Forget the Whatabouts, False Parallels Between Trump And Biden
Tu quoque is the best way to describe my reactions over the Republicans’ self-serving, bloviating anger about the revelations involving President Biden’s classified documents.
Other words and phrases that explain my own repulsion at the Republicans’ repulsion include whataboutism, false equivalence, wronger than wrong and then the old reliable, hypocrisy.
The discovery of the Biden documents has created a virtual Republican feeding frenzy.
Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the newest chair of the House Oversight Committee, is hot on the trail of Biden and votes over the disgraceful discovery of a dozen classified documents at Biden’s former office and in his home. The documents were from Biden’s time as vice president, and included a “small” number located in a former office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania, with another set found in the garage of his residence and six pages in a room adjacent to the garage.
After the discovery, Biden notified the National Archives and voluntarily turned over the documents, which is what you’re supposed to do. Contrast that to ex-president trump’s lies and refusal to turn over hundreds of top secret documents, including some with nuclear information, that he claimed were his and that he took from the White House and had stored willy nilly at his Mar-a-Lago castle.
Republicans claim a double standard with how Biden’s handling of classified documents is being treated compared to how trump has been treated. It is classic false equivalent.
Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, sent letters Garland requesting a classified briefing about the classified documents in Biden’s files. Smelling blood, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, has started a probe under the Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by Jordan. And also not to be left out, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, has demanded “all classified documents which were discovered in the garage of President Biden’s home in Delaware & an assessment of the risk to national security if those classified documents were to be exposed in public or foreign adversary.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., indignantly asked “Where’s the raid of Biden’s garage?” Scalise probably understands that the FBI acquired a search warrant signed by a federal judge before it went to Mar-a-Lago to look for secret documents that trump had taken. More classic false equivalents.
Trump left the White House with hundreds of documents and refused to give them up while Biden found a handful of documents and voluntarily turning them over to the federal government. There is no real comparison but these kinds of arguments ignore orders of magnitude. A false equivalence, otherwise known as comparing apples and oranges, is a type of false logic in which a person draws an equivalence between two things based on the presence of a few shared features when those two things are not alike in the relevant respects.
The arguments over the proven human contribution to climate change are often presented as false comparisons.
“Many scientists believe that climate change is happening and is caused by humans, but there are those who disagree and think it’s a hoax. So we don’t really know and it’s reasonable to believe either way.”
Or the argument over gun controls.
“We can’t ban guns just because they can be used to hurt people. After all, cars can be used to hurt people, so if we ban guns then we would have to ban cars too!”
Trump is under investigation by a special prosecutor appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland. And in an obviously politically motivated pandering to a false equivalent, Garland has named a special investigator to look into Biden and the documents even though the situations are clearly different with trump warranting an investigation and nothing of the sort is necessary regarding Biden.
To help clear up this sinful episode, in the name of bogus transparency, Comer has asked the White House to release logs of visitors to Biden’s home in Delaware.
White House visitor logs, also known as the White House Worker and Visitor Entry System (WAVE), are the guestbook records of individuals visiting the White House to meet with the President of or other White House officials. Visitors logs, however, are not required and have never been kept for a president’s private residence.
“Given the serious national security implications, the White House must provide the Wilmington residence’s visitor log,” Comer wrote to Biden’s chief of staff. “As Chief of Staff, you are head of the Executive Office of the President and bear responsibility to be transparent with the American people on these important issues related to the White House’s handling of this matter.”
Comer, curiously, has never inquired about logs of visitors to Mar-a-Lago and said he wasn’t interested in them. Trump has never released logs of visitors to Mar-a-Lago or the White House.
“I don’t feel like we need to spend a whole lot of time investigating President Trump because the Democrats have done that for the past six years,” Comer said in a very disingenuous way.
There is no law requiring making visitor logs to the White House public but since Biden took office in January 2022, he has released monthly reports on visitors. To date, 209,950 records have been posted.
