Tu Quoque (Redux) – FT#201

17 Sep Tu Quoque (Redux) – FT#201

Show Notes

Tu Quoque literally means “You too.” It’s a particular type of Red Herring fallacy where the speaker avoids responding to a criticism by distracting the listener with claims that other people (ideally the one doing the criticizing) have also done similar bad things.

Trump

We started out by discussing this clip of Trump calling Biden a threat to democracy:

Then we talked about this clip of James Comer equating Biden finding a few documents in his garage and calling the FBI to Trump stealing dozens of boxes and lying about them:

Then we talked about this clip of Marjorie Taylor Greene claiming Democrats worship George Floyd:

And finally we looked at this clip of Mike Johnson not denying that Trump is unhinged:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about Nadine Dorries attacking the media and the other parties:

The he covered Nigel Farage attacking the other parties:

And he finished with Lee Anderson defending Farage:

Fallacy in the Wild (Sting: Dolly Parton – Jolene)

In the Fallacy in the Wild, we looked at this clip from Futurama:

Then we discussed this clip from I Love Lucy:

And finally, we talked about this clip from The Simpsons:

Fake News

Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:

Mark got it wrong this week and is still on 48%!

Mail-in ballots are not a logical fallacy

We talked about Trump’s attempts to fuck with mail-in ballots

The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about

• Every year around September 11th, Donald Trump reliably produces two things: a solemn tribute to the fallen, and a fresh, demonstrably false story about his own personal heroics that day. OK, that’s not technically true, he doesn’t do the first one. For example, his tweet in 2013 read in its entirety “I would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th.” Everyone remembers where they were that day. It’s what psychologists call a flashbulb memory. But Trump’s big brain doesn’t differentiate between fact and fiction, so his stories can get a bit mutually-exclusive. At an event honoring first responders, Trump described two firefighters, big strong guys, near the U.S. Steel Building supposedly grabbing him under the arms and physically lifting him to safety because they thought the building was about to collapse. There is, as CNN’s Daniel Dale gently pointed out, no evidence this ever happened. Trump wasn’t photographed anywhere near Ground Zero until two days later, and gave an interview at the time, outdoors, looking entirely un-airlifted. To be fair to Trump, as I always am, he kept it plausibly deniable whether he was claiming it happened on the day of the attack, and in his own 2016 telling of this story, he admitted it was a couple of days after 9/11 and he wasn’t inside the building, just “not so far from it,” which means the tale has spent a decade quietly growing its own action sequence, like a fish story where the fish eventually starts carrying you. Trump started the tradition just hours after the actual attack, when he called into a local New York station to boast that his building at 40 Wall Street had become the tallest in downtown Manhattan now that the World Trade Center was gone. This was false. 70 Pine Street, a block away, was 26 feet taller. In that same call, Trump also said he was watching from a window in his Trump Tower apartment, and years later he’d elaborate that from this same window he personally watched people jumping from the towers and saw the second plane hit, which is impressive, since Trump Tower is four miles from Ground Zero. In 2015 he claimed his 2000 book had predicted Osama bin Laden and recommended taking him out, which is not true, and he almost certainly didn’t write it anyway. 2015  is also when he started claiming he’d watched “thousands and thousands” of Muslim Americans on TV, cheering on rooftops in Jersey City as the towers fell, a claim for which zero evidence exists anywhere. Then there’s the 2016 claim that he personally helped clear the rubble at Ground Zero and sent hundreds of his own construction workers to help the recovery effort. Every fact-checker who’s ever looked into this, from Snopes to PolitiFact to CNN, has found nothing. A New York Fire Department battalion chief who was actually running recovery operations told PolitiFact he had no knowledge of Trump or a hired crew of his being anywhere near the site, adding that there would be a record of it, since every construction crew on-site was under direct police and fire department supervision. And in 2019, he retweeted a video attacking Ilhan Omar for supposedly dancing on the anniversary of the attacks, except the footage was from a Congressional Black Caucus event held on an entirely different date. Most people have a pretty clear story of where they were, because that’s how memory of a national trauma actually functions. Trump’s is more of a work-in-progress, updated annually, with new characters and set pieces whenever the old ones stop getting attention, and the only throughline connecting any of it is that in every single version, no matter how geographically or physically impossible, Donald Trump is somehow the bravest, most important person in the story.
