Analogy Backfire / Real Life

Analogies backfiring in real life, sorted by the people or organizations making the analogy.

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Advertising and brand names

• The health insurance company slogan "You Deserve The Redshirt Treatment" isn't terribly reassuring given the pop-culture usage of the term.
• This posting◊ from the Dutch flag carrier airline KLM faced ridicule from all sides for how terrible an analogy it presents, with even those who wholeheartedly agree with its message pointing out that it comes off as positively heteronormative because of how anything other than a male/female set of buckles can't fasten a seatbelt.
• There's a Digital Piracy Is Evil ad that uses out-of-context clips from Casablanca. Unfortunately for their message, they used the scene where Ilsa is holding Rick at gunpoint to get him to give her the letters of transit so she and Lazlo can help the Allies and claimed that Ilsa is the digital pirate. So, they accidentally (or maybe not so accidentally) implied that digital piracy is analogous to fighting the Nazis.
• One Amazon ad has a worker compare herself and her coworkers to the kids with golden tickets in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and their workplace to the eponymous factory. Those who have actually read the book can infer that Amazon has No OSHA Compliance and 80% of the workers will suffer horrific industrial accidents.
• Trojan condoms. Sure, the city of Troy withstood a siege for 10 years, but the adjective "Trojan" in every other case comes from the Trojan Horse, which was used to sneak a bunch of seamen inside the walls and ruin the place.
  • Plenty of sports teams go by the nickname "Trojans," which tends to raise the same question.
  • Throughout Homer, the Trojans are shown as honorable and the Greeks are susceptible to corruption (in the form of classic tragic flaws). And the horse story just shows all the seamen were only a problem inside the Trojan (city)...
  • Goes back to the Romans and their contemporaries: many European cities were allegedly founded by Trojan refugees, such as London.
• Similarly, Ramses condoms are named after a guy who fathered over 100 children.
• A Swedish ad campaign for pasta sauce used the slogan "What would Romeo be without Juliet?" (The correct answer being "alive". But a very Emo Teen, however.) In fact, misguided comparisons to Romeo and Juliet are very nearly a trope unto themselves.
• This quote:
  Pilot: Welcome to the Titanic of airliners.
  —Delta plane, La Guardia
• There are several companies named for Midas, the king whose touch turned things to gold. Excellent, until you remember that this included all the things he touched that were better before they were solid gold (water, food, air, his daughter...)
  • At one point, Meineke Muffler was advertising their low prices by having a woman exclaim, "I didn't want a muffler made of real gold," never actually mentioning the Midas Muffler company by name.
• The infamous "This is Your Brain on Drugs" Public Service Announcement, which showed a man frying an egg to simulate the mind-destroying effects drugs have on the user, is notorious not just for its message, but of all the ways people (including children) picked apart the analogy, from substituting "brain" for "eggs" just to drive the joke home, to suggesting that drugs are a healthy, nutritious breakfast that helps [your] brain grow.
• The famous French bank Caisse d'épargne uses a squirrel as its logo, as a reference to the rodent's well-known habit of hoarding grains to stash food and avoid starving. In practice, squirrels tend to be unable to find back their stashes (which helps spread the seeds). Hiding stuff in random place and losing most of your treasury is probably not how you would expect a bank to manage your money...
  • The French nature magazine La Hulotte had an issue on moles where a mole petitioned to be the bank's new mascot precisely for this reason (moles are known to dig out chambers where they store worms to eat later).
• This ad for men's jeweler Manly Bands likens their product to the rings of power in The Lord of the Rings while neglecting to mention that the rings of power were used by their maker Sauron to dominate and corrupt their wearers.

Idioms and other figures of speech

• The old-fashioned metaphor "If you have an itch, scratch it" is used to say "If you want to have sex, don't fight the urge - do it." Unfortunately, any doctor will tell someone suffering from chicken pox, poison ivy, etc. that if you have an itch, you're not supposed to scratch it because of the risk of infection...
• "A broken clock is right twice a day" means that even someone who is wrong a lot can be right sometimes. And it was a good analogy back when all clocks were analog clocks. It falls apart now that we have digital clocks. And even analog clocks can never be right if they're broken due to missing a hand.
• The expression "to sleep like a baby," meaning to sleep deeply and soundly, is often remarked on for this reason; babies tend to wake up at the slightest (or even no) provocation.
• Parents often say "the early bird catches the worm" to get their children out of bed, which is highly unlikely to work if you look at it from the worm's point of view.
  • It also has potential to fail even if you look at it from the bird's POV. Who wants to eat worms?
