Levin Pummels Straw Kennedy

9 May, 2006. 317 words.

I find it illuminating to note when political commentators use the techniques of propaganda. Mark Levin, writing in his National Review blog, recently beat the crap out of an imaginary straw man: Patrick Kennedy & Double Standards. (I found the article via. Michelle Malkin’s somewhat misleading Kennedy/Rush Double Standards.)

Levin writes at great length about the media abuse that American Hero Rush Limbaugh endured during his 3-year fight against a Florida prosecutor to clear his name. So Levin is understandably outraged about the double-standard of sympathy everyone is applying to Patrick Kennedy’s fender bender. But look what Levin actually writes:

So, I am very angry. You will hear commentator after commentator speaking sympathetically about Patrick Kennedy and his addiction to painkillers. You will hear people say that he is addicted, he has a serious health problem, he deserves to be praised for his forthrightness today, and we should leave him alone. And many of these commentators will be the same people who were giddy in their ceaseless attacks on Rush.

Give yourself a gold star if you noticed that Levin is outraged about things that haven’t even happened. “You will hear etc.” In other words, he hasn’t heard jack, but he still feels the need to beat someone up over the abuse that Rush suffered. So why not just make something up? *

I think there’s a simpler but much less partisan reason for the double-standard here. Rush Limbaugh is an enormously popular entertainer, plastered all over the airwaves every day, attacking people left and right, influencing public opinion all over the place. Patrick Kennedy is, well, a nobody. I never even heard of him until he hit that concrete barrier. Popular people will always get more attention — good or bad — than unpopular people.

* In Levin's defense, he did manage to locate [a single instance][4] of Kennedy sympathy, a week after writing about it.

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