• Somewhat worryingly in the same week or so that saw an ex-Anthropic AI executive warn that there’s a 10% chance that AI could destroy all of humanity Trump displayed more Derangement Syndrome symptoms by posting an AI video of geese with arms and firearms and Trump hair – Donald Ducks if you will, marching in flocks I suppose, around the shores of Lake Ontario – sorry sorry Lake America yeah alright Donnie!!. Okay help me out here – there’s a war in the middle east going on that Trump started and has no idea how to end – oil is no longer getting to the west, the blue-collar workers most likely to be the ones that Trump wants to vote for him are going to be the ones most affected by increased oil prices putting up delivery costs of groceries and increasing the running cost of businesses which will start having to make cut backs, and yet, and yet the same President of the United States of America – the hitherto-styled leader of the free world – let’s not forget! – is putting out 30-second AI generated movies of ducks marching to the theme tune of Hawaii 5-0! What the actual Donald Duck!! This is the same president who told us we don’t need any guardrails to check and balance AI developments cos “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” So you’re in a car being driven at speed around a clifftop corner by a crazy man with his foot on the gas all the way to the floor and he’s the one that says I’ve taken the guardrails down cos I know better/all there is to know about driving safely around a corner above a fatal plummet and that’s all you need to know, and furthermore any protest about my fitness to be the thing that objectively provides safety without fear or favour will hurt my feelings and will get you jail time or censure or called a bad name in public. Meantime the adult that side of the Atlantic – Mark Carney reminded Trump that Ontario comes from a word meaning big and beautiful from 400 years ago – older than the fucking USA ferchrissake, and in doing so is showing the world the kind of leader the world needs in standing up and pointing out the bullying persona of Trump’s America. Eventually Trump’s geese will of course all return north and leave a pile of shit behind. 
• There’s a reason the Department of Agriculture has a food safety and inspection service, and it’s the same reason we invented smoke detectors and seatbelts: because “it’s probs fine” is not a good system, and most of us think shitting yourself to death should only be something that happens in Oregon Trail. I say only… now I think of it, there are a few people for whom I would happily use one of my three wishes to make them shit themselves to death, but sadly none of them are likely to eat a salad, and that’s where the main death-shitting risk came from this summer. A nationwide cyclospora outbreak tied to lettuce that’s sickened more than 17,000 people across 48 states, hospitalized over a thousand, and killed two has understandably grabbed all the headlines, but it’s just one part of a bigger problem. In August alone, 26 different foods were recalled, and the man technically in charge of all this is roadkill gourmand Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a guy who took his grandkids swimming in raw sewage in Rock Creek Park, so it’s maybe not shocking that under his watch the CDC’s parasite surveillance team got shrunk from 11 people down to 3, right as a parasite outbreak was exploding into the largest in US history. Politico also reports the USDA is quietly shuttering two of the only three federal cyclospora research projects, with the third supposedly being “relocated” from Maryland to Iowa, a plan so obviously designed to make the scientists quit that every single one of them has. A USDA spokesperson insists “none of the research has been disrupted,” and in my imagination that spokesperson is a small dog sitting in a burning house. This is, of course, Trump’s own genius playbook completing its inevitable second act: the same guy who once said, out loud, that testing fewer people for COVID would give you fewer cases, has now applied the exact same logic to parasites, except this time instead of restricting the nasal swabs, the tool for “seeing fewer cases” is firing the microbiologists. Some of those other recalled foods included 19 million eggs, as well as jalapenos, mangoes, granola, and radishes, all of which contained salmonella. Publix organic blueberries were hit by a Class I E. coli recall, the FDA’s most serious warning, reserved for stuff with a “reasonable probability” of causing serious illness or death. Four infants were hospitalized by botulism in baby formula before that was recalled. A Boston company recalled nearly 25,000 pounds of frozen buffalo chicken that had been sold with fake USDA inspection stamps despite, in fact, not having been inspected. Even pet food got recalled in New Jersey for testing positive for Salmonella, Listeria, and E. coli all at the same time, which does make you wonder what the fuck kind of parties were going on in that pet food factory. And then, capping off the whole disgusting summer, Dreyer’s had to recall its popsicles because they might contain glass.  Actual, literal, shards-of-glass-in-your-mouth glass, inside a food product typically enjoyed by small children. I can only assume that while caught up in the excitement of cutting all those wasteful food safety regulations and defunding essential agencies they somehow, accidentally or deliberately, fired the guy whose only job was standing next to the popsicle machine going “hang on, is that glass?”
