Mitt Romney was called out after the first presidential debate for his planned assault on Big Bird. On Tuesday night, it was "binders full of women," sparking an eruption of social media parodies.
The Massachusetts governor defended his record as a crusader for pay equity for women in the workplace, saying during Tuesday's presidential debate that he sought out female candidates for cabinet positions and was brought "whole binders full of women."
Within hours, the remark became prime fodder for satirical social media accounts. Never mind that Boston Phoenix's David Bernstein fact-checked the anecdote and found it wasn't true.
But that didn't seem to matter to the more than 33,300 followers of the Twitter account @RomneyBinders, which aggregated comments on the debate and asserted that Romney loves "women, they make the best sandwiches."
On Facebook, the "Binders Full of Women" community page — fronted with a profile picture of Romney giving a thumbs-up, had nearly 300,000 likes. That page included articles from Slate and the Guardian, critiquing the original comment and making clear that — true, or not — binders full of female candidates wouldn't shatter the glass ceiling.
And it made up a few satirical sound bites of its own.
"I'm not sexist," the moderator, who is not named on the page, wrote. "I let women work for me."