• Changing values and meaning along with poor phrasing or lack of context can cause an Analogy Backfire backfire. For example, the phrase "It's always darkest before the dawn" (a common phrase for comedians' complaints) is not inaccurate because of false dawn, but rather means "It's darkest before it starts to get lighter".
• The saying that encourages people to be nice rather than coarse: "You attract more flies with honey than with vinegar." Some cynical people will quickly point "Who would want to attract flies?"
  • Or as xkcd would point out, you actually attract more flies with vinegar. It seems that Nice Guys Finish Last in this case.
    • It is also true, as noted by Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory above, that you can attract more flies with a nice pile of manure than either of the above.
  • Winston Groom once wrote in Forrest Gump that "...you can catch more flies with garbage than either of them other two things; assuming you're into catching flies."
• The saying "sure as the sky is blue". Most of the time the sky isn't blue — at night it's black, at sunset & sunrise it's all the colors of the rainbow, and if you count clouds it's grey / white a lot of the time as well. And if you want to get technical about it, the sky isn't actually blue at all; nothing, in fact, has any inherent colour, it's all wavelengths getting bounced back.
  • Another way to get technical is to say that the sky still is blue. It's just the clouds that got in the way that have a different color.
• The phrase "like taking candy from a baby" is almost a Dead Horse Analogy now, as it's only likely to be seen if it's followed by the obligatory "Have you ever actually tried taking candy from a baby?" retort.
  • The Mythbusters actually tested this. They found out that taking candy from a baby is incredibly difficult; the babies had a strong grip that made pulling the candy away hard to do, and the older ones knew how to use evasive strategies to hide the candy from the arm trying to take it from them. Then there's the guilt that is quickly felt when the baby begins crying.
  • Mythbusters is late to the game here, back in the '70s when Bob Barker was doing the game show Truth or Consequences, one of the contests that people had to try to do was take candy from a baby, without causing it to cry. Hilarity Ensues. Very difficult, indeed! Then again, at least in fiction, the people who tend to use this phrase are the sort who would have no problems with killing said baby, in which case it probably would be quite easy.
• Sarcastically suggesting that someone clearly guilty of something is "blaming the one-armed man", in reference to the lame excuses the accused keeps offering—this is frequently quoted on legal shows. Completely forgetting that as bizarre as his story was, Richard Kimble was telling the truth.
• Stating that someone going through a difficult situation is like "Daniel in the lions' den", or experiencing "the trials of Job", disregarding the fact those guys came out of their ordeals okay — Job was even rewarded twofold for keeping faith that everything would work out. (Unless the point is to suggest that whoever's in the difficult situation will pull through just fine.)
• Expressions like "when Hell freezes over" and "a snowball's chance in Hell" don't quite mean the same in Michigan, where's there's a place called Hell that does freeze over in the winter. Nor would they have their intended meaning to anyone who's read The Divine Comedy, where the lowest circle of Hell is a frozen wasteland.
• The analogy that life is like a roller coaster in that it has its ups (good times) and downs (bad times). When a rollercoaster is going down, isn't that when it is the most fun? ^note  And what does that make the loops? On the other hand, it could still work if the intended meaning was that the up parts were the bad times (the difficult, slow, uphill slog) you have to get through in order to experience the down parts (the fun, quick and easy bits everyone enjoys).
  • It's also worth mentioning that some people find the uphill parts of the roller coaster to be relaxing and the downhill parts to be scary.^note Especially if a basophobe—someone afraid of falling—has been dragooned onto the ride.
• The saying "There's no I in 'team'" is often used as meaning that selfishness has no place in teamwork. However, some wiseguys^note Including those who think it's all about them. have pointed out that there is, in fact, an M and an E in "team."
  • There’s also the fact that “team” is pronounced with a short I sound, and would appear in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /tim/.
  • Depending on the font that the word "team" uses, there actually IS an "I": hidden in the "A"-hole.
• "Pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps" is sometimes used in a non-ironic sense where one is expected to get themselves out of a tough situation by their own resources and determination. This ignores that the phrase was originally meant to signify an impossible task, because, after all, you can't lift yourself up by your bootstraps.
• One French idiom for Morton's Fork choice is "choisir entre la peste et le choléra" (literally: "choosing between plague and cholera"), due to both being lethal and highly unpleasant diseases. Progress in medicine and hygiene made the idiom sounds less relevant in French-speaking areas, because plague and cholera are now rare, easily preventable, and easily treatable diseases.
