This week’s tempest in a teapot comes to us courtesy of the John Edwards campaign. The general consensus in the media seems to be that Edwards is now “in trouble,” and that he must act quickly and decisively to remedy the situation. Otherwise, presumably, his presidential hopes are doomed.

But what is this great scandal? Was Edwards caught cavorting on his boat with a scantily-clad woman to whom he is not married? Have all of the businesses he has run ended in failure? Did he crash his car during an alcohol- and cocaine-fueled bender?

None of the above. It is much, much worse than any of that. I will let the New York Times summarize:

Two bloggers hired by John Edwards to reach out to liberals in the online world have landed his presidential campaign in hot water for doing what bloggers do — expressing their opinions in provocative and often crude language.

The Catholic League, a conservative religious group, is demanding that Mr. Edwards dismiss the two, Amanda Marcotte of the Pandagon blog site and Melissa McEwan, who writes on her blog, Shakespeare’s Sister, for expressing anti-Catholic opinions.

The Times article goes on to describe the outrageous behavior of the two Edwards staffers, working itself into quite a state… “incendiary language of the blogosphere…,” “vulgar language…,” “written sarcastically about the news media…,” “…repeatedly used profanity in demanding that religious conservatives stop meddling with women’s reproductive and sexual rights.”

My heavens! It’s enough to give a person the vapors.

The Right has worked their collective panties into a twist over the affair, leading such paragons of decency and decorum as Michelle Malkin and Rick Moran to denounce not only the staffers in question, but also the Edwards campaign, liberal bloggers in general, and, by association, the entire Democratic Party. As a result of this rather predictable hissy-fit (“How could they say such things?”), the larger media has spent most of the last two days flogging the story of yet more outrageous, offensive behavior by the hysterical, foul-mouthed Left.

It has been pretty thoroughly documented across the Intertubes that when it comes to accusations of incivility, right-wing blogs can’t afford to be casting stones (Glenn Greenwald has posted extensively on this subject). Likewise, Media Matters has a rather exhaustive run-down of the litany of verbal abuse spouted over the last few years by the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue, whose feigned outrage set off this whole dust-up in the first place.

The comments about which Donohue and the rest of his fellow handkerchief-wringers have been screeching were written by Marcotte and McEwan on their own sites, before they were hired by the Edwards campaign. They did not write this stuff as representatives of the campaign, and presumably, it is not their intention to do so going forward.

Even that aspect, however, is beside the point.

Edwards has released a statement saying that although he doesn’t agree with what Marcotte and McEwan said or condone the tone in which they said it, he’s standing by them. Frankly, that response comes as something of a surprise, given that convention wisdom held that the two bloggers would be quickly fired from the campaign in an effort to sweep the affair under the rug. The “they have both assured me that it was never their intention to malign anyone’s faith” part of Edwards’ statement read like something of a cop-out, but it’s an understandable one.

What is particularly galling about the ruckus raised over this non-issue is that Donohue and his small, cranky group of extremists have been able to disrupt a primary campaign in this manner, and that the media have been mindlessly carrying the load for them. The people screaming the loudest here would never vote for Edwards (or any other Democrat, for that matter), but to some extent, his campaign has to listen to what they’re saying. Otherwise, they risk facing a crowd of angry Catholics in the general election next year. At the same time, Edwards can’t afford to alienate the growing Democratic constituency represented by blogs like Pandagon and Shakespeare’s Sister.

Worse still is the feigned outrage over dirty language, the credulous, “Shocked, I tell you, SHOCKED!” tone of the coverage by mainstream publications such as the Times and the Washington Post. Part of it is lazy reporting, the willingness to take the claims of Donohue and his cronies at face-value rather than spending a paragraph digging into Donohue’s history of outrageous statements.

Also at play here is a general disdain on the part of traditional media outlets toward blogs and other new media. Blogs are routinely characterized as a partisan, potty-mouthed, lowest-common-denominator rabble by mainstream reporters. As a result, any story that bolsters that image tends to get widely (but shallowly) covered by newspapers and cable news channels.

In the end, it is reassuring to see that Edwards is standing by Marcotte and McEwan while the histrionics play out. Four years ago, Democrats would have run screaming from the rhetoric currently being tossed at the Edwards campaign, panicked over how they might be able to absolve themselves. If we’re lucky, enough of Edwards’ fellow Democrats will take a cue from his decision, and the Right’s cheap parlor trick of mock outrage will no longer hold the sway it has had for the last ten years.

