play the [blank] card

[Marc Velasco]

for the curious...

Frequency counts of "cards" played; from ~600 words that matched phrase
"played the [blank] card" on Yahoo search.  Truncated to suppress unique
items.

race 317
highest 60
last 22
"race 11
gender 9
same 7
terror 6
pow 5
fear 5
penalty 5
winning 5
lowest 5
victim 4
underdog 4
attack 4
race ... the claim that he had played the race 4
wrong 4
"muslim 3
"god 3
china 3
first 3
stop 2
puppy 2
patent 2
caste 2
"dad 2
"woman 2
magic 2
class 2
asian 2
communal 2
'race 2
sympathy 2
regular 2
terrorist 2
best 2
'tribal' 2
traditional 2
gore 2
war 2
"gender 2
wild 2


Politically neutral terms like "highest," "last," "winning" "penalty" tend
to dominate the middle of the distribution.  "Race" is by far and away the
most frequent term to fill this particular phrase.  Interesting unique items
from the tail include the 'ayers' card, the 'rezko' card and other items
pertinent to a political analysis.  Alternate spellings have been left here,
so that "gender is the same as gender (together they'd have frequency of
11).  The tail is probably under sampled, due to relatively low sample size.

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