'WHATABOUTISM': The President & Pocahontas

Yesterday President Trump made a joke about 'Pocahontas' while supposedly honoring a group of Navajo Code Talker WWII heroes.  Many, including his guests, took to it as a racial slur.

Pocahontas was immortalized in the Disney animated tale of romance between a young American Indian woman named Pocahontas (Irene Bedard) and Capt. John Smith (Mel Gibson), who journeyed to the New World with other settlers to begin fresh lives. Her powerful father, Chief Powhatan, disapproves of their relationship and wants her to marry a native warrior. Meanwhile, Smith's fellow Englishmen hope to rob the Native Americans of their gold.

Can Pocahontas' love for Smith save the day?

Should she have?  How would the Indians be treated in the wake of Colonization? Westward Expansion?

Why is it IRONIC that Native Americans would once again help the United States in WWII?

How did White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders struggle to Defend Trump’s ‘Pocahontas’ Jab?

This tactic is called "whataboutism," a fallacy with roots in old Soviet propaganda that shifts any given topic to another, potentially irrelevant one. It implies that all actions regardless of context share a moral equivalency, And since nobody is perfect, all criticism is hypocritical and everyone should do whatever they want ... It doesn't solve a problem or win an argument. The point is just to muddy the waters, which just makes the other side mad.

The most famous recent example was Trump's reaction to the alt-right rally in Charlottesville. When a neo-Nazi intentionally drove a car into a mass of people and killed protestor Heather Heyer, Trump responded by looking for equal fault on the other side.

Take a look at these other examples.

Do two 'wrongs' make a 'right?'  What do two 'Wrights make?'

Ernie Pyle

Ernest Taylor Pyle (August 3, 1900 – April 18, 1945) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist. As a roving correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, he earned wide acclaim for his accounts of ordinary people in rural America, and later, of ordinary American soldiers during World War II. His syndicated column ran in more than 300 newspapers nationwide.

At the time of his death he was among the best-known American war correspondents. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his spare, poignant accounts of "dogface" infantry soldiers from a first-person perspective. "No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told", wrote Harry Truman. "He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen."

Listen to Jon Voigt read Ernie Pyle

How did John Hersey differ from Ernie Pyle?

Why is the book Hiroshima still so important today?