Edwards blogger resigns

Days after Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards decided against firing two liberal bloggers with a history of inflammatory writing, one of them resigned Monday night with a blast at “right wing shills” for driving her out of the campaign.

Amanda Marcotte, whose writings were assailed as anti-Catholic, wrote Monday on her blog that the Edwards camp had accepted her resignation. She blamed her most vocal critic, Bill Donohoe, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, writing that he “and his calvacade (sic) of right wing shills don’t respect that a mere woman like me could be hired for my skills, and pretended that John Edwards had to be held accountable for some of my personal, non-mainstream views on religious influence on politics,” which Marcotte described as being “anti-theocracy.”

Marcotte said Donohoe had been running a “scorched earth campaign” against her and that he “made no bones about the fact that his intent is to ‘silence’ me. … It was creating a situation where I felt that every time I coughed, I was risking the Edwards campaign. … Bill Donohue doesn’t speak for Catholics, he speaks for the right wing noise machine.”