Don’t fall for Republicans’ phony outrage
Every so often, Democrats will accuse Republicans of doing something bad that they are, in fact, plainly doing, and Republicans will respond by feigning outrage over the accusation itself, in an effort to distract attention away from its actual substance.
A little over a year ago, Lindsey Graham did it when Democrats tried to highlight the fact that Republicans were ramming through the lifetime confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee who had credible sexual assault allegations leveled against him. Watch his four-minute theatrical performance (he really, really should have considered a career in acting instead of politics) and notice that, apart from irrelevant generalizations, he conspicuously fails to address or refute any of the specific accusations made by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Instead, he spends his time letting everyone know just how SPITTIN’ MAD he is about this “unethical sham”!
Madder’n a wet settin’ hen! Madder’n a puffed toad! (Any other folksy expressions worth noting here to illustrate just how bad Lindsey Graham had the mads in that moment?)
Roughly a year before that, when Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown was pointing out that the GOP tax scam is, in fact, a scam, former Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch responded not by countering the substance of Brown’s assertions but by angrily yet irrelevantly asserting that he “come(s) from the poor people” and that he gets “kind of sick and tired” of being accused of working for the rich (when he was, in fact, working for the rich, a reality that he did absolutely nothing to disprove during his tirade).
Every so often, Democrats will accuse Republicans of doing something bad that they are, in fact, plainly doing, and Republicans will respond by feigning outrage over the accusation itself, in an effort to distract attention away from its actual substance.
Fast-forward to the present situation, in which POLITICO reported last week that Republicans are “livid” over accusations that they’re party to a cover-up in the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump. Livid, you hear?!? Fittingly, the photo at the top of the article is none other than…an indignant-looking Lindsey Graham.
Never mind that a group of jurors working together to block or suppress new evidence and witness testimony in a trial is, quite literally, the very definition of a cover-up. Instead, pay attention to the fact that they are OUTRAGED!!! that Democrats would accuse them of such a horrible thing.
Or how about the most recent kerfuffle, also reported by POLITICO, in which Republicans were — you guessed it — “livid” over Adam Schiff’s reference to supposed threats made by the Trump team against GOP senators.
Never mind that Trump threatened Schiff on Twitter just today and that he has a well-documented history of issuing both veiled and explicit threats against those who might cross him, including the whistleblower. Instead, pay attention to how OUTRAGEOUS!!! it is that Schiff would even suggest this.
And let’s be very clear: If it hadn’t been this, it would have been something else. They invariably would have found something — anything at all, really — to latch onto with phony indignation and shift focus away from the compelling substance of the prosecution’s argument.
Schiff himself, by the way, did a good job summarizing this cynical ploy during his closing argument at the impeachment trial (emphasis mine): “You can expect attacks on all kinds of members of the House that have nothing to do with the issues before you. And when you hear those attacks, you should ask yourself: Away from what do they want to distract my attention?”
That last question is absolutely key. If you can’t win an argument based on its substance or merits, you can always resort to distraction or deflection in hopes that your audience won’t notice — or, more precisely, won’t remember — that you don’t have two legs to stand on. As I’ve noted before, emotional manipulation is particularly useful for this purpose, because emotion, much more so than factual information, is closely tied to memory and people naturally like to identify with the persecuted rather than the persecutor.
If you can deceive observers into believing that you’re righteously angry over a perceived injustice perpetrated against you by some malevolent other, they likely won’t remember how bogus your stance is or that you’re defending the indefensible, as indeed Republicans are doing in all of these cases. Instead, they’ll remember how MAD!!! you were, and before you know, your phony RAGE!!! becomes the focus rather than the issue at hand.
Given what Republicans are seeking to promote and defend, it’s at least understandable, albeit in a very perverse kind of way, why they would use this tactic so often. That doesn’t mean the American people should fall for it, or that we should fail to call it out when we see it — which, I suspect, is going to be more and more often.
