last week, it was announced that the John Edwards for President campaign had hired a foul-mouthed, anti-Catholic, misandrist blogger named Amanda Marcotte (of the Pandagon blog) as the Blogmaster (or as she prefers, “blogatrix”) for his campaign.

Over the last few weeks, the right-o-sphere has skewered the Edwards campaign for the hiring. And rightly so. Marcotte immediately went into a venemous defensive posture, deleting old controversial postings from her blogs and attacking her attackers.

But for the most part, it has been nothing more than a typical blog war between left blogs and right blogs — the lefties exhaulting Marcotte’s hiring as a brilliant stratgey decision by Edwards; the righties laughing at the monstorous mistake Edwards had just made.

And as long as it remained a blog squabble, Edwards probably didn’t even notice the kerfluffle.

But the one thing that John “I Have a Bigger House than God” Edwards did not want to wake up and see is this:

Now that the al Qaeda Times of New Yorkâ„¢ is reporting on the story, it’s becoming all anybody is talking about when they are talking about the Edwards campaign.

Which has prompted some non-bloggers to start piling on and holding John Edwards accountable for his staff (and their lunacy, whether it be past or present):

The Catholic League, a conservative religious group, is demanding that Mr. Edwards dismiss the two, Amanda Marcotte of the Pandagon blog site and Melissa McEwan, who writes on her blog, Shakespeare’s Sister, for expressing anti-Catholic opinions.

Hmmmm. That seems to have gotten Edwards attention, as they had this reply:

Mr. Edwards’s spokeswoman, Jennifer Palmieri, said Tuesday night that the campaign was weighing the fate of the two bloggers.

Uh-oh. Doesn’t sound like Edwards is willing to go to bat to defend Marcotte’s rantings, such as:

I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring thoughout 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.

I can’t imagine that will play too well if/when Edwards campaigns in the Durham/Raleigh area (I didn’t link to the page where Amanda wrote this, because she’s since deleted it and replaced it with a lame and more sanitized excuse for what she originally wrote).

This probably isn’t going to end well for Ms. Marcotte. She might want to put those plans to move from Austin to Chapel Hill on hold. Which should’t be too big of a deal, considering that she’s not a property owner in Travis County, which means she’s probably a renter (and thus hasn’t already put her home on the market).

(I didn’t realize Amanda lives in my hood of Austin, TX — we must run in different circles though, because I can’t remember ever seeing her out-and-about — though I get the feeling she’s not the type to hang out at university sporting events, sports bars, biker bars, or any other number of ‘testosterone party” places. Like the Yellow Rose).

Hiring an established and competent blogmaster from the Progressive community is a good campaign strategy for Edwards. But surely there’s got to be someone out there in the Left-o-sphere who’s not completely batshit insane and unapologetically vitriolic?