THE DOUBLE STANDARD, PLAIN AND SIMPLE – AT 7:28 P.M. ET:   What an example of the double standard in journalism, one standard for Republicans, another for Democrats.

Rep. Loretta Sanchez, Democrat of California, said something awful last week.  If she had been a Republican, she might have had to withdraw from public life, or at least suffer a period under a cloud.  But she's a Democrat, so, while there plenty of outrage in her congressional district, no one made any demands.  Now, after too much time has passed, she's finally apologized.  From Politics Daily:

Now things are getting tough. Locked in a tight re-election campaign against a Vietnamese-American Republican, Sanchez, who was born in California to Mexican parents, said in an interview with Univision TV earlier this month that the "Vietnamese and the Republicans" in her district were "trying to take away" her House seat after "we have done so much for our community."

Her remarks ignited the blogosphere and talk radio and angered residents of Santa Ana, which she represents and which has one of the country's oldest and largest Vietnamese communities. Conservative commentators joined the fray when her words were reported in the Orange County Register this week, and her opponent, a state assemblyman named Van Tran, lashed back, calling her remarks "offensive and wrong."

Poor Loretta, she was left with nothing to do but apologize. "I used a poor choice of words that some people have taken as offensive," she said at a news conference Friday afternoon. "I apologize for those remarks." But she didn't apologize for calling him "very anti-immigrant and very anti-Hispanic.''

COMMENT:  There is a long history of Democrats engaging in bigotry and getting away with it.  Jesse Jackson made openly anti-Semitic remarks and suffered not at all.  The late Sen. Robert Byrd used the "n" word in a statement, and it was hardly noticed.  And of course, there is Barack Obama, who described his grandmother as being like any other white woman.

No Republican could have made any of those statements and survived intact for more than a day.

I'm sure that the public eventually notices these things.

September 27, 2010