"Look, when there’s no need for your rhetoric not to be lazy, you land on lazy rhetoric. If you can carry the day — at least with those who you’re most worried about convincing — with little effort or logical consistency, why bother putting in the effort or assembling that consistency? If your target audience hasn’t even heard the nuances that undercut your point, why bother rebutting those nuances?"
Writes Philip Bump in "The impressively weak effort to ‘whatabout’ Biden’s classified documents" (WaPo).
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55 comments:
This kind of language happens when people are torn between two ideals. In this case they include (1) rabid hatred of things Trump, and (2) wishing away the flaws and evils of your own team. These words are particularly common among people raised in a religion but who don't believe the teachings. There brains scream "NO," but they cannot emotionally break away from the only team they've ever known.
Some will live in an unresolved state for the rest of their lives as Janissaries, many will drift away from the team and become apathetic, and some will switch to actively hate and fight the hypocrisy of the team. They need a new leader and fresh team to break away, but it'll eventually happen.
Confession by projection.
I used to wonder if Washington journalists ever felt embarrassment for their over-the-top efforts to protect and promote the Democratic party and its talking points. But after a while one realizes that they're just show-offs - they want to let the employees of the Party know that they're better at the job than the people who manufacture the talking points. It's not embarrassment but pride over a job well done. They take the Party's crap and turn it into candy for the rubes.
Where, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) demanded to know, are the visitor logs from Biden’s personal residence? To which the White House responded, in short: It’s a house.
Well, sure. That's a big part of the reason why it's illegal to keep classified documents there.
Show me a liberal talking about "nuance" and I'll show you a liberal who's been caught out.
I'm guessing, without given WaPo a click, that the "whataboutism" regarding Biden isn't the people trying to pass off his mishandling of classified information by pointing at Trump's lawful possession of declassified information stored in a protected vault, while others attempted to question Trump's Constitutional authority in the matter.
Who is he talking about whatabouting Biden's documents? Is it the people trying to defend Trump or the people trying to defend Biden? It's impossible to tell from this excerpt.
Logical consistency is important, but clarity is too. Of course, it's WaPo, so I'm not surprised he's simply employing another tactic to defend Biden from accountability while pretending what Trump did is inexcusable (while those of us trying to be objective continue to wait for evidence, any evidence at all, that Trump did something wrong).
Over the years, Bump has proven to be a chump.
It’s all about running interference for his masters.
The WaPo is a reliable purveyor of regime propaganda, so is the New York Times, and nobody else matters. They bought and paid for the Drudge Report, rendering it irrelevant. I am pretty sure that the real problem that our government has with TikTok is its inability to subvert and control it, as they have YouTube and Twitter and Facebook.
My version of whataboutism is that Trump and Biden are narcissist lying sacks of shit and our nation would be far better off if both were in our rear-view mirror.
The problem isn’t that Joe was careless with classified documents. The problem is that Joe has been bribed by foreign countries. That’s a beam in his eye. The docs are a mote.
And, of course, the Fifth Estate refuses to do its constitutional duty and just covers for this guy.
Biden was bribed by Burisma and China. How has that affected foreign policy?
What passes for political analysis in the WaPo is astonishingly weak.
You guess correctly, Leland @7:13am. Of course the real "whataboutism" is those defending Biden by saying "Trump was worse!" I was naively hoping the WaPo was actually experiencing a moment of honesty, but no....
And since the piece is behind a paywall, if you want to read it without a subscription, this site works: Remove Paywall
A few obvious points against Biden that Bump doesn't address:
1. Trump was President, and had authority to declassify.
2. Trump's documents were in a much more secure location.
3. Every President has kept documents, with no resulting FBI raid.
And then there was Hillary....
Hunter is paid $50k per month by a Ukrainian company. The US has spent $20b on the defense of Ukraine; much of that in cash. Was some of that $20b sent back to Joe Biden in crypto? Has Navy Jean Biden been paid in crypto? What about Jim Biden?
Crypto was invented for criminals. There is no doubt in my mind that the Bidens all have huge crypto accounts.
The correct understanding of "whataboutism" is that it is a illogical changing of the subject.
If Person A did Action X, then it is logical to point out that Person B likewise did Action X.
For example, Yes, Trump took secret documents home, but Biden likewise took secret documents home.
Pointing that similarity out is logical.
However, liberals dismiss that logical comparison by calling it "whataboutism".
======
An example of real "whataboutism" is this.
Yes, Trump took secret documents home, but what about Biden lying all the time?
======
When I was in Soviet Russia, I heard this kind of mockery of whataboutism in Soviet propaganda:
Yes, there is some poverty in the Soviet Union, but what about lynchings of Negroes in the United States?
