Bill Donohue gets what he wants

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP)--A second blogger working for Democratic presidential candidate and Catholic League whipping-boy John Edwards quit Tuesday under pressure from a single misanthropic blowhard who said her previous online messages were anti-Catholic.

Melissa McEwan wrote on her personal blog, Shakespeare's Sister, that she left the campaign because she was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the level of attention focused on her and her family by a vicious right-wing demagogue claiming to speak for all Catholics.

McEwan's resignation came just one day after another blogger, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, left the Edwards staff for similar reasons.

Both had become a flashpoint for bigoted loudmouth Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, a paranoid fringe group with no religious authority. Last week, Donohue demanded that Edwards fire both bloggers, and Edwards, to his shame, blinked.

Edwards, a former North Carolina senator who for some reason has not yet learned that the proper response to Religious Right hitmen who attack your flank is "Blow me," responded that he considered the bloggers' past writings personally offensive and added that similar content would not be tolerated. But he decided to keep Marcotte and McEwan on staff to give them "a fair shake" and try to avoid the wrath of the millions of progressive voters who wouldn't know Bill Donohue from a stinking, worm-infested hole in the ground.

"We're beginning a great debate about the future of our country, and we can't let it be hijacked," Edwards said in a statement last week, after having let it be hijacked.

Donohue had promised a nationwide scorched-earth smear campaign in newspapers, magazines and Catholic publications in an effort to rid the Edwards campaign of the two bloggers. The Catholic League counts 350,000 members, or about one half of one percent of all U.S. Catholics.

McEwan and Marcotte have stressed that the content and opinions on their personal blogs are in no way a reflection of the Edwards campaign, which you'd think would be obvious.

Donohue is a trash-talking piece of shit who thinks speaking out against the church should be illegal. He is obsessed with anal sex and Hollywood's control by "secular Jews who hate Christianity."

"It's too bad that Edwards didn't make the decision himself to get rid of them," Donohue said Tuesday night. "Why he had to wait for these women to bail on their own doesn't speak well for him. But I'm delighted, and as far as I'm concerned, this closes the issue. I have no vendetta against John Edwards, now that he's crippled himself in the eyes of his supporters."