• When people say something is "a snap", they almost invariably mean it is easy. Even if they are one of many people who finds it hard to snap his fingers.
• "When life closes a door, it opens another one". An insurance company turned this on an ad into "When life closes a door, you open it again. It's a door, that's how they work".
• The simile "as pure as the driven snow" and similar expressions. Snow naturally has carbon dioxide and other impurities mixed in it as it falls, like rain does, so it isn't exactly pure, even without taking acid snow into account.
• Whoever said "Words are like toothpaste, once you get them out, you can't put them back in" probably never even tried putting toothpaste back into the tube. It's more like, "Words are like toothpaste, you can put them back in with relative ease, and once you wash your hands of the matter, it's like it never happened."
• "You can't teach an old dog new tricks" has been disproven by a study that shows that you can. Older dogs are more intelligent, more experienced, and more disciplined than their younger counterparts, making them easier to train.
• The saying “You can't turn back the clock”. It's actually fairly easy to change the time on a clock, as people who live in places with daylight savings can tell you.
• "Rubbing salt in the wound" is used to mean "To make a bad situation even worse". Salt is antibacterial, so while it's very painful when applied, it's ultimately beneficial to the recipient.
• "Sweating like a pig" would confuse those who know that pigs don't have sweat glands; one of the reasons they roll in the mud.
• The phrase "fighting like cats and dogs" (a.k.a. Animal Jingoism), referring to the centuries-long clashes between the two species. Except, there's just as many examples of loving relationships between them as well.
• If you're having a problem, you really should talk to somebody about it because "the squeaky wheel gets the grease". Nowadays, a malfunctioning component is more likely to get replaced.
• There's a viral post on the internet◊ reminding everyone to be humble because no matter how rich or poor they are, they will all be buried in the same grave. However, many people pointed out that rich people in ancient times were buried in pyramids or mausoleums, so the better interpretation is that people should be humble because they will all die someday.

News media

• Glenn Beck compared himself to Howard Beale, apparently missing the fact that Beale went insane... and eventually was murdered by his own network. To be fair, how do we know he didn't know that already?
• When Angus Deayton was fired from his job on Have I Got News for You after the second round of wacky cocaine-and-prostitute hijinks, a longtime panelist from the show said "We've lost Zeppo, it's no big deal". You'd think a very big aficionado of old comedy (to the point of having written a book on the subject) like Merton would remember that while Zeppo is often perceived as the blandest, a lot of people claim he's just as funny as his brothers, but subtler and more of an acquired taste. Although like the Marx Brothers post-Zeppo, Have I Got News for You managed to continue clicking along quite nicely without Deayton, which restores the validity of the analogy.
• Back in The '80s, the media liked to compare Michael Jackson to The Pied Piper of Hamelin (one of the Disney's Wonderful World of Knowledge yearbooks titled a whole article "The Pied Piper of Pop"), owing to his huge popularity. Such comparisons forgot what the Pied Piper did to Hamelin's children when the mayor and his underlings wouldn't pay him. In the years since Jackson was first accused of child molestation in 1993, this analogy is usually not applied by those speaking up for Jackson, but this author not only uses it, but seems unaware that the reason the children followed the Piper is because they were bewitched into doing so, not because they instinctively knew he was a good guy.
• This headline from TIME Magazine describes the Kakhovka Dam collapse as "[Ukraine]'s Chernobyl," referring to the Chernobyl disaster, which happened in...Ukraine.^note To be fair, Chernobyl occurred while Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union.
• A segment from Entertainment Tonight describes the Costa Concordia disaster as a "real-life Titanic", apparently not realizing that the Titanic itself was also a real ship.

Politics and activism

• During the 2008 Democratic primaries, Hillary Rodham Clinton tried to compare herself to Sylvester Stallone's Rocky. A lot of people commented that he lost in the first movie. Presumably, the desired implication was that she'd stick it out 'til the end. Even worse, Rocky loses to a charismatic black man.
  • Stephen Colbert used the same metaphor in reference to George W. Bush at the Correspondents' Dinner, and was halfway into it before he realized that Rocky lost to Apollo Creed.
    ...The point is, it is the heart-warming story of a man who was repeatedly punched in the face.
    • Colbert seems to like this. He once discussed one politician who used an analogy of the Men of the West's diversionary attack and Iraq distracting the Bush Administration from the election, pointing out that by the terms of the man's analogy, this makes the US Mordor.
