As I’ve been pointing out forever, liberals don’t understand analogies, one of the most basic building blocks of logic, at least since Aristotle.
This failing has been on display at MSNBC for some years now. Whenever conservatives demand that the same standards be applied to Donald Trump as are applied to Democrats, MSNBC hosts charge: “Whataboutism!”
That’s not “whataboutism.” It’s called “the rule of law.”
Whataboutism originally referred to the Soviet Union’s practice of covering up the multiple failures of communism — long food lines, shoddy apartments, no electricity, planes crashing, etc. — by saying, But what about the crime rate in the United States? What about the civil rights abuses? What about Watergate?
In other words, whataboutism consists of changing the subject to some random failing of one’s opponent.
[A friend traveling in Russia at the time reported that the Soviets’ saturation coverage of the Watergate hearings did not have its intended effect. Instead of wowing Russians with the deficiencies of capitalism, actual Russians’ main question to my friend about the hearings was: “Do all Americans have such nice shoes?”]
By contrast, analogies, especially in politics and the law, are used to vindicate the principle that like cases should be treated alike.
Liberals hate that. They refuse to accept generally applicable rules. The only question for them is: Whose ox is gored? If it’s Trump, he’s guilty, no further information is needed. But if it’s a lefty who’s done the same thing — or 20 times worse — it’s: How dare you question this man’s character?
On MSNBC, Mika Brzezinski said that equating Trump’s possession of classified documents with Joe Biden’s possession of classified documents was a classic case of whataboutism. Those aren’t even like cases — they’re identical ones.
Stephanie Ruhle said the same thing about comparisons of the Trump indictments to the Biden family’s corruption, such as foreign interests funneling millions of dollars to the president’s son, Hunter Biden, for nonexistent services. Whataboutism!
Mehdi Hasan, failing to grasp that whataboutism — at a bare minimum — requires some sort of comparison, called any mention of Hunter Biden whataboutism.
A classic example of liberals’ situational view of justice happened to another friend after he got picked to serve on a jury while at Yale law school. When his fellow law students found out it was a rape case, they demanded that he find the defendant guilty.
Yes, but you don’t know the facts of the case.
What facts?
The defendant is black.
You have to acquit!
Today, liberals are using their refusal to treat like cases alike to denounce Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles in order to protect freeways, police cars, citizens, federal agents and buildings from violent mobs.
The New York Times called Trump’s order “both ahistoric and based on false pretenses.” Appalled that he, the president of the United States, had sent the Guard “on his own volition,” the paper noted that “the National Guard is typically brought into American cities … when local authorities require additional resources or manpower.”
The word “typically” does a lot of work in that sentence. The two most celebrated instances of a president using U.S. troops against tumultuous citizens both occurred in direct opposition to the states’ governors.
In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower deployed the 101st Airborne against American citizens in Little Rock, Arkansas, after Bill Clinton’s mentor, Gov. Orval Faubus, had called out the National Guard to prevent nine black students from entering the local segregated high school. Eisenhower sent federal troops to ensure that the nine could enter the school.
In other words, Eisenhower’s order pitted the president’s troops against the governor’s troops, strongly indicating that the governor had not requested them.
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy federalized the National Guard to remove a sitting governor from the “schoolhouse door.” Alabama Gov. George Wallace had vowed to stand at the school and physically block the entry of two black students. (Fun fact: Twenty years later, Wallace won a fourth term as governor with the overwhelming support of black voters.)
How does the Times deal with the fact that these sacralized events involved presidents deploying troops against the wishes of governors?
The paper simply cites one of the cases, as if correcting a perjurious statement, then quickly moves on with a non sequitur:
The last time this presidential authority was used over a governor’s objections was when John F. Kennedy overruled the governor of Alabama and sent troops to desegregate the University of Alabama in 1963. Supporters of states’ rights and segregation howled at the time and, in the usual corners, are still howling about it.
Who cares if anyone is howling? Besides being irrelevant, it’s also false. No one is howling. American citizens’ rights were being violated.
The threshold for sending federal troops has — in Trump’s case — grown to colossal proportions.
Former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s dumber younger brother in California, District Court Judge Charles Breyer, countermanded Trump’s deployment of troops to L.A. on the grounds that Justice Department lawyers had “not identified a violent, armed, organized, open and avowed uprising against the government as a whole.”
According to liberals, what constitutes a “violent, armed, organized, open and avowed uprising against the government as a whole” is hurting the feelings of 11 black students. (Also violating their constitutional right to enroll in specific schools.)
Dumb Breyer conceded that the administration had “pointed to several instances of violence” in L.A., including:
“Some protesters threw ‘concrete chunks, bottles of liquid, and other objects at Federal Protective Service officers guarding a parking lot gate’”;
“[S]ome protesters attempted ‘to use large rolling commercial dumpsters as a battering ram’”;
“Some of the protesters used ‘chairs, dumpsters, and other items as weapons’”;
“Two federal buildings were vandalized and sustained minor damage.”
OK, so apart from all that it was mostly peaceful.
In liberals’ wildest imaginations, nothing this destructive ever happened in Little Rock or Tuscaloosa. No cars were set on fire, no buildings vandalized, no concrete chunks thrown, no dumpsters used as battering rams.
The world-shaking, democracy-ending violent uprisings “against the government as a whole” in Little Rock and Tuscaloosa mostly consisted of verbal threats, racist taunts, spitting and the throwing of eggs, sticks and rocks. (Also mean chants: “Two, four, six, eight! We don’t want to integrate!”)
But Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy thought that was enough to deploy federal troops in express defiance of the states’ governors. So does history.
Liberals can’t grasp that Trump’s deployment of troops is a fortiori constitutional, necessary and, indeed, heroic because …
ANALOGIES SECTION:
Aristotle is to logic, as:
a) Elephants are to rhinoceroses;
b) Boats are to ships;
d) Liberals are to blithering idiocy and blank incomprehension.
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