their purity, our defilement

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Feb 13, 2007

John Edwards's hired blogger Amanda Marcotte resigned from his campaign staff yesterday. The AP hack helpfully spins the story in Edwards's favor by making out the aggressor to be Bill Donohue:

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, demanded last week that Edwards fire Marcotte and a second blogger, Melissa McEwan, for remarks he deemed anti-Catholic.

"For remarks he deemed anti-Catholic ..." The implication, thank you very much, is that anti-Catholicism is in the eye of the beholder, and humorless pedants of Romish allegiance are too quick to read hostile intent into vigorously-expressed political commentary. We're either too dim or too thin-skinned to pick up on the underlying respect that Marcotte and McEwan have for us "mean, jealous mother****ers" and our position, disguised as it is by occasional jesting at our expense.

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Now flip back to the summer of 2005, to the midst of the Senate confirmation hearings on the appointment to the Supreme Court of John Roberts. With a conservative nominee in the SJC's gunsights -- a Catholic judge married to a card-carrying pro-lifer, no less -- the dread spectre of RACISM made its appearance in the hearing chamber. Let Mark Steyn tell it:

New York's senior senator, Chuck Schumer, began with some observations about Judge Roberts' "troubling" record on "the issue of civil rights." Ah-ha! "Many of us consider racism the nation's poison," he said sternly. And then he dropped the big one: Twenty-five years ago Roberts had inappropriately used the word "amigos" in a memo.

Troubling indeed. In 1980, as a lawyer in government service, Roberts had written some notes to White House Counsel Fred Fielding in which the following phrase occurred: "I think this audience would be pleased that we are trying to grant legal status to their illegal amigos."

Got your breath back yet? Roberts' evident bigotry helped finish him with Schumer, as well as Senator Dianne Feinstein, who drew attention to those amigos in opposing his nomination: "I can not in good conscience, cast a 'yea' vote. I will cast a 'no' vote."

Roberts' malign intentions didn't even get a "deemed" out of Feinstein. That's the way the game is played. For the Left, as Sobran says, there are no real differences of opinion, only differences of motive. In a peculiar sense, the politics of The Enlightened is a parody of St. Paul: "To the pure all things are pure" -- see Titus 1:15 -- "but to the defiled, even their mind and conscience is defiled." Multiply Marcotte's mother****ers as you will; they can never add up to one of Roberts' amigos.