• Anti-Biotechnology groups often refer to genetically modified crops and farm animals as "Frankenfood," presumably arguing that because it was created in a lab like Frankenstein Monster, it must be as dangerous as the Frankenstein's Monster. Anyone who has read the book or seen the movie knows that the monster was originally innocent and benign and only turned to evil when provoked by the bigotry of humans. On the other hand, maybe they did read the novel, and were thinking of Victor Frankenstein's failure to foresee or take responsibility for the ultimate results of his attempt to play God For Science!. Naturally, bio-engineered food scientists are quite concerned with testing or tracking their creations, but whether they are required to do so enough or to have their research independently verified by non-industry sources is the central issue here.
  • Ironically, non-genetically engineered food is almost never tested for safety, though there is no particular reason to believe it would be any less hazardous; indeed, plants produce natural insecticides to deter predation, and traditional plant breeding is actually more likely to introduce undesirable variations in the expression of these traits.
• As Jimmy Carr has pointed out, this applies to the people who have described Barack Obama as a cross between John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., both of whom were shot.
  • Being a legislator from Illinois who was elected president, he's also often compared to Abraham Lincoln, another victim of assassination.
  • This rather funny video has a group of Obama campaigners singing One Day More shortly before the election. YouTube commentary was quick to point out that most of the characters of Les Misérables died.
  • He's also been favorably compared to David Palmer, who was the first black President, led a country in turmoil in the The War on Terror and was also assassinated after several failed attempts.
    • As of his retirement as president on January 20, 2017, Obama has successfully averted this form of Life Imitates Art.
• After World War I, there were the Communist Spartacist uprisings in Germany. Named after the famous Spartacus who led the slaves' uprising against the Roman republic-verging-on-empire. And was defeated by Crassus (the richest man in Rome, and maybe in the world history), and crucified together with 6000 of his fellow slaves. Guess what happened to the German Communists. (OK, they weren't crucified.)
• A deliberate case of backfiring analogy. When member of Soviet Academy of Science Sakharov became a dissident, the speaker of the academy held a meeting:
  (Speaker) -Comrades, we have an unprecedented issue here: about nullifying the membership in our Academy for Sakharov...
  (Capitza) -Why unprecedented? Hitler once nullified the membership of Einstein in German Academy...
  The issue was promptly dropped.
• A transphobe on Twitter shared a photo of a closed Pizza Hut saying, "No matter what you do to this building, everyone knows it used to be a Pizza Hut. That's what the trans community fails to understand." However, a trans advocate used this to make a point of her own, sharing a photo of a tax agency that was also a former Pizza Hut. She said that while there are clear signs of what the building used to be, that's not what it is anymore, and if you walk in there now asking for pizza, they're going to think you're crazy. Regardless of that building's past, it's now a tax agency and that's how you would interact with it, and being transgender is much the same way.
• PETA attempted to put up a billboard in Ohio depicting a sow, a piglet, and a human microwaving a pork chop in reference to the China Arnold murder case along with the caption "Everybody's somebody's baby." For those unfamiliar with the case, Ms. Arnold was convicted of cooking her own child. While this behavior is congruent with that of many domestic pigs toward their offspring, that was probably not the message that PETA intended. Or is it?
• Animal rights activists often compare animal suffering to various forms of oppression, such as rape, racism, and slavery. Going by this analogy, this compares the victims of said oppression to animals, which is something that the perpetrators of oppression often do to justify their actions.
• During the 2010 California gubernatorial election, Meg Whitman said in a speech she wanted California to be like it was back when she first moved there. It took very little time for Jerry Brown's campaign to put out a commercial helpfully pointing out that when Whitman had moved to California, Brown had been the governor.
• During the earlier stages of Obamacare, Sarah Palin tried to speak out against it by doing a parody of Green Eggs and Ham. Critics of Palin were quick to point out that the moral of the original story was "do not claim that you hate something without even trying it first", and that the protagonist really liked them when he tried them.
  • During the 2008 election, Palin would also deflect criticism of her youth and inexperience by comparing herself to another outdoors-loving Republican governor of similar age who became Vice President. Detractors were quick to point out that by the time Roosevelt was made William McKinley's running mate, he'd already been an Army officer, New York City Police Commissioner, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy (where he wrote multiple books). Palin had only been mayor of a small town before serving two years as Governor of Alaska.
• Once Brazilian people started protesting in 2013, a few of the revolted started calling the movement "Brazilian Spring" or "Brazilian Autumn" after The Arab Spring. While both were popular uprisings, the Arab Spring was met with much repression, at times evolving into armed conflict, and had already at that point seen its pro-democracy intentions instead installing some much worse governments. Not exactly the outcome the South Americans expect.
