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.

For the Record: Tracey on War

Via Wonkette.

I guess that qualifies me, as somebody who's been pretty loudly opposed to every US war since well before Tracey was born, to decide who gets to be taken seriously and who doesn't, and I'd like to say if watching the Ukraine story has suddenly made you understand... pic.twitter.com/vwN09muzB2

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) April 4, 2022

What I don't get is people like Tracey who've been pretending to be anti-war all this time and it turns out they're just anti-American.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) April 4, 2022

I completely forgot Tracey was complaining about unfairness to Russia way back five years ago, that time Maxine Waters beat him up.

Here's the full @MaxineWaters @mtracey interview. Sensitive viewers, you are warned. pic.twitter.com/gyU2pw6FdD

— Tommy moderna-vaX-Topher (@tommyxtopher) June 3, 2017

Note on Whataboutism

Protesters in Venceslas Square, Prague. Photo by AFP-Yonhap via The Korea Times. It's getting very international.

 

Wild day yesterday, starting with the radio news that President Zelenskyy had rejected a Russian request to start peace negotiations in Belarus (Belarus, he said, was contributing to the Russian invasion and wasn't a neutral country) and going on to the news that he'd changed his mind after a call from President Lukashenka assuring him that Belarus would not be sending any missiles, planes, or helicopters across the border as long as the talks went on: 

“I will say frankly that I do not really believe in the outcome of this meeting, but let them try to make sure that no citizen of Ukraine has any doubt that I, as a president, did not try to stop the war,” Mr. Zelensky said.

Meanwhile, Russia's diplomatic isolation continued to grow: Germany announced that it would reverse decades-old policy and start contributing lethal assistance to Ukraine—antitank missiles and Stingers—and the chorus of countries ready to cut Russia out of the Swift bank transfer system grew to include Japan and Hungary. Europe and Canada joined to ban Russian planes from their airspace. As I noted yesterday, important classical music figures like Putin's pal Valery Gergiev are unable to perform outside Russia; the national Polish and Swedish soccer teams are likewise refusing to play against Russia in the World Cup heats. Ukraine filed criminal charges against Russia in the International Criminal Court, and demanded Russia's expulsion from the United Nations Security Council (no, that's not going to happen). Switzerland—Switzerland!—has tossed its I-don't-know-how-many-centuries tradition of unbreakable neutrality and joined the EU in imposing financial sanctions on Russia, and may even be sending weapons. Oil monster BP is outright dumping a $25-billion stake in Rosneft:

For the Record: The Preemptive Whatabout

Via The Way of Improvement Leads Home.

Much respect and warm feelings toward attorney general nominee Merrick Garland, but I also enjoyed what looked to me like subtweeting skill in the written version of his opening statement for today's confirmation hearing:

From Merrick Garland statement https://t.co/ohDLfE38m1:

"strictly regulate communications with the White House"

That's aimed at criminal AGs Sessions and Barr and it's very welcome pic.twitter.com/cRPqoXI3ck

— Screechy Ill-Speak (@Yastreblyansky) February 21, 2021

Ted Cruz may have thought so too, because in his "questioning" at the hearing he brought in what you might call an argument by Preemptive Whatabout, where you don't wait for your opponent to give you a name before you respond with your whatabout, but rather trot it out in advance—in this case forestalling the Barr with a dig at Obama's first attorney general, Eric Holder.

We don't all love Holder a hundred percent, I realize. I personally think it's a divided legacy, with very good work in the civil rights area (including, I'll say this to the end, in his handling of the 2014-15 unaccompanied minor migrant crisis, "cages" and all, as comes clear when you compare it with Sessions and his crimes against humanity in 2017) and his very inadequate response to the crimes committed by bankers and insurers in the 2007-08 financial crisis. And I'm fond of the idea of Holder as Obama's anti-racism translator, if you know what I mean, expressing thoughts Obama didn't feel he could afford to express for himself.

But Cruz's remarks pushed me into one of those rants:

The End of Whatabout

"Meanwhile," said Trump in Louisiana on Thursday night, "the far left Democrats in Washington want to abolish the production of oil and natural gas. How do you like that idea? How about this clown, [inaudible]? He was against guns, religion and oil, and he lives in Texas. That's not going to work." I don't even know who he's talking about (it wasn't the Democratic gubernatorial candidate he'd come to attack, incumbent John Bel Edwards, who ended up winning in spite of Trump's efforts, as you've heard).  Image via Bruce Gagnon/Organizing Notes.

One way for a blogger to deal with the firehose aspect of the news these weeks is to just resign oneself to being a couple of days behind and looking for the bits that nobody's managed to pick up yet.

Thursday afternoon, 14 November, a strange commotion took place in the Oval Office while the helicopter was waiting to deliver Trump to the plane to Bossier City, Louisiana for a rally in his losing campaign to unseat Democratic governor John Bel Edwards, and it seems they were discussing the forthcoming report from FBI Inspector General Michael Horowitz on the "origins" of the Trump-Russia investigation (focusing, we're told, on the FBI's decision to put a FISC order on Trump's former "foreign policy adviser" Carter Page, Ph.D., some weeks after Page left the campaign, although the investigation had already begun, over the alarming story of the indiscreet former "foreign policy adviser" George Papadopoulos).

A lot of faithful Trumper paranoids have been looking to this report to prove to the world that the Trump-Russia investigation was actually a conspiracy among the "angry Democrats" who are naturally in charge of the FBI's counterintelligence activities to take down Trump's presidency (it had to wait for Trump to become president to go into real action, though you'd think it would be more efficient to just stop him from winning, but apparently the sinister cabal was expecting Hillary to win, like everybody else, and this conspiracy roping together the forces of the FBI, CIA, intelligence services of UK, Italy, and Australia, and possibly the White House, was just an "insurance policy"), and they've been waiting for this thing to come out with increasing excitement.

Not that any of this is going to happen. As with his report on Andrew McCabe, Horowitz will make an attempt to be pissy about some of the people Trump is after but nobody is going to be anywhere near locked up, because they didn't do anything wrong (Marcy Wheeler has suggested there may have been cut corners in the warrant on Dr. Page, but added that whatever they did has been done much more abusively to many, mostly Muslims, in recent years, and it's kind of ridiculous to single out this particular case of somebody who obviously needed to be watched and who had practically no remaining connection with the Trump campaign at this point anyway).