In the film, The Princess Bride, the character Ingio Montoya refers to the word “inconceivable” and says to the villain, “You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Much the same can be said of the word “distraction,” as used by the Democrats.  I’ve noticed that it has become a predictable part of the left’s response to any revelation of a faux pas, crime, scandal, or other misdeed committed by one of their members.  It seems as if whenever they’re caught in the act, they attempt to deflect attention away by calling it a distraction.

They just did it again.

On July 22, President Donald Trump held a press conference in the Oval Office and accused former president Barack Obama of “treason” related to alleged 2016 election interference and urged the DOJ to investigate.  In response, Obama’s spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush issued a rare statement, calling the claims “ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction,” dismissing them as an effort to shift focus from Trump’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case files.

Minimizing and deflecting attention from the issue at hand is a recurring Democrat strategy.  During Obama’s term in office, this tactic appeared in the numerous scandals that occurred during his supposed “scandal-free presidency”:

We’re still waiting to discover who was held to account for that scandal.

In May 2020, Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif./Md.?) responded to “Obamagate” allegations by saying, “They want to distract attention.  They want to create some kind of counter-narrative that, no, it was actually Obama committing crimes, not Donald Trump.”

Speaking of waiting, how much longer do we have to wait for Mr. Schiff to produce his evidence of Russian collusion?

Even in 2019, Biden’s campaign minimized Obama-era scandals like Fast & Furious, implicitly sidestepping accountability.

Under pResident (not a typo) Biden, the strategy persisted.  The Hunter Biden laptop story was reportedly labeled a “distraction” by Democrats to shift focus from corruption allegations, though specific quotes are scarce.  After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at NPR, wrote that the outlet’s coverage “veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.”  She went on to say, “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

In 2024, amid concerns over Biden’s cognitive decline post-debate, James Clyburn suggested media focus was a “distraction” from legislative wins and Trump’s threat “to our democracy,” again redirecting the narrative.  Biden himself criticized age-related coverage of him as a distraction from defeating Trump, reinforcing this approach.

The term “distraction” occurs often enough to be noticeable, part of a broader scheme utilizing other, more subtle deflections, such as the use of the phrase “politically motivated” and the employment of logical fallacies such as the ad hominem attack.  When all else fails, they call us racists or fascists, and their use of these pejoratives have become so common that they’ve become laughable and a signal that they’ve lost the argument.

Nonetheless, from Franken to Obama’s recent defense, Democrats consistently use this framing to mitigate allegations, protecting political figures and priorities.

As those of us on the right have learned, the cover-up is often worse than the crime.  How long will it take for the left to catch on?

Image via Picryl.