Barr, Bee, Eagles and whataboutism

Whataboutism is a “logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent’s position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument.” Thank you, Wikipedia.

After praising ABC for dumping Roseanne Barr over a racist tweet, I was asked many times, What about Samantha Bee? The comedian had hurled the disgusting C word at Ivanka Trump.

Comparing these different cases may have been logically fraught, but the readers had a point. My short answer was: Yes, Bee should have been canned over that. It matters not that I generally share her politics. Calling someone by that word should have been a firing offense.

But let’s move to a broader consideration of acceptable commentary — or what I consider such. Invective or railing is OK. Mockery is fine and especially powerful. (Some Donald Trump fans would rather I scream in outrage than make fun of him.)

Racism is not acceptable, and it is into that abyss that Roseanne leaped. Her calling Valerie Jarrett a cross between the Muslim Brotherhood and “Planet of the Apes” was grotesquely racist and merited swift removal. Roseanne could have condemned Jarrett as corrupt or stupid. That would have qualified as opinion — inflammatory and unfair, perhaps, but within the pale.

Now, what about Bill Maher’s demand that Trump prove that he’s not the “spawn of his mother having sex with an orangutan”? Not the wittiest of remarks, but an entirely different case. Like Barr, he jokes about simian ancestry. Unlike Barr, he does it not in a racist context but in reference to Trump’s behavior and fake tan.

Because of our painful history, racism remains a more barbaric affront than misogyny. But as with race, gender is something one is born with. The C word singles out women. There are lots of obscenities related to male organs, but none matches the C word as a tool of humiliation. That Bee is female does not excuse it.

The business of Trump’s disinviting the Philadelphia Eagles, Super Bowl champions, from the White House is a very different story, but it does have a whatabout angle. One might ask why Trump took such issue with football players kneeling during the national anthem but praised Roseanne despite her having performed a comedic version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” that included scratching her crotch. The football players were quietly protesting racial injustice. Roseanne was seeking raw attention.

Complicating Trump’s denunciation of the Eagles over the kneeling issue is this: No player on the Eagles knelt or sat during the 2017 regular season. Members of other teams did. Not the Eagles. That some Eagles defended other players for kneeling was Trump’s excuse for taking back the invitation.

Of course, Trump could have praised the Eagles for not kneeling, but magnanimity is not his habit. The most plausible reason for the move was that a number of players had said they would not show. There are few things Trump likes less than empty seats in his presence. But there was also a need for distraction with the release of his lawyers’ memo confirming that Trump dictated the lie Donald Jr. used about meeting with a Vladimir Putin-allied Russian during the campaign.

It happens that whataboutism was a specialty of Soviet propaganda. Talk about the Russians’ murder of dissidents, and Russians would change the subject to the history of black lynching in America. With Russians and Trump seemingly on the same team, one could envision Russian trolls providing new whatabout arguments in the president’s service.

For all we know, they may already be at it.