John Edwards’ now former blogstress was the talk on O’Reilly tonight:

After the airing, Amanda Marcotte resigned from the Edwards campaign. She’s blaming it all on Bill Donohue, and the AP is only too happy help her tote that banner:

One of the chief campaign bloggers for Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards quit Monday after conservative critics raised questions about her history of provocative online messages.

Amanda Marcotte posted on her personal blog, Pandagon, that the criticism “was creating a situation where I felt that every time I coughed, I was risking the Edwards campaign.” Marcotte said she resigned from her position Monday, and that her resignation was accepted by the campaign.

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.

It’s a shame that the AP singles out “conservative critics” to credit/blame for all of this, when the critics who probably had more of an impact were the progressive Christians who also saw bigotry in Marcotte’s inflamatory writings. Put another way, which seems more likely: That Edwards worried about what Bill Donohue thinks, or that he worries about what his fellow Democrats who also happen to be Catholics think? With Hillary! and Obama waiting to crush him in about a year, he can’t afford to leave out any potential voters.

And all of the above masks the truth at the center of all of this, which is that on their face Marcotte’s writings on Christians and Catholics in particular smack of rank bigotry, from the 114 times she mimicked the name of Christ as “Jeebus” to the ways she graphically described carnal intercourse with the Holy Spirit. That’s what earned her the criticism from Donohue and from us and other conservatives from the progressive Christians as well. It’s not a smear to accurately quote someone’s own words when criticizing them.

Our friends on the left will undoubtedly go ape. They will attack us and others who were in the mix on this story. They won’t accept the fact that the initial hiring of Marcotte was a hint that something was broken within the Edwards vetting process, nor will they accept that bigotry is bigotry no matter who the target is or how much you try and soft pedal it. They won’t accept that words mean things, that a blatantly thin defense of “it was all satire” won’t fly when Marcotte’s writings clearly weren’t satire, and that it is possible that their own ways with words can become liabilities to their preferred candidates and political party. They’ll go off on apples and oranges comparisons to bloggers on the right whose work was clearly meant as satire and who aren’t on any presidential campaign staffs. In short, they won’t get it.

More: Marcotte vows revenge. For…being quoted accurately? Sheesh.

More: I just noticed this from Michelle’s post:

Bloggers heralded the decision to keep them; the Catholic League was outraged, and a top adviser to a rival Democratic campaign took a shot: “Apparently they’re more afraid of the bloggers than they are the Catholics.”

Predictably, Kos is gunning for the rival campaign. But what he’s decrying is nothing more than normal politics. In hiring the Blunder Twins Edwards created a self-inflicted wound that Hillary! and Obama were bound to exploit. They would have been fools not to exploit it.

Of course, the problem for the netroots is that Edwards’ wound is their wound too. And that’s gotta hurt.

More: Howard Kurtz already has a solid story posted about the brouhaha. Unlike the Associated Press, Kurtz references the writings that actually earned Marcotte her criticism–the anti-Catholic screeds as well as the unhinged posts on the Duke rape case.