For his part, during his two terms in office, Obama posted 5.99 million rows of data on White House visitors that were viewed 471,000 times and downloaded more than 10,000 times as of the page’s final update on Dec. 30, 2016.
The visitor logs made public contain 28 fields of data, including the date and time of the appointment, type of access the visitor received, and a description of the visitors.
Throughout his reign of terror, trump refused to give up his visitor logs. A March 6, 2017, letter to trump from eight Democratic senators urged the then-president to release the visitor logs and said that “continuing President Obama’s transparency policies would help dispel concerns that the wealthy and the well-connected have unfair access to your white house.”
In 2017, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the National Security Archive and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University sued the trump administration for access to the logs, arguing that the public had a right to know who interacted with the president at the private property that Trump often refers to as “the winter White House.”
Taxpayers were billed at least $1,092 for stays at Mar-a-Lago in 2017, the Washington Post reported. Trump earned $37.2 million from Mar-a-Lago in 2016, according to financial disclosure forms. The public has a right to know who visited trump.
A federal judge ruled that trump had to turn over the Mar-a-Lago records to the government watchdog groups.
In response, the watchdog groups were given a list of 22 Japanese officials who had joined their country’s prime minister at the property during a February trip. The groups got the same response to their request for information about visitors to the White House and Trump Tower. No way, trump said.
In February, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered trump to release White House visitors records sought by the Democratic-led congressional panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, deadly attack on the Capitol by a mob of trump’s supporters.
If anything, the congressional Democrats are creative. In 2017, they introduced the “Making Access Records Available to Lead American Government Openness Act,” or “MAR-A-LAGO Act,” which would require Trump to disclose visitors at places where he “regularly conducts official business” within 90 days. The act was approved by the House but, the Republican majority in the Senate ignored it and the bill died.
“The American people need to know who has access to the White House if we’re going to ‘drain the swamp’. So far, all we’ve seen from the President is murk,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., one of the bill’s sponsors. “His Administration has stonewalled congressional requests for information about his advisors and appointees’ conflicts of interest. Dark money groups are spending millions on campaigns to confirm his controversial nominees for the Cabinet and Supreme Court. He joins top Administration officials to mingle with the ultra-rich at his ‘Winter White House’ and won’t say who paid $200,000 for the privilege. Maintaining sensible transparency policies would help dispel concerns that the wealthy and the well-connected have unfair access to the Trump White House. If he won’t adopt that policy himself, Congress should require it.”
Back to Tu quoque, which is a discussion technique to discredit the opponent by attacking the opponent’s personal behavior and actions as being inconsistent with their argument. For example, it is possible to justify support for Politician B, who has done something wrong, by pointing to the misstteps of others. “Yes, Politician B did do this-or-that immoral thing, but then again so do other politicians. So what’s the big deal?”
False balance, also called “bothsidesism,” is a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports. Journalists may present evidence and arguments out of proportion to the actual evidence for each side.
False balance in reporting on science issues has included human-caused climate change versus natural climate variability, the health effects of tobacco, the alleged relation between Thimerosal and autism, alleged negative side effects of the HPV vaccine and evolution versus intelligent design.
Another common term in the universe of political double speak is “Whataboutism” or “whataboutery,” which are closely related to a “red herring” or “double standard” in which a critical question is not answered or discussed, but is met with a counter-question which expresses a counter-accusation. For example, a question is posed about how long-term unemployment is related to poverty in Germany. The whataboutism response is, “But what about the starving in Africa and Asia?”
The term originated in the United Kingdom and Ireland in the 1970s by people who defended the IRA by pointing out supposed wrongdoings of their enemy, the British.
Or why is trump being persecuted by the democrats. Whatabout Biden?
And then there is the logic of “wronger than wrong” where two errors are equated when one is clearly much worse than the other. As in comparing the hundreds of documents trump stole, including some with nuclear weapon information, with the relatively small number of papers that Biden ultimately turned in.