This kind of language happens when people are torn between two ideals. In this case they include (1) rabid hatred of things Trump, and (2) wishing away the flaws and evils of your own team.
I am not sure that the author wishes that the flaws and evils of his party would go away - if Mar-A-Lago had never happened, would WaPo even have reported on the discovery of classified documents (sorry, I mean "documents having classified markings") in Biden's garage? Would they care at all, much less wish that Biden hadn't done it?
No one on the left cares about Biden family corruption. or any corruption on team D.
They hate Trump and everyone with an R - the collective left are all willfully blind to corruption on their pathetic corrupt team.
Biden supporters
Let me explain these "nuanced" differences that mean one man should go to jail and one man should be "a little embarrassed" for breaking the same law.
Stupid people are easily convinced by weak rhetoric. Explains the Democrat party right there!
That is so funny. I really thought the article would be a criticism of Democratic attempts to push off Biden's problems, by bringing up Trump's problems. Turns out it's the other way round! Heh.
Of course, the article, like all such articles, never mentions the most important difference between Trump and Biden: Trump had full power to declassify all of these documents before he took them, says he did, and no one has any way to prove that he didn't do that.
News flash: The Democratic establishment has decided that Donald Trump's classified document issue is no longer an issue, and they've decided that Joe Biden is not the best candidate for President in 2024. No one needs to push off Trump's document issue any more, because they've decided it's embarrassing for everyone.
This document kerfuffle is a D operation to get rid of Biden. Whataboutism doesn't apply, because no one really wants to defend Biden. They can still give Trump a shiner while tossing Biden on the ash heap. Why would you run Biden when you could run (sigh) Michelle?
You think Kamala is a problem? They'll just ignore her. No one likes her. They'll make her Secretary of Transportation as a consolation prize.
Clueless hacks like Bump are so far out of the loop they think Biden is supposed to be defended. Result? Additional smokescreen for removal of Biden.
Why is Merrick Garland suggesting that he made a decision to not have the FBI investigate Biden's home for classified documents because the FBI would "compromise" the investigation? If the FBI isn't investigating, then what federal bureau of investigation is investigating the Bidens and might get compromised by the FBI?
With all the effort to try to elect/cover for this clusterfuck of an administration I'm compelled to ask a question. Just what is the end game? Are the MLK files intact or missing? Something big is happening behind the scenes.
DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKNESS!
:James K @7:29
1.
2.
3.
Bingo.
Lots of words spent, for something as simple as 1,2,3
#4 is being ignored, pertains to #3
Democrats have weaponized the DoJ. A non=political DoJ would have known Presidents taking classified documents is as common as sunrise. But Biden and Garland are intent on Punishing Trump. One because Trump is Trump. 2, Just like a head on pike, a warning sign to the next outsider, non-swamp denizan, "this will be your future".
That Truth would not have required the Biden mess being made public, even though the VP cant declassify, this doesn't rise to the level of investigation.
Hunter's Laptop. Influence peddling. For years.
That's the difference. Philip.
I clicked and read until about the sixth paragraph, where Bump claims That Trump compares unfavorably to Biden in his "handling" of the documents, apparently trying to convince readers that a Delaware crack house is preferable to a locked storage room guarded by the Secret Service.
"The impressively weak effort to ‘whatabout’ Biden’s classified documents"
Accusing Biden critics of whataboutism is just a version of the evasive Republicans-pounce trope.
The impressively weak effort to defend impressively weak Biden at any cost (until all Dems suddenly agree that he must be dumped) shows the strength of Dem MSM hegemony. They will say anything at any time to protect the regime without any shame and of course without any fear of accountability.
By the way, have any late-night geniuses turned the Corvette defense into actual jokes?
That lying dog-faced pony soldier!
The Trump comparisons are off base.
There are junior military members who have been fired for taking pictures in sensitive areas. Careers terminated, publicly. For the slightest potential risk of exposing sensitive information.
Then there are VPs and Secretaries of State who are publicly exposed to have completely lax standards, to have illegally and wrongfully taken SCIF-controlled information out of SCIFs. And then handled it correctly.
And then be given a casual wave of the hand and moved on.
Trump completely mis-handled his classified documents situation as far as I can see.
But that doesn't mean anything for Biden.
I notice that more and more, the stories about ill-gotten classified documents are placing both Trump and Biden in the same group, and then discussing the 'problem'. 'Joey Papers' is on the 'outs'.