Honestly, I don’t listen to a lot of hip hop.

I’m not entirely sure why this is the case. Like many people in my age and demographic group, I was a fan of Public Enemy in the late Eighties and early Nineties (“Back in the day,” I suppose you might say…), as well as NWA, the Beastie Boys, and some De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest as well.

Sometime in the mid-Nineties, though, I pretty much stopped listening to anything new that was coming out. While I’d like to say it was a result of the hyper-commercialization of the genre as evidenced by the rise of over-blinged acts like Puff Daddy, that’s not really it.

By and large, hip hop discusses an experience that I don’t share. Of course, the same can be said of most other genres, and I would never argue that one must have directly experienced the same thing as a particular artist in order to appreciate her or his work. However, it too often seems to be the case that white people listening to hip hop crosses the boundary between appreciation and appropriation.

As a result of not giving serious attention to the genre, what I have heard over the last five to ten years has been the popularly available stuff. Missy Elliot, Eminem, 50 Cent, Three 6 Mafia… none of this bunch is really a style I like. As with any genre, what’s popular is, by and large, not what’s good, and so you have to pay attention and do some work to find the stuff that’s worth listening to.

Long story short, I’ve missed a lot of good stuff, and am now making an effort to catch up. Among others, I recently got the new Nas record, Hip Hop Is Dead. It’s uniformly excellent.

There’s a lot going on on this album, but the over-arching theme is one of leaving the past in the past but not forgetting about it. The “past” here is two-fold: the history of hip hop, as well as this particular artist’s own past. Analyses of hip hop as a glorification of violence are nothing new, but there is more here than the typical “I’m describing the life I know” claim. Hip Hop Is Dead paints a pretty bleak picture, but it does not revel in the bleakness. Nas asks a wide range of questions, and few of them have easy answers.

Fortunately, his skills at the mic are more than up to the task, and the album’s production is dense without being slick. Even if you are not a hip hop fan, I would recommend checking this record out. If nothing else, the title track will be stuck in your head for days.

Hot on the heels of last week’s Dick Cheney, the New York Times brings us this tidbit from Cheney’s daughter Mary, who is about to give birth to a child with her female partner:

“When Heather and I decided to have a baby, it was not going to be the most popular decision ever,” Ms. Cheney said, referring to her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe.

She then gestured to her middle—any bulge disguised by a boxy jacket—and asserted: “This is a baby. This is a blessing from God. It is not a political statement. It is not a prop to be used in a debate by people on either side of an issue. It is my child.”

Ms. Cheney then went on to chastise Wolf Blitzer, who, in his interview with her father, asked for his response to criticism of his daughter’s pregnancy from James Dobson’s Focus On the Family organization. The Vice President refused to respond to Blitzer, telling him, “I think you’re out of line with that question.” His daughter agreed: “He was trying to get a rise out of my father.”

It is impossible to say for sure what exactly Blitzer’s intent was in asking the question. It was not, however, out of line.

Dobson and his minions are not some small, fringe group issuing statements in a void—Focus On the Family is a huge organization that wields vast influence on the Right, and it has been a key supporter of the Bush administration over the years. Moreover, the White House has consistently stoked the fires of reactionary religious conservatism to further its own political ends. Mostly, it has been everyone else that has suffered the consequences.

In other words, Blitzer’s question is not some out-of-left-field attempt to drag inappropriate personal details into the public sphere (as Cheney, with his indignant response, would have us all believe). The Bush White House and its supporters have worked hard to relegate gays and lesbians to the status of second-class citizens by pushing to deny them basic legal rights and demonizing them. It is entirely reasonable that one of the chief representatives of the administration should be asked how he reconciles those policies with his own experience. Cheney wants to have his cake and eat it too, though—insist loudly and publicly that gays and lesbians are sub-standard parents, and then decline to comment when his lesbian daughter has a child.

As to the larger question of Ms. Cheney’s child being a political prop, she will get no argument from these quarters. However, Republicans have spent years trying to insert the government into the private details of citizens’ lives. That those chickens are now coming home to roost should surprise no one.