Whataboutism!
It’s becoming the lowest of pejoratives. For the Left, if you compare the way conservative politicians are treated to progressive ones, you’re rationalizing. You’re making excuses.
If you use your brain the way thinking people do, you’re not really thinking.
You are a cowardly MAGA-hack who is throwing up a smokescreen to camouflage the unique, sui generis evil that is — all together now — Donald Trump.
Good grief.
This bit of legerdemain has been around for a while. We’ve had more than the usual fill of it this week, however, because of the Biden Justice Department’s indictment of Trump.
The former President is being prosecuted for allegedly mishandling intelligence — over 300 classified documents he caused to be transmitted from the White House and shipped to his Mar-a-Lago estate, which is not an authorized repository. He is also charged with obstructing the government’s grand jury investigation.
Trump will posit a number of defenses to these charges. Some of them — based, for example, on the esoterica of the Presidential Records Act — are not very persuasive.
By contrast, he has a very compelling defense of selective, vindictive prosecution.
The Obama-Biden Justice Department gave former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a complete pass on similarly egregious offenses.
The Biden Justice Department — even as it indicts Trump — is laying the ground work to absolve President Biden himself on what appears to be appalling classified-information violations going back decades.
Yet the earth has been scorched to make a criminal case against Trump, not only a former president but a current presidential candidate — right now, the prohibitive GOP favorite to run against Biden.
To anyone watching this, the normal reaction to Trump’s indictment is: What about Hillary? What about Biden?
Come to think of it, what about Sandy Berger and David Petraeus, who got slaps on the wrist rather than the serious felony prosecutions for classified information crimes? What about Mike Pence?
It couldn’t be more obvious that these cases are pertinent to the question of whether the indictment of Trump is fair and just.
Ergo, Trump-deranged progressives feverishly work to eviscerate what makes it obvious: our normal human thought process of weighing a decision against similar decisions.
That, they snark, is whataboutism.
Actually, what progressives deride as whataboutism is just common sense. In my profession in particular, it’s what’s known as the practice of law. It’s what’s known as jurisprudence.
It is the centuries-old Anglo-American iteration of Enlightenment reason. We develop and refine the principles we live by based on decisions in prior cases. We deal with our today and prepare for our tomorrow by learning from all our yesterdays.
Sadly, the Left’s taunts tend to work. Increasingly often, we hear Republicans and conservatives garbling their points so they can assure us they’re not engaging in “whataboutism” — when, of course, they surely are if they’re making any sense.
It’s sense that progressives are trying to exile. Don’t fall for it.
I am a proud, died-in-the-wool whataboutist. I always will be. I make no apologies for examining what has been done to determine what should be done. You shouldn’t either.
In our rational world, whataboutism ought to persuade President Trump to apologize for having done what military or intelligence officers who’ve mishandled defense secrets get prison time for.
Then President Biden, in view of the inevitable dropping of the classified-information probe against him, ought to order the Justice Department to drop its case against Trump.
With such efforts to reestablish equal justice under the law, perhaps we could commit to enforcing national security law going forward. Then maybe let voters, rather than prosecutors, decide the next election for a change.
What about that?
Andrew C. McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor.