Sunday, August 31, 2008

Aboard the Double Standard Express

HT to the Southcomm blogger who broadcasted the salacious innuendo that a Knox County Republican blogger (among several wildly imaginative others) read into the botched peck on the cheek that Barack Obama gave Jill Biden on stage after her husband's acceptance speech. (Keep in mind that the Knox blogger is an avowed Southern Baptist, which may explain his Victorian knee-jerk. The genesis of the Southern Baptist Church was the defense of slavery, and it's explosion in the 20th Century is marred by a legacy of church support for segregation. Combine that with the Baptist obsession with abstinence, and you get the picture; but, I digress).

The space Southcomm wasted even paying attention to what is obviously an innocent miss of aim (when you give someone who has no record of hitting on women in large venues the benefit of the doubt) gives me the opportunity to underscore the double standard applied to black and white candidates.

There was a modest blogstorm on the right regarding the peck, and that virtual circle jerk was given credibility at some media sites like Southcomm. I believe that if Obama had been white, works-righteous bloggers and their media megaphones would not have posted like voyeuristic Puritans.

And yet, John McCain is not getting the same blog or media attention for eyes that seem to wander across his running mate's (or in his words, his "soulmate's") goods during her introduction speech in Ohio:



That's not ogling we can believe in. You can bet that if McCain were black, bloggers would be tearing up the prospect of a single glance at a white woman in a suggestive way.

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