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A MODEST QUESTION. To ruthlessly steal from Scott and his earlier post about the Edwards bloggers and Joan Walsh of the Salon: I have a question, and it has to do with this quote by Walsh:
Clinton hired Peter Daou, who'd run John Kerry's Internet operation and later licensed his Daou Report to Salon (it is now the Blog Report, run by Steve Benen). But given the netroots' distrust of Clinton, especially her failure to firmly repudiate her vote authorizing the Iraq war, Edwards was emerging as a possible blogger favorite, especially after he hired the swashbuckling and unabashedly feminist Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan to blog for him. When I heard the news I found myself thinking, boy, Edwards is really running a ballsy campaign. And then the thought quickly followed: Has he or his top staff ever really read those bloggers?The posts that got them in trouble were intemperate in their take on Catholicism, but that's not the only thing they've been intemperate about. They are young and brash. Like many of us, they sometimes blogged first and asked questions later. Their blogs are passionate and sometimes funny; the writing is uneven, but the commitment to candor and to street-fighting the right wing are not.Perhaps they hadn't read those bloggers. But I'm sure Ms. Walsh has read Camilla Paglia. So what is her excuse for bringing back the writer whose immortal output contains gems such as this one:
Although I'm an atheist who believes only in great nature, I recognize the spiritual richness and grandeur of the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised. And I despise anyone who insults the sustaining values and symbol system of so many millions of people of different races around the world. An authentically avant-garde artist today would show his or her daring by treating religion sympathetically. Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents. When will artists climb out of the postmodernist ditch and accept their high mission to address a general audience? An art of chic coteries, whether in rococo aristocratic France or in drearily ironic, nervously posturing New York, ends up in a mental mousehole.
--J. Goodrich