• During his term, Portuguese Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho has compared his government's long austerity policies to a "marathon" and that "getting to the end too quickly" could put the country in jeopardy. At least one pundit pointed out that according to legend, the original marathoner dropped dead at the end.
• The controversial German classical liberal politician Guido Westerwelle once said on one of his party's assemblies, "Here stands the Statue of Liberty of this republic!". The very leftist comedian Volker Pispers was quick to retort: "Can someone kindly tell this man... that the Statue of Liberty is hollow and accessible on the inside?"
• The dove is the internationally used symbol for peace. Every ornithologist (and many other people) know that doves are very aggressive animals amongst each other — even more so than falcons.
• Medical doctor and vegan activist Dr. Michael Klaper said that "the human body has no more need for cow's milk than for dog's milk, horse's milk, or giraffe's milk." Horse's milk is actually a staple in eastern Europe. The larger "we don't drink dog/cat/whatever milk" argument doesn't really stand up to logical scrutiny either; we don't drink the milk of these animals because they don't produce a large enough yield to make them worth the trouble of farming for milk the first place.
  • Such people will also claim that humans are the only animals that regularly consume the milk of another creature, even though there have been several noteworthy examples of dogs nursing kittens, etc. Not counting that, even if they were the only ones, they are also the only animals that use glasses, wear clothes, use antibiotics to threat diseases etc. and that doesn't mean these are bad things.
• Oftentimes political debates, such as the healthcare debate, involve comparisons that run against the point one is trying to make. Real Time with Bill Maher involved Bill mimicking sarcastic anti-government questions before answering them with a Blunt "Yes".
  Bill: I mean, how stupid is it when people say "oh that's what we need, the federal government telling Detroit how to make cars, or Wells Fargo how to run a bank, you want them to look like the post office?"
  [Beat]
  Bill: Yeah. I mean, a place that takes a little note from my hand from LA on Monday, to give it to my sister in New Jersey on Wednesday, for 42 cents? Well, let me be the first to say that I would be THRILLED if America's healthcare system was anywhere near as functional as the post office.
  • It is notable that he changed it to the post office for this joke to work. The actual comparison he's mocking is with the DMV, which is the usual go-to example for bureaucratic inefficiency.
• During the 2010 British Airways strike, Sir Ian McKellen said "Nice well-behaved hobbits don't join unions". David Langford was quick to point out that "nice well-behaved hobbits were easy meat for Saruman until the rough aggressive ones got home." And when they did get home, the hobbits took "collective action" to a whole new level (as in, shooting their oppressors by hundreds).
• A Mexican left-leaner informative/satirical political magazine ran an informative strip criticizing the Mexican Drug War, denouncing it as being orchestrated by "greedy U.S. capitalists" to take control of Mexico just as the Opium Wars were orchestrated by "greedy British capitalists" to take control of China; unfortunately, if the parallel was correct, it would make the Mexicans greedy capitalists who would want to take control of the U.S. and impose the legal sale of drugs. (Unless the author is also making a point about history being Written by the Winners.)
  • And from the same author of the aforementioned strip, this editorial political cartoon referring to the new Mexican Labor Laws: It depicts a poor worker being crushed by the "Modern Labor Machinery" while representing two of the major political parties that are pushing these new laws (PAN and PRI, that hold opposing views from the author's) as the main cogs of this evil mechanism; you'll notice, though, that the positioning of the PRI cog would prevent the whole system from working, which is actually true, since historically the PRI has opposed many of the PAN's proposed reforms.
• Simon Hoggart pointed out that John Major was prone to making a fair few of these in many speeches. For example, Major once said that Labour and taxes go together like peaches and cream, causing Hoggart to remark that people actually like peaches and cream.
• Former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said he was inspired by King David when he ran for office. Unfortunately he didn't read the entirety of 2 Samuel which led to infidelity, murder, rebellion, and Israel on the brink of ruin. Guess what happens to the city of Detroit after Kilpatrick's sex scandal and other crimes were exposed? Thankfully no rebellion was carried out.
• In April 2011, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, trying to connect to younger voters, said that "If this was a Lady Gaga song, the relationship between the youth vote and Barack Obama would be 'Bad Romance.'" Apparently he missed the point of the song — to want all of someone, their good AND their bad.
• The religious Evangelical subculture in the US tend to promote old fashioned courtship rules for young people (girls never left unattended with boys, no physical contact until marriage, dating only as a prelude to marriage, etc.). One of the more prominent programs is Bill Gothard's "Lancelot Lives", only going to show that no one involved seems to realize they named their program after one of literature's most famous adulterers.
