The False Equivalency of "But What About Obama?"

 

It’s got to be tough if you’re a Republican who still has some of your brain cells firing, especially if you’re on social media. I mean being constantly confronted with all the lies, corruption and ill-advised policy decisions of President Trump and feeling some obligation to your party to try and defend someone so indefensible. So, in this light it’s not too surprising that people in this position often fall back on the “what about Obama?” defense. I suppose I’d be tempted to do the same thing if the situation were reversed. I ran into this situation yet again several days ago when one of the more reasonable Republicans I know came back with the below response after a couple people pointed out some of the many flaws in the current resident of the White House.

This gentleman is making the same mistake as a lot of Trump’s supporters by drawing a false equivalency. Of course, Obama wasn’t a perfect President, he made mistakes. But when you start looking at the facts of these incidents it becomes clear that none of them are really an Obama administration scandal. In some cases mistakes were made, in other cases, to quote the former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, there’s no there, there. It is deeply flawed to hold these up as an equivalency to obstructing justice, extorting political favors from a foreign country, tearing children of immigrants from their parents, the normalization of daily overt lies, and Trump’s pattern of racists actions and statements. These claimed misdeeds of Obama probably don’t deserve this much attention, but because they continually come up, I’ve decided to go ahead and address them. So here it goes:

Cash to Iran: This was a reasonable policy decision. We returned Iran’s own money to them that we’d been holding onto for decades as part of a nuclear agreement. Back in the 1970s the American backed dictator the Shah of Iran ordered military equipment from America, but after the Iranian revolution we cancelled the order but kept the money they’d paid us, we simply returned this and other Iranian assets that were frozen in America. Under this nuclear agreement Iran stopped making advances towards nuclear weapons and reduced their future capacity. According to observers from the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran was fully in compliance with the agreement. It also reduced sanctions and was a first step toward normalization and increased regional stability. Trump, for absolutely no legitimate reason, blew that deal up, raised tensions in the region and increased the likelihood of Iranian sponsored terrorism. Because of Trump’s actions Iran is now closer to obtaining a nuclear weapon and America has lost creditability in the region that won’t be easily regained.

Fast and Furious: This was an anti-gun running plan that was created and implemented at the field office level. As part of the plan the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearm (ATF) sold weapons to Mexican gangs with the intention of tracking the guns to make a bust. However, the plan was bungled, and the guns were lost and eventually used in crimes, including the death of a U.S. Border Patrol Agent. Every investigation into operation has found the administration was unaware of it. Fast and Furious was a poorly executed and probably a fundamentally flawed operation, but why did they do it? We’ve all seen the horrible reports of Mexican gangs wreaking havoc in northern Mexico. Where do you think they got all those guns? For decades these gangs have made straw purchases of firearms from legal gun dealers across the American Southwest. The ATF had pointed this out, but Republican politicians refused to pass any legislation to make it easier to crack down on this practice. It was in this desperation of seeing the free flow of weapons from the U.S. to the Mexican gangs that the ATF attempted this ill-conceived plan. Although some of these weapons were ultimately used in crimes there’s no reason to believe the gangs wouldn’t have been able to get an equal number of weapons if Fast and Furious hadn’t happened.

Benghazi: The attack on an America outpost that resulted in the deaths of the American ambassador to Libya and three others was a tragedy, but not a scandal. Right-wing conspiracists have claimed that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the military to stand down the military rescue mission, this has been proven entirely false. Clinton is guilty of jumping to conclusions that the attack was related to the riots in Egypt over an inflammatory American movie. Clearly, she should have waited until they had better information before making a statement about the motivation behind the attack. By the next day the administration was walking back Clinton’s statement and within a couple of days they stated definitively that it was a pre-planned attack. Clinton made a mistake, but there’s no reason to suspect any conspiracy in the initial statement. Could it have been prevented, this is a more complicated question. There were known security short falls that should have been addressed, but it’s also true that the Republican Congress had cut funding for diplomatic security. Having diplomatic operations in countries like Libya is inherently dangerous, and there are clearly lessons to be learned from the Benghazi attack, but it’s not the scandal Republicans want it to be.

If you like your doctor you can keep him: Obama did make that statement when promoting Affordable Car Act (ACA), and in many cases it turned out to be incorrect. It should be noted that there’s nothing new about this. If your company changes insurance providers or you take a new job, new insurance often means having a different provider network, meaning you might have to change doctors. The ACA had a grandfather provision that would let people keep their existing plan so when Obama said that people could keep their doctor it was in good faith. The problem was the way it was written made the grandfather clause less effective than intended. Of course, if the Republicans had been more willing to work to improve the ACA instead of solely focusing on repeal, the parties could have worked to make it function better. So, Obama was incorrect when selling the “if you like your doctor you can keep him” feature of the ACA, but Republicans were also guilty of making it politically impossible to improve the ACA.

Prisoner trade 7 for 1 defector: This appears to be referring to the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap, but has the facts all wrong. First, it was 5 detainees, not 7. Second, Bergdahl was not a defector, he was an idiot who had some delusional plan to accomplish something by leaving his post. He never defected to the enemy, he was captured and repeatedly tortured. If he had defected, it would have been much more effective propaganda to put him in videos as a willing member of their ranks. All indications are he never cooperated with his captors and even attempted to escape. He did desert his post for which he was convicted, but that was only after a long investigation after his release. While he was captured, he was still a solider in good standing, we clearly had an obligation to get him released. Concerning the 5 for 1 nature of the swap. Bottom line is we value our POWs more than they do, and they knew that. If we’d insisted on a one for one exchange, he’d probably still be over there. The Taliban wanted all the Guantanamo detainees released for the Bergdahl exchange; Obama made the best deal he could to get to secure the release of our soldier. As you can see, in none of these “scandals” was there the corruption, immorality or abuse of power that we’ve become so accustomed to since Trump took office.