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marmar

(76,982 posts)
Fri Apr 30, 2021, 09:01 PM Apr 2021

Whataboutism, the last refuge for Republicans, is on the rise


Whataboutism, the last refuge for Republicans, is on the rise
Unable to defend their own views, conservatives are turning to "whataboutism" to deflect criticism

By AMANDA MARCOTTE
APRIL 30, 2021 5:01PM


(Salon) Over a year ago, and in violation of my own good advice, I got caught up in a Facebook argument with a Republican relative about Donald Trump. I don't remember what the topic was, and it hardly matters now, since the past four years was just a constant churn of Trump doing terrible stuff and his defensive voters constantly grasping for dumb excuses for why the terrible stuff wasn't actually all that terrible. What I do remember, however, is that, at one point, I linked the Washington Post's daily counter of Trump false statements — he was up to over a dozen a day by then — and demanded an explanation of why she would support such a liar. (I am not proud of myself, as noted.) She retorted with something along the lines of, "Oh, like Elizabeth Warren has never told a lie!"

Now, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is an honest politician and well-rated by PolitiFact. But all politicians have succumbed to the urge to massage the truth a time or two, and certainly I couldn't prove on the spot that Warren had a spotless record. But what was really preposterous was my relative's underlying assumption: if Warren had ever fudged the truth, then all criticism of Trump was rendered null and void.

It's this tendency to compare two unequal things that provided Trump and his supporters a blank check to have no standards at all, because, after all, the other side was hardly perfect. It's Whataboutism, the common term for a version of the tu quoque fallacy. RationalWiki explains that whataboutism is "a diversionary tactic to shift the focus off of an issue and avoid having to directly address it" by "twisting criticism back onto the critic and in doing so revealing the original critic's hypocrisy."

....(snip)....

Perhaps the most dangerous way that the right-wing addiction to whataboutism manifests is in the way it's employed after every story about cops killing Black people in incidents that should not have been deadly. Inevitably, right-wing media will settle on pointing the finger at the victim for being "no angel." Apologists for Derek Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd loved to harp on how Floyd had drugs in his system at the time. ..........(more)

https://www.salon.com/2021/04/30/whataboutism-the-last-refugee-for-republicans-is-on-the-rise/




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Whataboutism, the last refuge for Republicans, is on the rise (Original Post) marmar Apr 2021 OP
And just plain shamelessness peppertree Apr 2021 #1
its all they have pfitz59 Apr 2021 #2
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