Rove's Law

Rove's Law is an eponymous law of politics which states:

Never say anything that you wouldn't want reduced to a three-second sound bite on the news.

It was developed by blogger ACG on the blog "Submitted to a Candid World" which he originally stated as:

If you can’t express a complex political issue without using a string of words that, reduced to a three-second byte, sounds unpatriotic or otherwise inapt, don’t express it at all.

Or when he gets even more worked up:

Never attempt to say anything insightful, comical, or otherwise geared to provoke independent thought, if it can be quoted out of context in a manner likely to ‘offend’ right-wing sensibilities.

It is based on the political spin developed by Karl Rove that favors talking points over extended political discourse. When attempting to smear a political opponent, single sentences, or even parts of sentences, are picked out of a speech and used to represent their views. Based on this quote mining, a label can then be attached to this person.

Sonia Sotomayor
In 2001, Sonia Sotomayor gave the Judge Mario G. Olmos Memorial Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she said:

And the part that was quoted as a sound-bite:

Producing the talking point: "Sotomayor is a racist".

But consider Rove's very own racist slavery "joke" that he told to an African American woman:

Ooops!