The Politico: Off on the Road to Macaca

“Politico Scandal Coverage: 50+ Todd Akin Stories; 4 Wendy Davis Stories,” John Nolte writes at Big Journalism: 

Using Google’s advanced search and the key words “Todd, Akin, Rape,” I stopped counting after finding 50 separate Politico stories covering or touching on Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin’s stupid comments about rape, between the day the story broke, August 19, 2012, and August 26, 2012.

Using the same advanced search and the key words “Wendy Davis,” I found only 4 stories about Texas gubernatorial candidate and Democrat rising star Wendy Davis  this week — the week it was discovered she fabricated a personal narrative about being a teenage single mother and working her way through Harvard Law.

The flood of stories Politico unleashed last year about Todd Akin literally [sic] pecked to death Akin himself, the Republican Party brand as a whole, and most specifically Mitt Romney, who at the time was running for president against Barack Obama.

The Politico was founded in 2007 by a pair of former Washington Post staffers, who brought with them the same partisan culture as their former employer. About which, as I noted last August:

“The Washington Post Has a Fever, and the Only Cure is More Ted Cruz Birtherism,” Ace writes at the Breitbart.com group blog. “It’s breathtaking,” he notes, and really, you do have to see the post to believe it, since it features screen shots of over a dozen Ted Cruz birther-related stories, which if I’m looking at the date stamps correctly, all ran over the course of only one or two days at the Post.

Jim Geraghty of NRO estimated that in 2006, the Washington Post ran “approximately 100 articles, op-eds, [and] editorials” spotlighting Republican George Allen’s moronic “macaca” gaffe involving his botched effort at calling out a mohawk-wearing video tagger hired by his opponent, Democrat Jim Webb, to stalk the Allen campaign. The paper’s efforts helped Webb, the Post’s preferred candidate, narrowly win the election, which helped to tip the Senate into Democrat hands. It also derailed a potential Allen bid for the White House in 2008 — all of which were desired goals by the admittedly left-leaning newspaper.

Unless a better organized, less gaffe-prone candidate with a (D-TX) after his her her name enters the Texas gubernatorial campaign, the Politico has no desire to squash the Davis candidacy. Instead, they and the rest of the MSM are giving Davis the Biden treatment, as Andrew Stiles of NRO wrote yesterday:

Wendy Davis can rest assured knowing that the media will treat her as it has Joe Biden, whose innumerable gaffes are consistently shrugged off as “Joe being Joe.” But it’s hard to imagine the media being so forgiving of a Republican politician who frequently mixes up the names of senators and foreign countries, who described his opponent as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” and who once told an Indian-American supporter that, in Biden’s home state of Delaware, “You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.” Would the media be similarly amused at the thought of Greek diners being greeted by “Ted Cruzopoulos”? Probably not.

Biden, like Davis, hasn’t always been factually accurate when describing his past. But he did face a fair amount of criticism during his bid for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, and ultimately dropped his bid. Davis, on the other, should be just fine. She’s running against a Republican.

And the MSM has her back, every step of the way.