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I guess the Edwards campaign was trying to score some hip, swinging cred by adding some bloggers to their campaign of walking stiffs. But to profess dismay about content is kind of silly -- what makes blogs interesting is that they're unpredictable and not sanitized and scrubbed and safe.
Why Edwards added bloggers makes sense: he needs the cred; Why the bloggers took it also makes sense: it was a great opportunity; Why the Catholic wingnuts went after the bloggers doesn't make sense to me.
Perhaps they wanted to "make an example" out of somebody to discourage establishment types from mingling with bloggers.
Maybe their tempest in a teapot really was gender-based (I'd have to see if other campaigns with female bloggers had them get similarly slagged, or whether it was Pandagon and Shakespeare's Sister who were specifically targeted).
Or perhaps it was simply a target of opportunity -- the wingdings saw it in the news and went after them because they weren't powerful enough to protect themselves from attack. Certainly if it happens again, then we'll know that there's a systematic effort to derail prog-bloggers from getting involved with mainstream pols.
The whole thing is odd and perplexing. What does the Right gain from this? That's what we have to figure out.