Let's take this slowly and calmly.

"democratic smear campaign": 492 hits
"republican smear campaign": 2,980 hits

6:1 ratio, Republicans smearing more than Democrats

"conservative smear campaign": 881 hits
"liberal smear campaign": 1,400 hits

1.6:1, Liberals smearing more

Average of these four searches grouped as synonyms:

democratic+liberal: 1,892
republican+conservative: 3,861

2:1 (republican+conservate)s do more smearing than (democratic+liberal)s...on average.

So there, by my own inane standards of proof, I win.

Hey, wait a minute!

I call this the "Oracle at Google" game, and that might ring a bell. It just so happened that I Googled the phrase the other day, and got a surprisingly small number of hits. One of those just happened to take me to a flame between you and me back in July of 2006, in which the idea first came to me. And why was I Googling that particular phrase? Because I was bored New Year's Day, and so to play around I decided to build The Oracle at Google (it may still have some rough edges; I wasn't planning to publish it yet, but this is toooo apropos). Check out the "What the heck is this???" link, it pays homage to our flame and its role in inspiring me to build the Oracle.

Today you've inspired me again, Tom. Twice, in fact. One, I need another mode with a single value term to handle the cases we're playing with here, in which we're comparing two objects against only one term (terminology that'll be clearer when you see The Oracle). And two, your technique of pairing the value with multiple synonyms for objects could really enhance the accuracy of the results. Thanks!

You're my muse, Tom. Gosh....