With the recent revelations of boorish, misogynistic behavior and speech by Donald Trump (if you are surprised at these revelations, by the way, you have work to do when it comes to noticing narcissistic behavior from your fellow humans), his supporters and GOP partisans are becoming desperate as they attempt to rationalize their consistent intent to vote for him.
As a result, I am laughing out loud when I read some of the attempted justifications.
Dear Trump supporters, you’re embarrassing yourselves.
The argument “sure, Trump may be an asshole, but Hillary is just as bad!” is not credible. You know damn well it’s not. If your child’s school informed you that your child had misbehaved, providing compelling evidence of same, and the child’s response was “but mom, they did it too!”, you might be vaguely sympathetic, but that would probably only extend to saying something like “yeah, but you were caught and they weren’t”. Most likely you would be reminding your child that bad behavior has consequences.
Effectively, you are an adult playing the game of “but they do it too!”. Not credible. It makes you sound like that whining little schoolkid. Juvenile and unserious.
You’re not! I can hear you saying that as you read this.
Well good. Then wise up and try, you know, a better argument.
Ah! So Donald Trump is magically better because he never killed anybody? Like at Benghazi? And he never lost $6bn of taxpayers money?
Look, you can believe anything you like. You want to believe in tooth fairies, aliens from Mars, that the Moon landings were faked, and that Jade Helm was an abortive attempt by the Federal Government to take over Texas? Sure, go ahead and believe. But please don’t kid yourself that any of those beliefs deserve to be taken seriously by anybody with a well-developed set of reasoning and critical thinking skills. There is no compelling evidence to support any of them, and without compelling evidence, arguing otherwise, in many circles, soon makes you look both gullible and deluded.
Arguing that Hillary murdered 4 people at Benghazi is not supportable by any compelling evidence. If it was, somebody would have tried to indict her by now. Now, you can believe that she is being protected all you like, but the GOP has run seven (count them) investigations, and has yet to provide any compelling evidence.
Hillary lost $6bn of taxpayers money? Not even close. As this article explains, what actually happened was that an investigation revealed that the State Department lacked full documentation support $6bn of spending. Yes, that is bad. Negligent even. But saying you have no paperwork to support expenditure is not the same as saying that the expenditure was wasteful. Those are two different things, and if you continue to insist otherwise what you are really telling me is one or both of two things, neither of them flattering (a) you don’t understand the English language, (b) you chose to ignore the facts in favor of signing on to yet another cockanamie partisan narrative. Plus, if you are going to argue about losing money, you are going to crash and burn pretty damn quick. Donald Trump, based on numerous documented and detailed accounts of his business activities, has pissed away billions of dollars of other people’s money. That fiscal probity argument in favor of voting for him is utterly lacking in credibility. Best to not go there.
Look, I know that it is kind of difficult to support Donald Trump right now. Now that the media is catching up on actually, you know, digging into his past to the same level of exhaustive detail that they have been applying to Hillary Clinton for 25 years, some of the information that is emerging about his behavior is deeply unflattering. But you really have to do a much better job of argument. These rationalizations are like a psychologist exam to detect Motivated Reasoning 101. They are also an argument for voting based on nihilism. No positive endorsement of anybody. Only an argument that so-and-so is the Least Bad Option. Come on folks. There are well over 100 confirmed candidates for POTUS, excluding the cats, dogs and other weirdos. You should be able to find somebody to your liking there.
