Swiftboating

It's 2004 all over again, 'yall! Political manwhore and principal funder of the infamous "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" is at it again. GOPers are the party of crazy-makers and T. Boone Pickens is the guy who paid for the 2004 crazy-making anti-John Kerry smear campaign that claims to have given Bush the 2004 elections.

Unhappy with not being in the news during this election cycle, the oilman seems to have been drunk at a dinner sponsored by the American Spectator magazine. In a room full of Washington movers and shakers he claimed to be willing to pay 1 Million Dollars to anybody who could prove his "Swifties" lied about John Kerry's record.

Kerry issued a statement accepting the challenge and vowing to give the money to Paralyzed Veterans of America. So what does the GOP douchebag say to that? In what a colleague described as "a game of GOP Calvinball", the guy completely changes the rules of the wager by demanding that Kerry "provide his Vietnam journal, his military records, and copies of movies and tapes made during his service".

First off, I was upset that my colleague used the Calvinball reference to describe anything to do with the crazy-making slimeballs working for the Republican party. Bill Waterson is one of my heroes and Calvin and Hobbes is a masterpiece for how he captured the anarchic innocence and creative exhuberance of childhood.

Still basking in the glow of victory in New York City, a victory that was earned by the feminist-loving, GLBT-positive, new labor rising grassroots of New York state, I was going to hop into an article about John Edwards political courage. Instead I woke up to this :

Edwards’s Bloggers Cross the Line, Critic Says - New York Times:

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.

Mr. Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, is among the leading Democratic presidential candidates.

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, said in a statement on Tuesday, “John Edwards is a decent man who has had his campaign tarnished by two anti-Catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots.”

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

The Washington Post has the AP arcile that is the obvious "fair and balanced" source the Grey Lady does not acknowledge using for their article.

John Edwards is not new to the dirty tactics of the extreme Republican right in this country. He had a front-row seat to the Swiftboat Veteran's smear campaign of John Kerry, a campaign so out-of-control that it has become a verb and part of the political lexicon of this country.

What is galling about this particular campaign is that it is being done by bashing two of the most courageouly outspoken feminist bloggers in this country : Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister.

And make no mistake about it : this controversy has nothing to do with my blog sisters. No. This controversy is being created by extremist religious hypocrites like Bill Donohue of the Catholic League because John Edwards scares them with his political courage.

The Donohues of the extreme right go out of their way to push views on choice and homosexuality that are completely against the mainstream views of their base. They do so because it has been effective in the past to scare politicians into wearing their political leashes.

John Edwards hiring of Marcotte and McEwan sends them a strong message of how he will not wear that leash for the sake of political power.

Especially when it so goes against the mainstream.