Annals of Whatabout

 

Ignore the psycho-freak affect and language. Note that like all Trumpers, 6 years on they’re still mimicking the language of the Russia scandal in some kind of grand neener-neener gotcha. Collusion, election interference, etc. https://t.co/HXnoJYFXkP

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) September 1, 2023

I've been noticing that too, without as clear a sense of what it was I was noticing. It's just pervasive, especially in the attacks on "weaponization" echoing the word as Rep. Adam Schiff introduced it in 2019:

“Bill Barr, on the president’s behalf, is weaponizing the Justice Department to go after the president’s enemies,” Schiff said on ABC‘s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” “He’s demonstrating once again that he is merely a tool of the president, the president’s hand, not the representative of the American people.”

And I think there may be a reason, beyond the usual catchall that "it's always projection". It's a rhetorical trick of some kind they're playing, and a form of "the tribute vice pays to virtue": they're using this language to attack Biden and his family and his Justice Department because it was effective when applied to Trump.

Which may sound a little ridiculous, because obviously the attack on Trump over his Russia connections, from Crossfire Hurricane through the first impeachment, or his persecution of a Nixon-style enemies list, weren't effective enough. They didn't get him expelled from the presidency or imprisoned. It's not obvious what role they may have played in deciding the 2020 election, which was won on the basis of "negative partisanship"; Biden voters hated Trump more than Trump voters hated Biden, but we don't know what they hated him for; whether it was for being a criminal or being a fascist, or having bad Twitter manners. The most significant thing arising from the statistics, if I'm remembering rightly, was the substantial number of Trump voters who thought Trump was a criminal and didn't care. Anyhow that's what I mean by "effective"—the investigations and their publicity, inadequate and waffly though it was, really did convince large numbers of people that Trump was a criminal, only a lot of voters didn't think that was a good reason to vote against him.

One more time, the million people who voted for Eugene V. Debs in the 1920 presidential election, when he was in the federal penitentiary for violation of the Espionage Act, probably didn't think that was a good reason to vote against him either, nor was there any movement to knock him off the ballot on the basis of the 14th Amendment Section 3, in spite of the evident belief of Messrs. Luttig and Tribe that such would have been the normal procedure. I'm not comparing Debs, who I think of as an admirable person, to Trump, who I don't. I might have voted for Debs in 1920 myself. I wouldn't have thought the 1918 anti-war speech for which he was convicted deserved a ten-year sentence. But I'd have known he was a convicted enemy aid-and-comfort giver. Why wouldn't Trump supporters think the same way about Trump a century later?—that sure he was a lawbreaker, but his crimes, aimed at saving the country from socialism and the ethnic Great Replacement, were justified? And he hadn't even really been tried for any of it, regardless of the impeachment (technically an arraignment)!

One of the most irritating things about the TV lawyers like Messrs. Luttig and Tribe who rule for us on these issues is their failure to understand this: that our opinions on politicians' crimes differ according to our opinions on the crimes themselves. Everybody knew that Bill Clinton had smoked marijuana (even if we believed he really hadn't inhaled), everybody knew that George W. Bush had defrauded the nation in his evasion of the Selective Service Act (as had young Donald Trump, memorably devoting himself for decades to the fight against STDs instead, in the trenches with the models). It wasn't a big moral deal for the voters who supported them, whether or not it should have been.

What the Trump Republicans have wanted to do with Biden, however, is different; it's not to make him look worse than their own candidate. It's just to make him look equally bad; it's to disable candidate criminality as an issue. It's to whatabout the subject right out of the debate.

Or rather, perhaps, given that Trump won't be able to stop talking about his ongoing criminal and civil cases, to force Biden into doing the same thing with whatever is going on with him (there won't be any indictments, obviously, but House committee hearings and the "impeachment inquiry" where Mrs. Taylor Greene casts around looking for some kind of plausible charges). It's to establish the principle that "they all do it" so that there's no reason to talk about it.

And it's been their plan since early 2019 (early Giuliani expeditions to Ukraine, starting June 2017, were keyed to discrediting the Ukrainian prosecution of Manafort, billed in Trump tweets as "quietly working to boost Clinton", i.e., doing the thing Russian authorities had done on Trump's behalf). 

And I don't want to go too far in the optimism direction, but if that old plan is the best they've got (as the boys in the House continue to overpromise and underdeliver on their part of it), that could be a good sign for Democrats.