That didn't take long

Salon reports some expected news:

John Edwards has fired the two controversial bloggers he recently hired to do liberal blogger outreach, Salon has learned.

The bloggers, Amanda Marcotte, formerly of Pandagon, and Melissa McEwan, of Shakespeare's Sister, had come under fire from right-wing bloggers for statements they had previously made on their respective blogs.

The danger to Edwards was never that these fine specimens of maidenhood might rile up right-wing bloggers, since they are not going to vote for Edwards anyway, much less in the Dem primary. Rather it came from the fact that those bloggers might tell Democrats* what kind of a nutball Amanda is, using her own words to illustrate the point, and as MikeT noted before there were plenty of those words to go around. You don't become infamous enough to do "liberal blogger outreach" by being level-headed and polite - or having respect for the difference between fact and opinion - but by being angrier and more outrageous than other liberal bloggers.

My only complaint is that by getting rid of them in such a hurry, Edwards is denying the rest of us an opportunity to see Amanda make a blunder of such magnitude that Edwards himself would have to apologize for it on national TV. I guess Edwards is smarter** than I gave him credit for.

* of the non-moonbat sort, I mean

** but just marginally. After all, he's firing them for having been what he hired them to be.