Panda-gone?

Salon.com's War Room blog reports that feminist bloggers Amanda Marcotte (Pandagon) and Melissa McEwen (Shakespeare's Sister) have been turfed out of the John Edwards campaign.

A statement by the Catholic League's Bill Donohue, which called Marcotte and McEwan "anti-Catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots," and an accompanying article on the controversy in the New York Times this morning, put extra pressure on the campaign.

Speculation from sources that the two bloggers might be rehired was bolstered by Jennifer Palmieri, a spokeswoman for the Edwards campaign, who said in an e-mail that she would "caution [Salon] against reporting that they have been fired. We will have something to say later."

The irony's delicious: Donohue is a deranged clown who keeps in shape by bashing Hollywood Jews with croquet mallets. If Edwards is willing to give him veto power over his hires, he might as well hang it up and open a salon in Appalachia.

But I'm more interested in why bloggers wanted to pile on Marcotte (McEwen got less flak). As Michelle Malkin pointed out in a "dramatic reading" of Marcotte's blog, once assimilated into the Edwards borg she completely neutered her style of blogging and did what the campaign hired her for. Instapundit comments:

Other Presidential candidates would be well advised to spend a bit more time poking through the archives of any bloggers they think about hiring. There's nothing really wrong with cursing or overwrought blogging in itself, but the standards for political operatives are different. And, as the Pat Buchanan/ Larry Pratt business years ago demonstrated, candidates are held responsible for what these people do and say.

But why should bloggers subject each other to the same treatment? I mean, do bloggers really want their future opportunities to be dictated by whether they used their medium to hurl some spur-of-the-moment insults? Blogging reveals more of what its practitioners think than traditional journalism: This is a feature, not a bug. Marcotte (more so than McEwen) makes some mistakes (Glenn notes that she airbrushed controversial posts once conservative bloggers linked them, which is damn sleazy), but the damage from this silly episode will fall on every ambitious blogger who dared not to write like a political hack all the time.