Using Double Standards to Defend Trump Against Double Standards

The old media is horribly biased against Republicans and Trump in particular. They are completely in bed with the Clinton political machine. The release of information about Donald Trump’s womanizing has been carefully orchestrated to maximize the political damage to his campaign. The Clinton campaign is pushing the envelope of hypocrisy by using Trump’s alleged sexually predatory behavior against him. Some of the stories about Trump molesting women may be fabricated. Double standards are at play and that is unfair. The playing field isn’t level. The media tears down—or attempts to tear down—every Republican in similar fashion.

None of that means Trump actually isn’t a sexual predator, a liar, or a hypocrite.

None of it means Trump is objectively a good man. None of it means nominating him was a wise decision. None of it means he is fit to be president. (And for people handicapped by binary thinking, that doesn’t mean in any way that I believe Hillary is.)

Streiff wrote earlier today about how ”the sexual assault hit on Trump is a masterwork of political attacks.” It truly is. The staged rollout that allowed Trump to make denials before new allegations were revealed is not unlike how Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe took down ACORN. If an equivalent story about Hillary Clinton had been similarly executed, the same Trump fans who are now crying foul would be celebrating it as a journalistic magnum opus.

Trump himself said his “indiscretions” are fair game. Now he’s playing the victim, because the people who support him hate the media and the Clintons so much that’s what they want to hear. Never mind that Trump used the same sort of Clintonian tactics in the primary on his Republican opponents. The fear of a Clinton presidency is leading people to rationalize and excuse virtually anything. When Trump said he could shoot someone in the street and not lose his supporters, he was right. It is being proven right now before our eyes. Right now, Trump’s apologists resemble the people who decided “Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account was hacked” was a hill on which it was worth dying.

During Bill Clinton’s scandals as president, Trump actually claimed that Bill was the victim, much like he’s claiming to be a victim himself today. He’s attacking his accusers just as Hillary attacked Bill’s, and people who don’t yet know what truth there may be in these accusations are cheering him on while condemning her. It’s really not that uncommon for women not to come forward when abused by a man of tremendous wealth or power, but for the sake of the party many are pretending that it proves the accusation false. Bill Clinton’s accusers who didn’t report him immediately are to be believed without question though. Double standards are double standards on either side of the aisle.

Trump attacked Clinton’s accusers at the time but conceded that Clinton had “put himself in that position.” (Presumably he meant the position to get caught.) Guess what? Trump put himself in the position he’s in right now. Not the media, not the Clintons, not “establishment” RINOs, and not the people on the right who never supported him.

The primary difference between Donald Trump and Bill Clinton is only the sector in which they earned their wealth and power. The media covered for Bill as well as they could because he had power and a left wing message. They covered for Trump because he was making them money. They only turned on Trump when he decided to be a Republican. In fact, they even set him up, covering him almost exclusively and helping him get the nomination so that they could knock him down afterward as many predicted.

I won’t fault anyone who decides voting for Trump is the best way forward in this rigged crap shoot of an election. What I can’t condone—or even make sense out of—is how enthusiastic self proclaimed conservatives are about doing it.  Gleefully wallowing with a pig just because he’s not that pig. It’s maddening to watch the adoring crowds cheering for Trump as he denies assaulting women after we just heard him on tape telling Billy Bush how he assaults women. Call it locker room talk if you want, but you’re kidding yourself. It’s the kind of talk engaged in by men who think they are entitled to take what they want.

Trump’s history should tell you that at least some of what he’s accused of might be true. That should give you pause, especially if your current line of attack against Hillary is her husband’s inability to keep it in his pants. But for so many it doesn’t. He’s a scumbag, but he’s our scumbag, and that’s literally all that matters.

The reasons I resisted the Trump mania this election cycle are becoming clearer to me. At first it was just disgust at the notion that our side no longer cared whether a candidate was an honorable human being as long as his rhetoric scratched the right itches. Now, I’m realizing that what bothers me most is seeing that we have become them. Maybe we always were. That frightens me more than anything Hillary might do in the White House.

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