Some names conveniently left out of ‘Owner’s Box’

The new bias of the Capital Gazette/ Baltimore Sun was on glaring display in the “Owner’s Box” column, “The good guys and bad guys in Ukraine” (March 24). Discerning readers will note that Armstrong Williams’ argument was underpinned by a logical fallacy sometimes called “whataboutism” or, alternatively, “two wrongs make a right,” and suffered further from a glaring bias in terms of who was — and who was not — mentioned by name.

First, Williams argues that Russian President Vladimir Putin might not be the “bad guy” because the United States has participated in and condoned ill-conceived territorial expansions and disputes.

To back this up, Williams points out that Republican President Ulysses S. Grant regretted the war with Mexico that resulted in an increase in our territory, and used Grant’s regret to suggest that Putin was not such a bad guy after all. Rather than excusing Putin, another — more defensible — way to consider this episode is that Putin should be aware of historical regrets and refrain from attacking his weaker neighbors.

Williams then goes on to discuss the ill-conceived “gratuitous 2003 war against Iraq,” a war that resulted from Republican President George W. Bush’s insistence that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. However, Williams neglects to mention Bush at all, instead charging former President Bill Clinton (who had supported the idea of a regime change in Iraq, but who was no longer in political power at the time of Bush’s war) and current President Joe Biden, one of many members of Congress who voted in favor of Bush’s initiative, but the only one Williams bothered to name.

To recap, in Williams’ world Republicans are named only when they express regret and can, therefore, be forgiven. Democrats are named even when they are only peripherally related to the atrocious decisions that — by some convoluted logic — excuse Putin’s war crimes.

— Ellen Oakes, Annapolis