• In response to reports of Police Brutality, one official claimed in 2016 that "Are there a few bad apples? Yeah," in an attempt to dismiss the reports as a handful of Black Sheep making the majority of good cops look bad. John Oliver had a good time pointing out on Last Week Tonight that the full phrase is "a few bad apples spoil the bunch" (because rotting apples release a chemical which causes nearby apples to accelerate ripening) — which suggests the exact opposite, that the existence of these bad cops is reason to believe that the whole organization is corrupt.
• Shortly before the 2016 Presidential Election, Mike Huckabee appeared on Fox News where he compared Donald Trump to the character Quint from Jaws, saying that one could overlook his vulgar and unconventional ways because he was going to save everyone from the shark, which he likened to Hillary Clinton. As Megyn Kelly immediately pointed out, the movie ends with Quint getting eaten by the shark.
• This anti-abortion sign invoked the Harry Potter franchise by asking, "If Lily Potter had an abortion, then who would stop Voldemort?" Tumblr users quickly pointed out that Lily Potter was an educated, healthy, financially-stable woman in a happy marriage with a large support network and was carrying a wanted child who was developing healthily in the womb, so she had no reason to consider having an abortion. They then pointed out that if Voldemort's mother, Merope Gaunt (who was an impoverished and uneducated woman pregnant by a husband who had abandoned her, who had an abusive father and brother that she had run away from, had several mental and physical health issues that contributed to her Death by Childbirth, and no friends or anybody else she could turn to for support), had access to safe abortion services, then all the suffering in the Harry Potter books never would have happened.
  • Some counter-arguments of those Tumblr users though pointed out that then according to them a wealthy woman without worries shouldn't be free to have an abortion, and also that they were basically saying that the poor should have abortions.
  • Another take simply reads: "Neville".^note The character would have been the subject of the prophecy Harry Potter centers around had Voldemort decided to target the Longbottoms first instead of the Potters, which isn't shown in the movies.
• A common pro-choice argument is to compare a human fetus to a parasite. Pro-life activists regularly point out that parasite is defined as "an organism that lives and feeds on or in an organism of a different species and causes harm to its host," and that the fetus can send their stem cells to help their mother.
• A common argument in favour of veganism is that gorillas, which are closely related to humans, have very large canine teeth and obviously get enough protein despite being herbivores. Except gorillas are actually omnivores; while they mostly eat fruit, they occasionally eat insects and other gorillas, especially babies. Besides, "closely related" doesn't mean "exactly the same", so what works for a gorilla won't necessarily work for a human.
• Edmund Stoiber, former president of Bavaria (Germany) is infamous for not only stammering heavily, but also for throwing around analogies that either don't work out, are absolutely nonsensical or implicate the very opposite of what he was trying to say. Among others did he say that his party shall "spark passion to fire up the flood" where rival parties didn't even bother to point out how weak any fire would be to the ocean.
• The "A Good Cartoon" Tumblr largely runs on this, by picking apart (usually conservative) political cartoons that often end up disproving their own analogies when given the wrong interpretation. In particular, one cartoon by Ben Garrison compared the Affordable Care Act to the monster of Frankenstein, and depicted Rand Paul desperately trying to rally a mob to defeat the monster. As the Tumblr pointed out, the monster in nearly every version is a benign and tragic creature that means well despite its sordid origins, and is only ever dangerous (if that) because of unfair persecution and mistreatment, while the angry mobs that try to kill it are always depicted as misled or evil, and never successful.
• In a speech before the Reichstag, German chancellor Bernhard von Bülow coined the term Nibelungentreue (Nibelung loyalty), comparing Germany's loyalty to Austria-Hungary with Gunther's loyalty to Hagen. All well and good, except Gunther allowed his loyalty to Hagen to trump his obligations to his sister Gudrun and to justice, leading to his downfall and death. Indeed, Germany's "blank check" to Austria-Hungary caused a chain of events that ended the German Empire and caused Germany to endure a series of miseries that would last for most of the 20th century. Fittingly, the term Nibelungentreue has since become used to refer to excessive, unquestioning and potentially disastrous loyalty.
• During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Director-General of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin made a tweet comparing the invasion of a Tom and Jerry cartoon where Tom is bullying Jerry, Jerry seeks the protection of Bully Bulldog Spike, but Spike can't help him due to leash laws leaving him stuck by his doghouse. He analogizes Tom to Russia, Jerry to Ukraine, and Spike to NATO. People were quick to point out that the defining trait of Tom and Jerry is that Jerry almost always beats Tom, and the cartoon is no exception; it ends the leash law being repealed and Spike beating Tom senseless and humiliating him.
