Blog No Evil
The two Edwards campaign bloggers who were under fire last week for exercising their right to free speech resigned today in the face of some interesting ‘valentines’ from some folks claiming to be good, God-fearing Christians, citing concern for the negative impact on the campaign.
Of course, by NOT being attached to the campaign, they’ll be much freer to speak their mind and I’m certain they will. I just wish some of the folks calling themselves Christians would stop. It’s mortifying. Politics and religion shouldn’t be mixed together. Christians shouldn’t be threatening toward others ever. The blend of those two factors is an utter disaster. Score one for the bad guys in good guys’ clothing. What a mess, but at least there’s some serious pushback on the conservatives who sparked and fueled this nasty war of words.
This has been going on for a very long time. Before bloggers, message boards were the target. Back in the dark and gloomy days of the Clinton impeachment, the CNN Community was deluged 24/7 with trolls paid to try and shut down the conversation by spamming the boards over and over again with meaningless rhetoric. We used to play tag-team board moderation — one of us would be banning by the dozen while the other was mopping up the mess on the boards in real time.
If I close my eyes and think about it, I can almost quote them verbatim, because the message hasn’t changed, just the target and the method of delivery. Now that they have a ready-made platform on Fox News, they’ve become bolder, but still uncreative and cretin in their delivery.
Perhaps the campaigns should not pay bloggers at all. Maybe they should provide a platform (similar to the MyBarackObama.com site) for people to blog and that’s it. That way the best political bloggers can maintain their own voices and choices of expression without risking the campaigns, and no one can plaster the ‘paid shill’ label on them in the process (one of the milder accusations dropped this week).
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