• “I’m trying to get to the bottom of why, given the problems the FBI has in recruitment” Louisiana Republican John Kennedy asked FBI director Kash Patel at a senate hearing today “why would you even get into bestiality?” “We are not into bestiality” replied Kash Patel –  which, even knowing what we know about the whole Trump administration, is a strange way to answer the question, a strange thing to bring up. Apparently Patel was at pains to explain that the recruitment process wasn’t being so relaxed that they’d let anyone join the ranks of personnel – too late to exclude Kash for instance! But he did want to point out that they wouldn’t be excluding people that had paid for sex whilst excluding people who had committed sexual offenses. With regard to bestiality they would of course allow people to join who had had to commit such acts as a result of coercion or torture but would of course exclude people who had committed those acts voluntarily. I can’t help thinking how prescient the makers of South Park (who incidentally brilliantly renamed their show South America is obedience to Trump renaming everything America), how prescient they have been in the latest series regarding Trump getting the half humanoid half-goat character of the Devil himself pregnant! Kash opened the Senate hearing he was at with the usual MAGA stuff about how he’s changed the FBI to “let cops be cops” and how he’s been busy “capturing literally the worst of the worst.” He listed off a few data points about child abusers and “gangbangers” who have been imprisoned under his watch. And how he’s raised standards of recruitment despite Senator Dick Durbin pointing out that he had removed the requirement for people joining the FBI not to have criminal convictions for stealing, soliciting sex, or engaging in bestiality, Patel insisted that “Our standards have never been higher,” which is where he added that he wouldn’t have wanted to exclude those “victims of bestiality” from applying for FBI jobs. Which all sounds very woke and lovely, until you consider that actually the victims of bestiality are animals. When people came to you with a list of things to remove, Kennedy pressed on, “and you saw bestiality — I say this with respect — to the person who recommended it, why didn’t you say: What planet did you parachute in from?” Patel, who can’t even stick by his own absurd metrics and clearly was at this point worried he was going to start being known in public additionally as ‘The Bestiality Guy,’ then quickly claimed, “That was my initial response, Senator!” Which reminds me of the Python sketch with two pepperpot women watching the television – “What’s on the television’ ‘A penguin” “Where did it come from” “Burma” ‘Why did you say Burma?’ ‘I panicked” At the hearing we learned a lot about Kash Patel from the questioning, but very little about what he’s doing in the FBI. Following up, Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii didn’t even bother directing any questions to Patel.“If I thought I could get a real answer out of you, I’d ask you things like: What the hell were you thinking, getting rid of 12 Iran experts on the eve of a war with Iran?” But she wasn’t going to bother, she added, because she knew that it would be pointless. Whilst it’s an effective way of surviving a grilling at a senate hearing does it really bode well for the impression it gives the rest of the world regarding the USA’s security and intelligence competence – as Hirono simply told the chair “I’m done with this witness.”
• Trump’s approval rating is sitting at around 35%, somehow up from 33% two weeks ago, no doubt thanks to all the winning. Either way, he’s underwater by double digits, worse on the economy than at any point in his second term, and yet somehow, his solution to Republicans facing a historically brutal midterm election is to insist, loudly and repeatedly, that voters should “pretend I’m on the ballot.” He said it at a rally in South Carolina. He said it to Sean Hannity. He said it again closing out the GOP’s first-ever midterm convention in Dallas, where he also made the assembled crowd raise their right hands and pledge loyalty to “the greatest president in the history of the United States, that loves us so much he can’t even breathe,” just before they all pledged, at his instruction, to vote whether they’re registered or not, and cheat like hell. The theory, as Trump explains it, is that “when Trump’s on the ballot, they win. When he’s off the ballot, people don’t go to vote,” which would be a fun theory to test if it weren’t already being tested constantly, and failing constantly. His endorsed candidates are getting demolished in primary after primary. Republican enthusiasm for the midterms is running well behind Democratic enthusiasm in every poll that’s bothered to ask. And in response to all of