Compliment FAIL

FAIL Blog is upset.  A Meg Whitman campaign web video about Jerry Brown’s decades of political failure uses an image of their website.  The Cheezburger Network, the company that runs the FAIL Blog and other similar successful but vapid sites, has asked for an apology and for the video to be removed.

Here’s the video:

The FAIL Blog image, like the YouTube image, is a stylistic inclusion to frame the points.  But what FAIL Blog fails to understand is just how much of a compliment their inclusion is.  The video doesn’t use the image of FAIL Blog as an endorsement, but as an illustration of the depth of Brown’s incompetence.  The video’s point is that Brown is so inept, he belongs on FAIL Blog.

Usually, being synonymous with failure is a bad thing.  Ask the folks behind the Hindenburg, the Edsel,New Coke, Pepsi Clear, the DC Metro, and Jimmy Carter.  FAIL Blog should probably be embracing this.  Privately, they may very well be, if they’re smart.  But it makes for a bigger story if they complain that Whitman has somehow wronged them.  After all, we probably wouldn’t be talking about them if they didn’t pipe up.