Friday, April 13, 2012

Classic Example of a Flap

I can always tell when something like a gaffe or an errant twitter is running its course through the news cycle and scattering the pigeons in the blogosphere: the longer the chain of links in Memeorandum, the less consequential — hence more ridiculous — it is. The flap between Hilary Rosen and Ann Romney has reached peak meme silliness.

To recap: Hilary Rosen, a Democrat not affiliated officially or otherwise with the Obama campaign, said something stupid on CNN about Ann Romney not having a job. Ann Romney fired back. Hilary Rosen apologized. That should have been the end of it, but of course it was not. You know the rest.

I’m not even going to get into the merits of the debate over whether or not women who choose to stay home and raise the kids “work” or not, because that part of the debate was over long ago. The only reason the meme has legs now is that the Romney people finally, as Rachel Maddow put it, got a single in a game where they’ve been hammered by home runs and grand slams from the other side. Unfortunately, their cheering section has also been doing a lot of trash talk that has nothing to do with the game, but hey, what else have they got?

The only reason I’m posting about this isn’t because of the merits of the argument. It’s that we have here a classic campaign flap that will run its course and two weeks from now it will have been forgotten. No one’s going to be fired, no one’s going to win a primary or drop out of one because of it, and no one will care. So just bookmark the page in case you want to come back and see a sample of a flap in all its short little life span, like a fly from the Jurassic era preserved in amber.