this, Trump has directed his $400 million super PAC war chest not toward vulnerable Republicans clinging onto a three-seat House majority, but into ads about himself, featuring stirring testimonials from serious statesmen like UFC president Dana White. Meanwhile, actual Republican candidates who have to win actual elections in actual swing districts want absolutely nothing to do with any of this. They’d very much like the midterms to be about their individual records, their local issues, anything except a straight up-or-down referendum on an 80-year-old president who can’t stay awake for more than twelve minutes at a time. Since those twelve minute intervals are fueled entirely by people fawning over him, Trump is keen to get on the campaign trail: He told battleground Republicans during a Rose Garden dinner last Wednesday that he will be heavily involved in the final 30 days. But according to Politico, an unnamed senior Republican involved in a competitive House GOP race in a district that Trump won by double digits in 2024 said “We’ve told them he cannot come. Candidly, he would not be helpful here … I do not believe they would send him without our OK. And if they did, we probably wouldn’t campaign with him.” Unfortunately, saying no to Trump carries its own risk, since as one Republican consultant bluntly put it, “Say no to Trump, and he could punish you. Say yes to him, and his presence might not help.” So basically, both doors lead to the same damp, smelly basement, and I love that for them. Trump has already shown exactly how he handles Republicans who dare to distance themselves and then lose anyway: he mocks them by name afterwards, and celebrates their loss, the same way he’ll no doubt treat whoever sinks without trace this November thanks to the Trump shaped weight tied to their ankle.
• Paying someone $5,000 to get them to vote for you is obviously bribery – paying every voter to do that is policy. At a midterm rally in Dallas, Trump announced Wednesday that Congress would approve a dividend payment of $5,000 to “every” adult citizen should Republicans keep the House and Senate in November. The president has made at least two other similar promises during his second term, none of which have been implemented. “Of course they didn’t know. No one knew it was coming. The Republicans on the Hill I talk to were not kept in the loop on this,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the president of the American Action Forum and former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “It’s a bad idea. There’s no need for it economically and it looks desperate politically.” Notwithstanding the fact that it would cost $1.2 trillion JD Vance defended Trump’s proposal as a “dividend for American workers,” adding it was a way to help Americans “share in some of the benefit of this incredible wealth that we’re creating in the United States.” Anthony Scaramucci speaking on The News Agents podcast yesterday did say that unfortunately that kind of promise from Trump would land with the very people that Trump wants to vote for them, the kind of people that bought his meme bitcoin at 100 dollars from which he personally earned millions ahead of it crashing to less than $2! Of course he’s not going to pay anyone but that’s not the point – it sounds like he is thinking of the struggles of the working American and can distract from the fact that he is the cause of those struggles; tariffs, Iran, tax cuts for millionaires, cuts in medicaid etc etc etc. The White House announced Thursday that roughly 1 million Americans would be getting $500 rebates starting in “a few weeks” to offset excessive Affordable Care Act fees. Trump has promised Americans a dividend, rebate, or check 15 times since returning to office, and none of those have materialized, according to a tally by Groundwork Collaborative, a left-leaning organization. Elizabeth Pancotti, the organization’s vice president for policy, advocacy and research noted that “American voters can add their $5,000 checks to the growing list of empty promises from the president, right below lower prices and a cap on credit card interest rates.” 
• Quick recap for anyone who missed us talking about it in episode 195: Alaska’s Senate race features incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan, trailing Democrat Mary Peltola in the polls, and also on the ballot, a retired fifth-grade teacher from Petersburg, also named Dan Sullivan, whom incumbent, Dan S. Sullivan insists is a secret Democratic plant sent to steal his votes, a claim retired-teacher Dan J. Sullivan denies. Well, on August 18th, both Dans made it through the State’s open primary and advanced to the general election in November. Mary Peltola, got 49.5% of the vote, Dan S. Sullivan 41.4%, and Dan J. Sullivan came in a distant third with 2.5%. That was enough to piss Trump off, grumbling that the Alaska Supreme Court had sided with him staying on the ballot, saying “I don’t know how the judges are ruling it, but it really is terrible”, because the law disagreeing with Trump is both unacceptable and a daily occurrence. Apparently, they’re worried enough about him to ramp up the legal action, with NBC News reporting on the same day, based