You don't have to be a six-footer. You don't have to have a great brain. You don't have to have any clothes on.

Sometimes, a headline manages to combine both the extraordinarily obvious and completely wrong into one convenient passage: Here's an example from MSNBC:

Catholics slam bloggers hired by Edwards

Group claims campaign tarnished by ‘two anti-Catholic ... vulgar bigots’

Two bloggers hired recently by Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards were criticized Tuesday by a Catholic group for posts they had written elsewhere on the Internet.

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, demanded that Edwards fire Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan.

For the backstory, John Edwards hired two famous bloggers to work for his campaign, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and Melissa McEwan, who writes under the pseudonym Shakespeare's Sister at the blog of the same name. Both of them have been rather harsh on Catholicism in the past, not that the church didn't in most cases have it coming, what with defending and protecting any number of priests who like to molest and anally rape young boys and doing their best to fight reasonable birth control throughout the entire world.

Because of their writings, the Catholic League jumped all over the Edwards campaign, especially their president, Bill Donohue. Is he an important Catholic clergyman, you ask? Not at all, he's just the president of a large organization of right-wing Catholics, famous for the following quotes:

"The gay community has yet to apologize to straight people for all the damage that they have done."

"Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, OK? And I'm not afraid to say it. ... Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions."

He's a lovely fellow, isn't he?

What MSNBC totally missed is that the bloggers in question have offended any number of right-wing Catholics, right-wing Protestants, right-wing Jews, and right-wing atheists over time. Donohue speaks not for all Catholics, but for a particular right-wing organization. My wife's former boss is president of a left-wing Jewish organization, but it'd be ridiculous to claim that she speaks for "Jews"; rather she speaks for some Jews. If my wife and I get angry about the local grocery store in March/April, we don't get to claim "Jews slam Champaign supermarket over lack of Passover-related items" (this isn't a real complaint of ours, I'm just drawing an example). Donohue speaks ostensibly for his 350,000 person organization, who represent half of a percent of American catholics. He speaks in no official capacity for the Church itself, nor for the majority of American Catholics, who it turns out are a group that basically tend to behave like a broad cross-section of Americans, because they're a broad cross-section of Americans. Just as one can claim that the Catholic church is against abortion but a majority of American Catholics favor it's continued legalization, even more so may Bill Donohue have a problem with two bloggers while most American Catholics could give a flying one. It really isn't all that hard. The lesson, as always, is that way too many journalists are basically incompetent, and that bigots on the right-wing will always have a platform to launch ridiculous fake-outrage propaganda campaigns no matter how odious they happen to be. Thankfully, Edwards didn't cave, and now the left-wing blogs are launching attacks back on the Catholic league for their utter hypocrisy and misrepresentation of Catholic values. Serve it cold, people, serve it cold.