What about when Obama ruled?
Dems, media forget all about that
Even if you haven’t heard of whataboutism, chances are you’ve probably used it.
It is a fairly common ploy in arguments.
For example, let’s say your spouse mentions that you spend too much money on clothes, you might reply, “Well, what about that stupid X-Box you bought?”
Whataboutism is defined by Cambridge Dictionary as “the practice of answering a criticism or difficult question by attacking someone with a similar criticism or question directed at them, typically starting with the words ‘What about?'”
Like everything else, it existed long before Donald Trump appeared on the political scene.
But, call it coincidence, since January 2017 the left has had a sudden aversion to whataboutism.
Take the crisis at the border.
The left made it crystal clear that they were going to use this issue as a way to paint Trump as a soulless monster.
Remember the heartbreaking Time Magazine cover that depicted a child being separated from her mother at the border. Spoiler alert: That was very fake news.
AOC, Beto and other woke superstars of the Twittersphere have had more than their fair share of photo ops at the border fence, staring through the barbed wire with anguished eyes.
The illegal immigration issue quickly turned into an optics war against Trump.
But to anyone who has been paying attention, most of the reporting on the border crisis has been preposterous.
Mostly because it came after eight years of silence.
Even Jeh Johnson, the former secretary of Homeland Security under Obama, has been quoted as saying, “Chain link barriers, partitions, fences, cages — whatever you want to call them — were not invented on January 2017.”
They may have existed, Jeh, but they certainly weren’t getting the same amount of airtime preTrump. They weren’t being covered at all.
Sam Vinograd, who also served in the Obama administration, was discussing the border issue with Wolf Blitzer on CNN. Specifically, she was lamenting over the fact that Trump continues to bring up Obama’s blameworthiness when it comes to the crisis. After all, the cages were built under his administration in 2014.
Vinograd’s response was rich, to say the least.
“Why is Donald Trump saying that two wrongs make a right? Again, Obama wasn’t wrong, but he’s saying that because something happened under President Obama, he’s repeating it and upping the ante.”
The press is deliberately missing Trump’s point. He isn’t bringing up Obama’s role just for the sake of blaming him. The real reason he continues to bring up Barack’s past policies on immigration is because it emphasizes something bigger. It underscores the media’s massive failure.
Because if the “serious journalists” at CNN are now as offended by family separation as they claim to be, then why were they so deafeningly silent on the issue for eight years?
And rather than admitting their own culpability, the media is doubling down.
Take this laughable headline from CNN: “Yes, Obama deported more people than Trump but context is everything.”
A Republican is president. How’s that for context?
There are two possible reasons for the media’s sudden apoplexy on the border issue.
Either they failed at reporting on the border crisis during the Obama years to protect their Dear Leader’s reputation. Or they are now feigning outrage over the crisis to damage Trump’s prospect for reelection.
Actually, the answer is probably a hefty mix of both.
If you are a conservative who notices this double standard and brings it up … well, you are “seizing” or “pouncing” or “weaponizing”.
Don’t believe me? The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette illustrates this phenomenon perfectly with this headline: “Trump pounces on photo error; images of caged kids on border taken during Obama term.”
That’s the lead? Trump pounces? I’d think the story would be that the media completely messed up again and published inaccurate and or misleading information, aka fake news.
Perhaps whataboutism isn’t going to resolve our current political impasse, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable.
In fact, the past standards set by the press are worth mentioning simply as a way to hold their feet to the fire.
Democrat operatives-turned-journalists like Chuck Todd, Jake Tapper and George Stephanopoulos have every right to masquerade as objective reporters. But America likewise has the right to remind them that their reporting is not just biased now, but it was grossly insufficient then.
Because the media elite realize something about these whatabouters that they mock … the voters who remember the past administration and the media’s coverage of it, are the same voters who have the greatest reason to get out and reelect Donald J. Trump.