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.