on unnamed sources, that the DOJ had issued grand jury subpoenas in their Dan Sullivan investigation. Then, just as things could not possibly get more confusing, the Dans multiplied. A THIRD Dan Sullivan entered the race, sort of, without actually entering the race, because this Dan Sullivan, former Anchorage mayor Dan A. Sullivan, already ran for Senate himself back in 2016 against Lisa Murkowski. Had he won, both US Senators for Alaska would have been called Dan Sullivan, but sadly, he withdrew for mysterious unexplained reasons, and has now resurfaced purely to endorse Dan S. Sullivan over Dan J. Sullivan, branding himself, and I promise I’m not making this up, “the OG Dan Sullivan,” posting on Facebook “As the OG Dan Sullivan, I urge Alaskans to vote for Senator Daniel S. Sullivan. He’s been great for Alaska.” I don’t know what kind of sway Dan A. Sullivan has, since he’s not a Mayor any more, he’s just an ordinary guy named Dan Sullivan who crawled out of political retirement because he felt the sudden, uncontrollable urge to publicly rank his fellow Dans Sullivan on Facebook. And in case you’re wondering whether challenger Dan Sullivan finds any of this even slightly funny, he doesn’t, telling reporters flatly, “It’s my name, my grandfather’s name: Dan Sullivan. My dad’s name: Dan Sullivan,” which is either the most Alaska sentence ever spoken, or the setup to a horror comedy about a bloodline that only produces one name, forever, regardless of the consequences to future elections. Dan S. Sullivan doesn’t think it’s funny either, but we still do, and so, apparently, does the Atlantic, who found multiple other Alaskan Dans Sullivan and asked them what they thought about it. Both Dan K. Sullivan, a mechanic from Wasilla, and Dan P. Sullivan, a teacher from Nome, agree that it’s pretty funny, but neither they or the other Dans seem to be particularly invested in the outcome. Somewhere in a windowless room in Alaska, Mary Peltola’s staffers are debating whether she should change her name to Dan Sullivan to get in on the action. Don’t do it Mary!
• As we know Nigel Farage’s Reform Party – sorry private company – purports to be all about Patriotism and the residents of Engerland first before anyone not from Engerland, certainly when it comes to providing housing say, or withholding support from the welfare state. So it’s a bit confusing when the same party was on the receiving end of a £39 million donation this week from one Ben Delo whose BitMEX crypto company happily took on people and money from outside of their home country i.e. Iran. and changed the origination of that money to avoid being seen to be breaking sanctions in place against Iran. In 2022, the Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced that Delo and his BitMEX committed Bank Secrecy Act violation for “willfully failing to establish, implement, and maintain an anti-money laundering (‘AML’) program at BitMEX“. Delo was sentenced to 30 months’ probation, inevitably Trump pardoned him in 2025. So that’s all good for Reform and the UK hey! Not wishing to look like a skinflint by only bunging Farage the £5 million, Crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne matched that £39 million with £39 million of his own. In other patriotic action one Danny Tommo, or Daniel Thomas as grown-ups would call him, former bodyguard of Tommy Robinson or Stephen Yaxley-Lennon as people grown tired of his pretending not to be a jail-dodging grifter would call him, led his Patriot Platform made up of young men of fighting age all dressed in Black Shorts as a kind of sawn-off Oswald Mosely tribute act, and balaclava face-coverings to the port of Dover. There they held up traffic in and out of the terminal frightening women and children going about their daily business in a protest at Muslim men of fighting age coming over here covering the faces of their women and frightening the locals going about their daily business. No, the irony was lost on them. They moved the next day to Portsmouth to intercept a small boat landing with asylum seekers who’d desperately made the perilous crossing of the English channel, and then started having a go at the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat institution) who had to go into the sea to rescue some of the patriots who got into difficulties in the water. One suspects they never learned to swim or appreciate the water-retaining qualities of balaclava wool or the help given when the RNLI put up floodlights to help people get out of the sea safely, – or never even learned to read. Especially since the RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind) had to post online “We are not the lifeboat people” in response to veiled – no doubt by balaclavas – threats. No arrests were made at either port whilst proscribed pro-Palestine Action protesting pensioners still languished in jail. Makes you proud to be Engerlish – no it doesn’t it makes you sick of the whole fucking manufactured culture war perpetuated by far-right millionaires to distract people from taking to the streets to storm their palaces and bank accounts as the actual source of the inequalities in this fucking country!!

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