Similar But Unequal

The other day I saw a news story where some ignorant farmer near Mankato had put up a "Trump that B----" political sign, which encouraged the Republican nominee for President, Donald Trump, to defeat the potential Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, only using a far more crude, vulgar vocabulary.  The sign was on the side of a public highway, visible for all, including kids.  The farmer didn't originate this slogan, rather he copied it.  This is a common slogan already being pushed at GOP and Trump rallies, readily available on t-shirts, bumper stickers and signs.  Clearly, the farmer placing it on the side of the road was his attempt to further validate this slogan into mainstream culture.

The 'B' word for a woman should never be a mainstream acceptable term.  The fact certain elements of the right want to make it mainstream, in reference to a likely President of the United States, is incredibly disturbing, an unwanted view into their misogynist psyche, a simpleton's rationale for why they really hate Hillary Clinton.

I went up on Facebook and ranted against this, saying "you don't have to like her, but I think you can voice your discontent without degrading women..."  Later that day, a friend of mine brought to my attention some graffiti sprayed on a building in the Twin Cities, where the sentiment was to "Rape Trump."  Now 'Rape Trump' is a horrible statement, and it has no place in mainstream culture either, but there was an unintentional meaning to her pointing out the 'Rape Trump' graffiti:  both sides do it.

Here's the problem.  This wasn't equal.  Some knucklehead spray painting 'Rape Trump' on the side of an already graffiti covered building is wrong, but it's not multiple corporations sitting down to consider products for their political line, coming up with, or mimicking, the vile 'Trump that B---' slogan, creating multiple design ideas, running it through approval meetings, going to print with it, distributing it, selling it wholesale to vendors, who then proudly display it at pro-Trump events, while giddy Trump supporters count their coins, asking, "do you have it in an infant onesie?"  Yes they're both bad, but one is FAR worse.  If this was just some ignorant farmer, I wouldn't have brought it up.  This is corporate fueled sexism, and to imply a kid with a can of spray paint is just as bad wildly diminishes how out of line the entire 'Trump that B---' mantra really is.

A little girl who steals a five cent piece of candy has committed a crime.  So has an axe murderer who killed 10 people.  These two things are not equal, but imagine anytime we talked about a crime, the severity of the offense, the context, was taken out of the situation.  Then yes, Little Susie would be no better then the Crazy Lumberjack Killer.  But because we have a brain, we can look at these two separate incidents and see clear differences.

Conservatives started taking context out of the equation years ago.  Without context, they realized they could downplay their own indiscretions by implying their axe murders were nothing more than shoplifters, and they could make their opponents shoplifting into an axe murder.  Today when someone points out something conservatives are doing wrong, the usual Republican course of action is to find any minor indiscretion the other side is guilty of, and insist 'both sides do it,' walking away, acting as if it was a draw.

Example - when Bill Clinton was having an affair with an intern, the Republican Party was outraged!  They acted as if this was the first affair, EVER, talking about how the office had been permanently disgraced.  I could talk about the two Republican Speakers of the House, who, while screaming about their moral outrage, were both having affairs in between press conferences, but I'll focus instead on the third Republican Speaker of the House, Denny Hastert, who was guilty of raping young boys.  With Hastert's recent sentencing to prison, I mentioned how bad it was, and a conservative friend screamed, "well, both sides do it!"  Both sides did not have a House Speaker rape young boys, or have multiple Speakers of the House committing affairs, or were they vilifying all gays and lesbians while they themselves were under the leadership of a pedophile (Oh, and by the way - not the first pedophile the GOP has harbored!). Only one side did, yours!

I posted a few years back about my sister-in-law dismissing former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family having a drunken street brawl in Wasilla, Alaska with a 'both sides do it,' something which made me lose my mind.  President Obama's kids are vilified by the media for an eye roll, but are equated with a shirtless Track Palin swearing at the neighbors who just kicked his ass for being a a drunken jerk, while his sister is jumping on another man's head in her own drunken rage, because 'both sides do it.'

The removal of context has affected how we evaluate things in society.  If you're an African American, and you resist arrest, get into a shoving match or smoke marijuana, politicians and the media will try to validate the instantaneous death sentence ruling against you.  They'll always fault the African American whenever an African American is gunned down.  They'll turn young black men into axe murderers in an attempt to validate the after the fact lethal force that was never justified.  Meanwhile, a white kid kills some people while driving drunk?  He's an innocent victim, only shoplifting candy, suffering from affluenza, the curse of having too much money.  He gets to go home with a finger wagging, so we can get back to the real bad guy, the dead black one, who had skittles and an ice tea, and who smoked a joint once.  Context matters.  By removing it you can validate anything, including systemic racism.

Two more examples.  Benghazi was a tragedy.  Four dead Americans after an embassy attack, but the GOP has painted it as this country's greatest diplomatic error, worthy of countless investigations and years of hearings.  To follow the Republican narrative, you have to ignore this attack was not unique, as our embassies are attacked regularly, usually with a much larger loss of life.  I'm not saying what happened in Benghazi was good, but it surely doesn't warrant the level of attention the GOP has placed on it, something they've done purely for political reasons.  When you bring up a far larger foreign policy blunder, like the W. Bush Administration initially saying Iraq was involved with 9/11 (they weren't), then changing their story, insisting Iraq was trying to get weapons of mass destruction (another lie) as the justification of going to war with them, a war which cost 5000 American lives, tens of thousands of permanently wounded Americans, and trillions of US taxpayer dollars, all while obscenely increasing the profit margins of the corporate friends of Bush and Vice President Cheney, their first response; "Hillary Clinton voted for it.  Both sides did it, so there is no need to ask any more questions!"  Yes Hillary voted for it, but only after being outright lied to by the Administration, who created a series of dog and pony shows to prevent the truth from being discovered prior to troops being put on the ground, and labeled anyone who didn't vote for it of being responsible for 9/11.  Context places Benghazi into it's rightful place, while spotlighting our incredible failure in investigating the false justifications for the Iraq War, an investigation we still owe the brave men and women who died in combat.  Clinton was Little Susie.  Bush and Cheney were the Crazy Lumberjack Killers.

How about e-mails!  Hillary Clinton does have a bit of a problem with the e-mail platforms she was using, and how she handled certain intelligence, but nothing seems too outrageous, at least not yet.  This seems more like an attempt to get access to her e-mails, a fishing expedition akin to discovering the President had an affair while investigating him for an Arkansas land deal.  I find this new found concern about e-mails from the GOP funny, as they themselves didn't even question the intentional deletion of tens of millions of e-mails by the W. Administration, a task which must have required a staff of 100 or so working around the clock for a year to accomplish.  They wiped every computer, both sending and receiving, and all servers, both sending and receiving.  That's amazing!  When you point this out to Republicans, they'll diminish the Bush administration actions while at the same time insisting Hillary is a criminal.  I'll hold my final judgment on Clinton until the investigation is over, but there is no way these two e-mail discretions are equal.  The Bush Administration's was FAR worse.

'Both sides do it' is ignorance for convenience sake.  You either say it because you don't want to think about what the one side could be up to, or you say it to prevent from having to admit your side was wrong.  When someone says it, ask yourself if context is part of the equation.  Usually, it's not.

For the record, most of the time, both sides DON'T do it.