• After the mass shootings in Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas in May 2022, many conservative politicians rebutted calls for stronger gun control laws by saying "We didn't ban airplanes after 9/11." This argument ignores that: (1) All air travel was suspended immediately after the attacks; (2) Airplanes aren't designed with the intent to harm others the way guns are; (3) Airplanes aren't available to be bought the way guns are; (4) Anybody who wants to become a pilot must go through strict training before becoming certified as a pilot.
• On May 24, 2022, Arkansas gubernatorial candidate Sarah Huckabee Sanders vowed after winning the primaries that, "We will make sure that when a kid is in the womb, they're as safe as they are in a classroom." On the exact same day, a gunman killed 21 people in Rob Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, most of whom were children, and this was merely the latest in a long line of mass shooting incidents at schools. It didn't take long for people to call Sanders out for her poor choice of words.
• Apparently Donald Trump used some unfortunate analogies when the top generals told him that he could not have a big military parade in Washington DC:
  President Trump: You fucking generals, why can't you be like the German generals?
  General John Kelly: Which generals?
  President Trump: The German generals in World War II.
  General John Kelly: You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?
  President Trump: No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him.
• When Russia's attempts to mobilize the populace during the invasion of Ukraine resulted in a reported mass exodus, Ella Pamlova, head of Russia's election committee, referred to them as "rats fleeing the country... with trembling tails between their legs", and went on to proclaim with regards to Russia that "The ship will be ours, it's gaining strength and clearly moving towards its target." Many were quick to point out that the imagery going on seems to invoke "rats fleeing a sinking ship", which is used to refer to people trying to escape an imminent failure. Also not helping the comparison is that Russia famously lost one of its fleet flagships in the opening months of the war.
• In April 2023, Rep. Webster Barnaby of Florida defended a law prohibiting transgender people from using their preferred bathroom by comparing trans people to the mutants from the X-Men Film Series. He was apparently not aware that the mutants in the X-Men franchise are either superheroes or, at worst, Well-Intentioned Extremists, while the real villains are the anti-mutant bigots.
• In early 2020, as Bernie Sanders was the frontrunner in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, there were pundits arguing against Sanders' popularity, with MSNBC's Chris Matthews comparing Sanders' victory in the Nevada primaries to Adolf Hitler's invasion of France. Sanders supporters and many others immediately pointed out that not only was Sanders Jewish, but some of his relatives were killed during The Holocaust, which led to Matthews resigning from MSNBC.
• After Caesar Augustus became the supreme leader of the Roman Empire, he set up a temple for Mars and Venus in Rome to sanctify his leadership subtly. Augustus' family, the Julians, claimed to be descendants of Venus and Mars, as Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome, were their sons. Witty Romans, however, quickly pointed out that Mars and Venus famously had an affair behind Venus' husbands' backs, so Augustus had essentially built a temple for adultery. Augustus' fondness for advocating traditional moral values made this even funnier.
• The cartoon "Victim mentality will get you killed" compares building an Island Help Message on a "Far Side" Island and waiting to be rescued to saving yourself by using the wood to build a raft, in an attempt to make a point about personal responsibility. Setting off into the open ocean on an improvised craft without so much as a coconut on board is even more likely to get you killed.

Sports

• In the 2007 NCAA Basketball tournament, upon being asked about his match-up with future NBA #1 pick (and much taller) Ohio St.'s Greg Oden, U of Memphis center Joey Dorsey infamously remarked that this was a 'David and Goliath' match-up... "and I'm Goliath." Turns out, he was right after all: Dorsey was held scoreless and Oden had a monster game.
• Likewise, on the eve of the infamous 1987 Fiesta Bowl between Miami and Penn State, the Miami players attended a pregame banquet clad in combat fatigues while the Penn State players wore suits. Some Penn State players performed a skit onstage and made offensive jokes, causing Miami defensive tackle Jerome Brown to attempt a walkout. Brown was televised saying "Did the Japanese go sit down and have dinner with Pearl Harbor before they bombed them?" As the Miami players began to walk out, Penn State punter John Bruno retorted "Excuse me, but didn't the Japanese lose the war?" At the Fiesta Bowl afterwards, Penn State proceeded to upset Miami 14–10 and win their second national championship.
• When Lewis Hamilton started to win races in the F1 world championship, he stated that he was a big fan of Ayrton Senna during youth. Since he joined Mclaren just like the latter, several journalists and fans wished him to replicate Senna's career of success. Which was not a good wish, since Senna unfortunately died in a fatal crash.

Other examples

• Hybristophilia (a paraphilia in which women are attracted to violent criminals) is often called "Bonnie and Clyde syndrome". Ironically, unlike most hybristophiliacs (whose relationships usually end in Domestic Abuse and/or death), Bonnie and Clyde themselves had a quite happy relationship. Also, Bonnie and Clyde were both criminals, in contrast to most hybristophiliacs who simply admire their violent partner from the sidelines.
• Back in the older days of GameFAQs, the old administator, CJayC, compared notorious message board Life, the Universe, and Everything to "a cancer" due to its tendency to invade other boards and cause general mayhem wherever it goes. LUE was quick to point out that "there's no cure for cancer", which briefly became the message board's motto.
• The name of the Oedipus Complex comes from a Greek myth featuring a man who killed his father then married his mother. The mythological Oedipus actually didn't suffer from Oedipus complex: he was abandoned at birth (because of a prophecy saying he would commit both those heinous acts) and adopted. Once adult, he killed a man he encountered while travelling, then married the queen of a city he helped to saved, and learned those two strangers were his biological parents years later. When Oedipus and his mother learned the truth, the mother is Driven to Suicide, and Oedipus gouged out his own eyes. The name for the Distaff Counterpart, Electra complex, isn’t any better. Electra did kill her mother (or at least help her brother to) but there’s no (stated) element of Parental Incest in the story and in fact Electra’s father was dead before she killed her mother...because the whole motive for Orestes and Electra to kill Clytemnestra was that she killed Agamemnon.
• When Reginald Hudlin had the Black Panther and Storm of the X-Men married (pissing off many fans), Joe Quesada gave it the heads up, and called it the Marvel Comics equivalent of "Prince Charles and Princess Diana". The thing is, Princess Diana was believed to be trapped a loveless marriage, separated in 1993, had a romantic fling with Dodi al-Fayed, heir to Harrods owner Mohammed al-Fayed, before the couple were killed in a car crash after being zealously hounded by paparazzi. Maybe Joe's trying to tell us something here...
• During the final days of the infamous biotech firm Theranos (in which it finally came to light that their technology never worked and they had committed fraud on a massive scale), CEO Elizabeth Holmes bought a puppy to serve as their mascot. She named the puppy Balto, after a legendary Alaskan sled-dog that in 1925 trekked 600 miles from Nenana to Nome carrying medicine to fight a diphtheria outbreak. Balto was clearly supposed to be an analogy for Theranos' current struggles. However, according to Time, Balto only completed the last leg of the trip and got all the credit for carrying the medicine into town while another dog, Togo, who ran 261 miles and saved his driver and the dogs at one point, was ignored. To add insult to injury, she routinely claimed that this puppy (which was very obviously a husky) was a wolf, playing into her reputation for dishonesty.
  Nick Bilton: Holmes had used Balto as a metaphor for her vision for Theranos. In reality, it was almost too apt. Balto represented Holmes’s own shallow desire to be famous and take credit for something that wasn’t true.
• In The American Civil War, Robert E. Lee had copies of Les Misérables given to all the officers of the Confederacy, because he thought it symbolized their cause. Now, if you've ever read the book/seen the musical/watched one of the many film adaptations/read a synopsis online so you could look smart by knowing the plot and understanding allusions to it without having to read it, you know that the June Uprising was an absolute failure. All but one of the rebels die, the barricades fall after one day, the failed revolt didn't lead to any changes in government, and Les Amis d'ABC didn't even take anyone down with them. Fittingly, the Confederacy lost the war. The same applies to protesters who use "Do You Hear the People Sing?", Les Amis' Angry Mob Song, as their Protest Song. For extra points, Victor Hugo was famously anti-slavery and even wrote a pamphlet against the execution of John Brown (whom Lee helped arrest).
• Ayn Rand said, "In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win." However, some substances that are poisonous in large quantities are harmless or even necessary for life in smaller quantities. A good example of this is sodium.
• At his trial for multiple murders, John Wayne Gacy's defense team argued that he suffered from split personality disorder, comparing Gacy to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Gacy's lawyers apparently made this argument based on the popular assumption that Jekyll has neither awareness nor control over Hyde's crimes in the book. The prosecutor then read the book and, as he pointed out in his closing arguments, realized that not only is Jekyll aware of Hyde's evil acts, but he keeps taking the potion specifically because he enjoys said acts. The jury then sentenced Gacy to death.

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