Any news source that quotes Bill Donahue as an authority that speaks for Catholics should be ashamed of itself, and shamed in public. The fact is that Donahue never uses his platform to defend Catholics. Instead, it has always been about using his platform for political attacks and religious intolerance. He considers himself, for example, responsible for getting two Kerry staffers fired in 2004: While Donahue gleefully works to get Democratic staffers fired because of his background, he defends Republican staffers when their backgrounds reveal they are child predators. From Think Progress: If Donahue was really about defending Catholicism instead of about abusing religion as a means of taking partisan, political scalps, he would have called for firings in both circumstances. However, he defended the Republican, while repeatedly calling for numerous Democrats to be fired.

Bill Donahue also does not care about the values of Catholicism itself. I was raised in the Catholic Church (maybe I'll post some altar boy pictures sometime). My father (happy birthday Dad, by the way) is the former President of the Syracuse Inter-religious council, and still very active in that group. Needless to say, I know a thing or two about Catholic values. One of those values is forgiveness. Donahue failed to extend that value to the Edwards bloggers after their statements yesterday. Instead, he continued to call for their heads. however, when Mel Gibson was the subject of scrutiny for anti-semitic remarks, Donahue immediately lent him a hand of forgiveness. So, not only does Donahue only target his outrage over anti-Catholicism toward Democrats while simultaneously defending Republicans, he also only extends forgiveness toward conservatives while continuing to attack progressives. This is not a man who is defending Catholics or promoting Catholic values. This is a man who has made it his mission in life to target Democrats and progressives in an attempt to take scalps, while defend Republicans and conservatives at every turn. Since Donahue uses a 501c(3) organization to conduct these attacks, not only is he a hypocrite, as Jeffery Feldman has suggested he is probably also in violation of federal tax law. That is a matter for the New York attorney general to investigate. I am more concerned that any media outlets continue to portray Donahue as someone who speaks for Catholicism, rather than as the partisan, professional political scalper that he is.

Making sure that the Bill Donahues of the world are quoted at will in a wide variety of news outlets is one of the great success of the Republican Noise Machine. The right has developed a "think tank" and advocacy group structure that allows them to consistently portray partisan, ideological attacks against Democrats and progressives as both newsworthy and as non-partisan, or at least as coming under the veneer of speaking for some larger group. No matter what subject is being discussed in the news and what smear attack is being attempted, there are Donahue's all over the place who consistently appear in established news outlets, and who are portrayed as something quite different than the professional, partisan attackers that they are. In fact, somehow it has become news simply that the Bill Donahues of the world are outraged. That is why, for me, this entire episode had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual content of the blog posts in question, but instead about standing up to this false, partisan smear machine for what it is. Once we accept their terms of the debate, that this is supposedly about outrageous statements instead of being about how those statements made it into the media in the first place, he have already lost and reified the power structure that allows the right-wing to smear Democrats and progressives at will.

Whatever stuff we dig up on Bill Donahue--and there will be quite a lot we can dig up on Donahue--we have to remember that the focus of these campaigns must always remain squarely on news outlets that fail to properly vet sources like Bill Donahue, not on Donahue himself. As long as the Bill Donahue's of the world are allowed to continue to operate freely within the established media under the false cover of advocacy and non-partisanship, the smear machine will never go away. I hope that what we accomplished yesterday is a step in the right direction on that front, but I still worry that all of the changes we forced will remain specific to this one story, and not make a real dent in the overall operation of the Republican Noise Machine. Part of the responsibility to change this rests upon Democrats to not cave in to these attacks. Part of the responsibility to change this rests upon progressives to build a counter "think tank" structure. Most of the responsibility, however, rests upon the media to stop buying into this structure, and to actually vet their sources before allowing any smear from any winger to suddenly become national news. Until they do so, change will be painfully slow and incremental, and we will have to keep going to the mattress every time something like this comes up. It certainly feels good to have helped slow down one of these attacks, but we won't be so successful every time. We can't always expect to be successful on our own.

Vote in the MyDD February Straw Poll

Looking through the Dailykos comment thread that was attached to the latest Dkos straw poll results, I started seeing an old topic of conversation rear its ugly head again: "electability." This was a topic that dominated the online discussion regarding the Democratic presidential primary in 2003, specifically in relation to Dean vs. anyone. In fact, it was a discussion that apparently dominated the off-line world as well, as somewhere between 35-40% of the Democratic primary electorate identified "electability" as their number one issue in 2004.

While I am sympathetic to those who would argue that "electability" should not be a factor in who someone supports in a primary, I cannot say that I believe "electability" should play no role whatsoever. Besides, even if I did believe that "electability" should not be a factor, there is really no way to ever keep it from being a factor. As I already noted, a huge percentage of the Democratic electorate votes based on electability, and electability has played a major role in Presidential primaries since at least Eisenhower in 1952. Whatever opinion we may have of the value of electability, it simply is not going away as a factor in primaries, especially presidential primaries.

Given this, I believe the important thing for Democrats when it comes to electability is to work as hard to possible so as to make sure that Democratic candidates who are defined as "electable" are not defined as such because of their relationship to Republican narratives about Democrats. Most media pundits, and many Democrats, already do severe damage to the progressive and Democratic causes by filtering out progressive narratives and reifying Republican narratives. The always brilliant Peter Daou, who I think I have non-sexual crush on, describes this in a recent post (emphasis in original):

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