Double standard, example #17,396
Posted by Richard on June 14, 2010
A prominent Republican candidate, making small talk and not realizing she was being recorded, quoted a friend of hers making fun of her opponent's hair. A prominent Democratic candidate, speaking on the record with a reporter, compared his opponent to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Which of those events is more newsworthy, and more worthy of criticism and condemnation?
Why, Republican Carlie Fiorina's "hair-gate" incident, of course — it's been all over the MSM, while Democrat Jerry Brown's Nazi comparison (triggering Godwin's Law) apparently was no big deal and received scant attention.
But that's the legacy media, which hasn't been shy lately about exercising a partisan bias. And to be fair, there was video and audio of Fiorina's remark, while Brown's vile comparison was merely words quoted by the reporter. So one might argue that the former made for better TV…
Except that comparing your opponent to a Nazi ought to raise a few eyebrows and draw some attention, don't you think??
What about the internet? Let's try a Googlefight:
fiorina boxer hair: 106,000
brown whitman goebbels: 19,900
Apparently, not many people notice or care when a Democrat compares a Republican to a Nazi. It's happened so often in recent years that it's become kind of ho-hum, I suppose.
Hathor said
Obama Nazi
7,140,000
rgcombs said
Actually, when I did a straight Google search on obama nazi, I got 15.7 million hits. When I did the same for bush hitler, I got 14.2 million. And bush nazi returned another 11.5 million.
But the search rules for Googlefight are apparently much more strict. In a direct face-off, it gave me these results:
bush hitler: 4,210,000
obama nazi: 551,000
Anyway, those search strings are just too general. For instance, bush nazi finds references to W’s grandfather Prescott Bush. And obama nazi finds stories about a neo-nazi assassination plot. Not to mention every news or blog page that has a story or post about Obama and a completely separate one about some Nazi.
The nice thing about “fiorina boxer hair” and “brown whitman goebbels” is that they’re so narrowly focused. There isn’t a lot of “noise” — hits that are not relevant to the subject of interest.