By: John Hayward
The New York Times put together a little article about some of the disgusting race-baiting attack ads run by frenzied Democrats in the fading days of the midterm election season. It’s not really surprising that the Times would find nothing terribly objectionable about this – the Paper of Record’s eyebrow is raised a bit, but not enough to make its monocle fall out – but it’s a sobering reminder of how very, very different the rules for Democrats are. They can be as nasty as they want to be, without fear of the media making them pay much of a price for going overboard. It’s hard to imagine what the Republican equivalent of this garbage might be – what’s the GOP version of a Democrat ad that tries to paint a candidate in North Carolina as somehow responsible for the shooting of Trayvon Martin? – but you can rest assured it would not be clinically reported in a non-judgmental article that set aside only two paragraphs to relay a squeak of complaint from the other side.
The closest the Times comes to expressing great discomfort with these Democrat tactics is to note how “the images and words they are using are striking for how overtly they play on fears of intimidation and repression,” and to observe that it’s “surprising” that this toxic waste is coming from national Democrats and state parties, not “the shadowy and often untraceable political action committees that typically employ such provocative messages.”
