‘Not surprised that you rolled out WHATABOUTISM again.Another of your usual WHATABOUTS .. Dumbass?
The partisan J6 committee has been selectively leaking testimony .. since day one.
Meadows: ‘Leaked’ text messages from Fox News hosts have been ‘weaponized’ by committee
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said text messages he was sent by Fox News opinion hosts amid the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol have been “weaponized” in an atte…thehill.com
History of Whataboutism.
“Soviet Union and Russia
Main article: And you are lynching Negroes
Edward Lucas's 2008 Economist article associated the tactic specifically with the Soviet Union, stating "Soviet propagandists during the cold war were trained in a tactic that their western interlocutors nicknamed 'whataboutism'. Any criticism of the Soviet Union (Afghanistan, martial law in Poland, imprisonment of dissidents, censorship) was met with a 'What about...' (apartheid South Africa, jailed trade-unionists, the Contras in Nicaragua, and so forth)." Lucas recommended two methods of properly countering whataboutism: to "use points made by Russian leaders themselves" so that they cannot be applied to the West, and for Western nations to engage in more self-criticism of their own media and government.[4]
Following the publication of Lucas's 2007 and 2008 articles and his 2008 book The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West, which featured the same themes,[15] opinion writers at prominent English language media outlets began using the term and echoing the themes laid out by Lucas, including the association with the Soviet Union and Russia. Journalist Luke Harding described Russian whataboutism as "practically a national ideology".[16] Writing for Bloomberg News, Leonid Bershidsky called whataboutism a "Russian tradition",[17] while The New Yorker described the technique as "a strategy of false moral equivalences".[18] Julia Ioffe called whataboutism a "sacred Russian tactic",[19][20] and compared it to accusing the pot of calling the kettle black.[21]
Several articles connected whataboutism to the Soviet era by pointing to the "And you are lynching Negroes" example (as Lucas did), in which Soviets deflected criticism by referencing racism in the Jim Crow United States. Ioffe, who has written about whataboutism in at least three separate outlets,[22][20][23] called it a "classic" example of the tactic.[24] Some writers also identified more recent examples when Russian officials responded to critique by, for example, redirecting attention to the United Kingdom's anti-protest laws[25] or Russians' difficulty obtaining a visa to the United Kingdom.[26] In 2006, Putin replied to George W. Bush’s criticism of Russia that he "did not want to head a democracy like Iraq's."[27] In 2017 Ben Zimmer noted that Putin also used the tactic in an interview with NBC News journalist Megyn Kelly.[28]
The term receives increased attention when controversies involving Russia are in the news. For example, writing for Slate in 2014, Joshua Keating noted the use of "whataboutism" in a statement on Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, where Putin "listed a litany of complaints about Western intervention.”
