Chris Bowers and other A-list political bloggers are wondering why there's been no response from the Edwards campaign on the whole caving-to-Bill-Donohue thing.
Well, I think I can tell you why right now: I just got done listening to both drive-time radio and the ABC, CBS and NBC network TV news programs, and guess what wasn't mentioned once? Not once?
That's right, this whole brouhaha. (More after the jump.)
People forget that most Americans still get their news from either drive-time radio or the evening network news. If it's not on either of those two places, it might as well have not happened as far as most Americans are concerned.
Because of this, I'm beginning to step away from the "let's make a big stink" idea of how to handle this, and starting to think that maybe there should be no response from the Edwards campaign at all -- the problem, I believe, stems from saying things when they shouldn't have said anything in the first place.
Edwards should of course keep Melissa and Amanda -- but he shouldn't assist Bill Donohue in keeping this non-event alive. And the more I think about it, now that I've calmed down a bit, I can't see how publicly commenting does anything other than keep it alive. (However, that doesn't mean that, say, some folks can't do some agitating on his behalf, such as pointing out the idiosyncrasies of people like Bill Donohue and of John McCain's own campaign blogger.)
Feel differently? Let me know, and why.
UPDATE: CNN's mentioned it, but from the MyDD viewpoint -- which is better than taking the Donohue spin. Speaking of Bill Donohue, it turns out he calls women "bigots" all the time. Just look what he said about Barbara Walters today -- he called her a bigot, too -- and in language very similar to what he used against Amanda and Melissa: http://www.catholicleague.org/07press_releases/quarter_1/070207_barbarawalters.htmAnd here he is again:
Catholic League president Bill Donohue said lesbians were "something I'd expect to see in an asylum, frankly" when he spoke to Justice Sunday, a gathering of far-right evangelical Christian activists.Why should we enable him by taking him seriously?
UPDATE: Someone brought the Swift Boat liars as a reason for Edwards to come out with guns a-blazing. The problem with that example is that the Swifties were discredited right away -- yet the media still kept citing O'Neill and Corsi as if they hadn't been discredited. Which means that the problem was not so much with the smear artists or their victims, as with the media that was all-too-eager to pick up the smears.
That's not happening this time out. For one thing, the blogs and MediaMatters are a lot stronger -- THEY are the ones doing the Rapid Response, and it's working: the story isn't taking off the way that Donohue and Malkin hoped it would; aside from the Nedra Pickler and Salon.com pieces that started the hoo-ha several news cycles ago, not much media play has been happening, and what coverage there has been is starting to acknowlege that 1) Donohue's a nutjob and 2) Republican campaign bloggers, such as McCain's own Patrick Hynes, have said "controversial" things, too.
I've been checking CNN's front page since last night; the story's nowhere to be found there -- not in the top stories, not in the most-read stories. Nothing on the front of the NYT's dead-tree edition, nothing in my local paper the StarTribune. Nothing on the radio this morning -- at least not on NPR. In other words, this still isn't being seen/heard where most Americans will see/hear about it.
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