Popular conservative blogger Ace of Spades first enunciated The Marcotte Rule of Blogging: No public controversy is complete until Amanda Marcotte has made a complete fool of herself.
In case you don’t remember, Marcotte was one of two left-wing women whom John Edwards recruited in 2007 to boost his presidential campaign’s connection to the progressive blogosphere. Alas, this turned out to be a very short-term gig when it was discovered what manner of “political commentary” Marcotte and her comrade Mellissa McEwan had hitherto provided their readers, as eloquently summarized by Mary Katharine Ham: “Vote for Edwards, Godbag Christofascists!”
Marcotte and McEwan are both radical feminists of the most extreme variety, generally arguing that the Republican Party is a theocratic plot for the patriarchal oppression of womyn. McEwan remains rather obscure, but Marcotte is slightly more telegenic (which ain’t saying much) and therefore is considered acceptable to appear occasionally as a commentator on MSNBC, the network that promotes Ed Schultz and Al Sharpton as marquee TV talents. Marcotte is thus able to get freelance pieces published in such progressive venues as Salon and the Guardian, despite her repeated demonstrations that she is a blithering idiot prone to counterfactual assertions and astonishing crimes against logic.
Which brings us to the subject of last week’s gruesome mass murder in Aurora, Colorado. The senseless slaughter of moviegoers appears to have been perpetrated by a delusional kook with no political motive. James Holmes was a grad student with poor social skills who seems to have undergone some kind of psychiatric meltdown in the weeks preceding the shooting spree in which police say Holmes killed a dozen people and wounded dozens more.
What insights could a radical feminist like Amanda Marcotte offer us about this horrible crime? You might have thought Marcotte would have taken notice, for example, of Holmes’s sexist objectification of a “Page 3” pinup girl. That would be an aspect of the story within her accustomed gynocentric purview. But no, this is what Marcotte chose to address in a Twitter message Monday morning:
“It was desegregation that caused white America to believe that the government had stopped ‘protecting’ them, and so they needed guns.”
No one can explain how Marcotte’s warped mind managed to gin up that particular piece of counterfactual absurdity. Conservative blogger Darleen Click sees this as an expression of raw ignorance — or inventing fake history to suit the Left’s current political convenience — while my own co-blogger Smitty marvels at the foresight of the authors of the Bill of Rights who so presciently anticipated future developments. For her part, Marcotte takes to the blogosphere today to claim victimhood, saying she’s “getting screeched at by a bunch of wingnuts on Twitter,” without bothering to share with her readers the exact wording of the Tweet that provoked this common-sense reaction.
The significance of all this is that any political controversy resulting from the Colorado shooting is officially over, now that Amanda Marcotte has once again made a complete fool of herself.