What-about-isn’t
As someone stated above, the differences between Trump and Biden is this:
Trump was POTUS and the right to declassify any document and see any classified document. NOt only that, he acted like Obama and Bush, by giving the national archives a list of the documents he had AND stored them in a secure place. He even let the FBI examine the storage place the documents were stored for security.
VP Biden had NO Right to declassify documents. He had no right to take documents to his home. He did NOT tell the right people that he had the documents. And he did not secure the documents.
Again, Hillary held thousands of top secret emails in an unsecured server. Thousands of them ended up on the hard drive of Anthony Wiener's computer. And the FBI didn't care. And the WaPo didn't care.
Defending Biden is not as fun as defending the Obamessiah, but Dems will still gladly do it. He could pass out at the SOTU address and his media simps would still say 4 more years.
For a what-about to be decent you have to have an about to match.
What is it called in courtroom strategery? Don’t go delving into evidence that could help the other side.
What-about Trump, helps Trump. Let me spell it out. Trump Jr was not living at Mar-a-lago with secret docs nearby, while at the same time engaging with shadowy foreign figures raking in millions and apparently passing padre Trump a cut of the proceeds.
Remember that time when retired NYT reporter Linda Greenfield came to Althouse and saw what Ann and the rest of us had to say about her reporting?
I only wish that every time Ann posts an NYT or WaPo story, that the reporters were compelled by the editor to read the post and all the comments.
If it weren’t for the projection in their propaganda, it would be harder to figure out what is going on. It’s plain now they are aware of the fact that MSNBC viewers, for example, have never heard inconvenient counter arguments, so addressing them is not only a waste of time, but may in fact, expose the audience to dangerous ideas, dangerous to the Democratic Party’s prospects.
This is the same logic used in impeachment and the J6 hearings, trust the power of DNC and FBI control over what people get to hear.
It's a nothing thing with both Biden and Trump, pumped up to make it news. Everybody at that level retains classified keepsakes.
Millions handle classified stuff so you put in control numbers and audits to make sure everything is where it's supposed to be, just because multiplying the risk by millions otherwise makes it important. With only a half dozen people every four years the risk remains essentially zero, so those people exempt themselves from the system.
Hillary Clinton had her attorneys review 66,000 emails and then had them delete 33,000 of them and hand the rest of the ones that didn't incriminate her over to the FBI, which was only too happy to allow her to do this.
Neither she, nor they, were ever jailed for destroying evidence. James Comey could have arrested her. Donald Trump could have declared her a threat to our national security and sent her to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
That is the origin of all of this.
Nothing is going to change until Hillary Clinton is brought to justice for her crimes. The fact that Comey the corrupt cop let her loose doesn't change anything. She can still be arrested and she should be. Until then, all bets are off.
Talk about missing the mark invoking "whataboutism," especially embarrassing for a "journalist" like Bump.
With Biden and the documents, for comparison purposes, the interesting facts make it more of a who-when-where-why- and how-aboutism."
Is this more of the "It's wrong when Trump does it because Trump is incomparably evil" stuff? "We know that Biden's a good guy, so it's not wrong when he does it?"
Brian Stelter used to do this sort of spill clean-up and damage control on CNN. Now he's landed on his feet: Harvard and Davos.
It gets fishier and fishier every day. I don't trust ANY of these Obamaites. THEY destroyed America so he could transform it to what we have today. They all belong in Gitmo.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/01/biden-attorney-dana-ramus-obama-officiate-wedding-departed-white-house-right-senators-grassley-johnson-found-non-government-email-assigned-joe-biden/
What does Obama know, and when did he learn it?? (or is HE in on it??)
I think the point here is that Philip Bump is pointing to exactly how the press is "defending" Biden. I cannot get at Bump's article but over at Memeorandum I found an article which, is in the Memeorandum discussion section on Philip Bump's article, making it an an example of the "an impressively weak effort to whatabout".
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/3814579-did-biden-just-give-trump-a-get-out-of-jail-free-card/ (not behind a paywall)
https://www.memeorandum.com/230117/p61#a230117p61
Here's a quote from that article:
"... more than a few liberals on cable TV [are] saying that Biden obviously didn’t hand carry the documents to his garage; that some flunky probably brought the classified documents to Wilmington; and that it wasn’t Biden’s fault because he knew nothing — the Sgt. Schultz of “Hogan’s Heroes” defense. ... it’s the only time Biden supporters have said — out loud, anyway — that the president has no idea what is going on right around him."
'The President has no idea what's going on' IS an impressively weak defense. Moreover, it's what the Republicans have been saying for years.
And what is being proposed by the Dem media? Equity. Investigate both, let both off.
