I’ve mostly been confining my political rants to Facebook, but a recent issue had a (slight) Korean angle, so I’m going to run with it here at LTG.

It starts with the Washington Post running an expose hit piece on presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.  Yes, the paper that brought you Watergate used all the powers of investigative reporting to discover that Romney may have been a bit of a prick.  In 1965.  In high school.

The other night at darts, a friend’s Korean wife who is just about as apolitical as you can be, expressed outrage that anyone could be held accountable for adolescent behavior occurring half a century in the past.  Her husband, who doesn’t like to talk politics but leans well to the left, was equally nonplussed, saying “That is just wrong.  If people are going to be judged based on how they acted in high school, no one will be qualified to be president.”

Of course, their anger at this smear job is understandable.  They have the good fortune to be living in Korea where they are not subjected to “news” stories that read like press releases from the Democratic National Committee on a daily basis.  Otherwise they might not have been so surprised at just how low the Fourth Estate has fallen.  The press cannot fulfill its historical watchdog role when it is in the tank for the party in power.  Jennifer Rubin, the token conservative blogger at the Post, has a nice column up showing just how one sided “reporting” has become.

What always gets to me though is the blatant hypocrisy.  It was just days ago that presidential adviser David Axlerod was making the rounds saying how outrageous it was for Obama to be criticized for eating dog.  After all, Axlerod reminded us, he was just a child.

But it is worse than that really.  See, it turns out that Obama has some bullying in his past to account for as well.  In his so called autobiography Dreams of my Father, Obama recounts how he shoved a girl because he was being teased by his classmates that he was her boyfriend.  Hey, I’m all in favor of what happens on the playground, stays on the playground.  But it’s got to cut both ways.  That’s just basic fairness.

Anyway, the latest attempt to demonize Romney was not particularly well received.  Even the leftist left leaning Time magazine felt compelled to offer a lukewarm defense of Romney, noting that Obama wasn’t disqualified from office based on his admitted pot-smoking, coke-snorting past.

Anyway, I think bullying is bad and wrong and that it has been a part of the socialization of children since the beginning of time.  So I’m not attempting to condone the behavior of either man when I say that of the two, Obama comes off worse in my view.  It sounds like Romney was a smart ass instigator.  Obama was pushed into his abusive behavior by peer pressure.  To the extent it matters (and of course, it doesn’t), I know who I would rather see as the leader of the free world.

In the end the Post failed in its attempt to change focus from the abysmal Obama economy to Romney’s alleged bad character as a high school boy.  You can’t really blame them for trying, because after four years of utter destruction, Obama has nothing else to run on.

UPDATE: A musical accompaniment.