Vetting Mitt Romney but not Obama

The Washington Post is doing what it should be doing, in my opinion, when it broke the story of Mitt Romney's alleged bullying in high school in the mid 1960s. It's a cheap shot by a liberal newspaper against a conservative candidate, but a full vetting of a candidate is a necessary thing. It makes me wonder why the Washington post -- and all of the left wing media, which is 85% in America -- never bothered to properly vet the current president.

Romney's high school situation is now in the public eye, whether it's honest reporting or not. We've learned in the last three days that he attended an expensive, private high school. Well, so did Obama, right? We know that Romney's wealthy parents paid for Romney to attend school. We now have some information about how Romney behaved in school -- at least an allegation. But who paid for Obama's expensive private schools? How did Obama behave in school? Why is the press extremely interested in something that is scarcely important with Romney (horsing around in high school more than 40 years ago), but there is no equivalent interest in the other candidate for president?

For the record, the family of the alleged victim of Romney's bullying (victim is now deceased) say the Washington Post got the story wrong. They never heard of any bullying against their family member and don't believe it happened. WaPo didn't do the expected work to make sure a story was right. They published a sensational story with maybe a quarter of the required work to get a lot of web views while slamming the candidate who's not communist. It was a win-win. If they have to make a correction or even a retraction, they can do that on page 10 with two sentences -- something the Great Unwashed won't even read.

Another interesting aspect of this vetting and non-story is that we're in the Facebook and social media generation now. It's not easy to dig up dirt on a presidential candidate now because people in the 50s and 60s don't have a high school social media record, but the future will look different. Most people today have an online presence at a young age, and camera / video. The Onion addressed this problem in a video called Every potential 2040 president already unelectable due to Facebook.

USA Today story on Romney "bullying" here.