"Here’s an idea: Let the special counsels conclude their investigations of the president and the former president. Let the attorney general, who has the final say in whether or not to prosecute, make public the findings. Tell both Donald Trump and Joe Biden that they can’t do what they did; that they were not merely sloppy but reckless. And then call it a day with no prosecutions."
And look at the lazy writing in the article. For example, the article says: "Tell them they can’t do what they did." That's a lazy use of "can" which ignores the difference between "can" and "may." They may not (are not allowed to, should not) do what they did. They can (are able to) do it because they did do it. But that difference is a nuance, that's just grammar or meaning. Dem partisans, busy preening themselves on how brilliantly credentialed they are, won't know or care about actual facts, let alone the actual meaning of a sentence. We would say that. But the point is a Dem is saying it. It might signal throwing Biden under the bus. More likely, it signals throwing reality out with the bathwater down the drain is OK, Boomers.
I see no mention, in all of this hysteria, of Daniel Moynahan's book about the over-classifying that goes on in DC without justification, Titled "Secrecy: The American Experience"
I wonder how many million pages classified "Top Secret" really contain legitimate secrets and how many are ass covering by bureaucrats ?
VP Biden is like SoS Clinton are like Pres Obama.
There may not be "visitor logs" as that may be defined by the WH but there will be documents and other evidence relating to those coming on the property while the President is there. Any decent lawyer would know how to frame the document request.
Goebbles would envy this work.
It seems like that 'they' are saying that because Trump was under investigation, and did not simply hand over legally held documents, that a warrant and raid was necessary, somehow indicates defacto guilt.
So, if a federal authority wants to come into my house, but I refuse, and they have to get a warrant, I am somehow guilty of covering something up?
Further, have those who have obtained the documents from trump demonstrated that those documents were held illegally? (ah, of course, the BS 'ongoing investigation').
MikeR: "That is so funny. I really thought the article would be a criticism of Democratic attempts to push off Biden's problems, by bringing up Trump's problems. Turns out it's the other way round! Heh.
Of course, the article, like all such articles, never mentions the most important difference between Trump and Biden: Trump had full power to declassify all of these documents before he took them, says he did, and no one has any way to prove that he didn't do that"
Shhhh! You'll upset Earnest Prole with that kind of talk.
Biden's screwup is simply another opportunity to pile on the democratical express to railroad Trump. Get with the program MikeR!
Overclassification is a real problem. Bureaucratic ass-covering overclassification, in the "oh no, we can't let people know *that* happened" sense, is explicitly forbidden by the regulations, so we're certain that will never happen, right? Right?
At least equally common is the difficulty of figuring out what classification level to use for a given document or piece of a document. It's always safer to just say, "system high"--this came from a system that's TS//SCI/H, so that's how I'll classify it, because otherwise I'll have to understand and apply the classification guide, and that's really hard (only rarely are those documents in anything like plain English) and therefore error-prone. Overclassification is better both for me and for the country, in the short term. In the long term...well, who's paying attention to that? But it is at least potentially damaging both to good governance and to innovation.
On multiple occasions, Kathy Chung coordinated with Hunter Biden to schedule meetings with former University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann.
"VP will be meeting with President Gutmann on Friday, Jan. 8, 11:00 am, at the Lake house in DE," Chung wrote in an email to Hunter Bidenin January 2016. "VP hopes that you will be able to join him for this meeting. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!!"
In April 2016. He suggested in a follow-up message to his business partner Schwerin that he may need to reschedule a meeting with the prime minister of the Ivory Coast. Hunter added that "the Guttman mtg is a must attend for me per Dad."
https://thekylebecker.substack.com/p/mystery-woman-questioned-on-moving
Love this one, Hunter has been filling the bank accounts, and Joe has been spending the money.
In an e-mail on April 12, 2018, to his assistant Katie Dodge, Hunter complains that he has been “shut out” of one his Wells Fargo bank accounts.
“Too many cooks in the kitchen. Too many profile changes and such. Happened 10 days ago too . . . My dad has been using most lines on this account which I’ve through the gracious offerings of Eric have paid for past 11 years.”
“Eric” is presumably Eric Schwerin. - NY Post
Trump completely mis-handled his classified documents situation as far as I can see.
How? In what way?
If your target audience hasn’t even heard the nuances that undercut your point, why bother rebutting those nuances?"
Which would be the guiding light to why the Left fights so hard to censor the right: Their arguments are shit, they KNOW their arguments are shit, but they'd rather censor and be lazy, than try to come up with arguments and positions that aren't total shit
Yes, there is some poverty in the Soviet Union, but what about lynchings of Negroes in the United States?
In Soviet Russia, Negroes lynch you...!
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