Whodunit?

Oh, my, the outrage.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis kicked the Democratic hornet's nest into peak outrage by flying two score and ten migrants to the bluest of blue-blood enclaves, Martha's Vineyard. The land of the Kennedys, where Teddy, "The Lion of the Senate," left Mary Jo Kopechne to drown some 53 years ago, exhibited a level of pique not seen since their pristine ocean views were threatened by offshore windmills.

• Joe Biden accused DeSantis of "playing politics with people’s lives."

• The local chamber of commerce declared it a "humanitarian crisis."

• George Takei: "Maybe we should put Ron DeSantis on a chartered plane to a far off island."

• Keith Olbermann: "It was kidnapping, and Human Trafficking. These are federal crimes. The sentence is five years - per victim.

• Gavin Newsom: "I’m formally requesting the DOJ begin an immediate investigation into these inhumane efforts to use kids as political pawns."

• Brian Tyler Cohen: "Wow. An immigration attorney just exposed Ron DeSantis’ multi-million dollar human trafficking scheme and it’s even worse than it sounds."

• The Nation: "Let’s Call DeSantis’s Migrant Stunt What It Is—Kidnapping."

• Press Secretary Karine Jeanne-Pierre: "[treating migrants like] chattel in a cruel, pre-meditated political stunt"

• Congressman Bill Keating: "History does not look kindly on leaders who treat human beings like cargo, loading them up and sending them a thousand miles away without telling them their destination."

There are many more.

Thing is, just this spring, the Administration, under cover of night, flew multiple planeloads of migrants to Westchester County in New York. And elsewhere. This is apparently "routine," as apologists and 'fact-checkers' insist.

If the routine movement of migrants from overwhelmed southern communities is no big deal, then why the cover of night? If redistributing (Bernie Sanders' favorite word) the burden created by the unchecked influx of migrants across the southern border to northern regions is standard operating procedure, then the feds should be happy that someone else is paying for some of that transport (Florida state funds were used for the MV flight). If cities and localities designate themselves as "sanctuaries" against migrant deportation by the Feds, shouldn't they welcome those they wish to protect?

Yes, these and more are rhetorical questions.

Welcome to the world of policy relativism, where who does something informs us of whether it's Good or Bad. In the world of logic, this is akin to a Genetic Fallacy or Fallacy of Origins, wherein the truth of something is judged by its source rather than its content. Here we witness the judgment of an action's morality by the political affiliation of its initiator.

It's an extension of what I've concluded is the prime mover in modern Democratic policy: If Trump or the Republicans did something, the only proper course of action is to undo it and do the opposite. Judgment by "whodunit."

We are all susceptible to genetic fallacy. Who among us doesn't allow the source of an article, or the utterer of a quote, to influence whether we consider the contents? We, as individuals, are capable of overcoming that bias with just a bit of willpower - but more importantly, we are just individuals, not people in positions of power, authority, or influence. We aren't self-styled or self-appointed arbiters of "good" and "bad," and vitally, critics can call us out for doing so.

As we should criticize those who engage in it.

That the Democrats are red-faced dyspeptic over DeSantis's stunt - and, yes, it's a stunt, fifty migrants is noise - is bald-faced hypocrisy. The stunt was a good one, and accomplished exactly what it was intended to. We witness both the Left's NIMBYism and their style of "do elsewhere," and it affirms that the people who make the most noise about overbalancing society in the name of "equity" don't want their enclaves sullied in the process. The plaints that MV didn't have the infrastructure to handle them ring terribly hollow when the government is shipping migrants to small towns that have neither the resources nor the wealth to handle them.

This is yet another example of the naked, unabashed tribalism that has become the baseline in our politics. It's one of the unusual cases where whataboutism is a valid rebuttal. As an old English proverb tells us, "what's good for the goose is good for the gander." As Saul Alinsky taught us, "make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." And, "ridicule is man's most potent weapon."

It is beyond ridiculous that the woke-scolds of MV had the National Guard mobilized to deal with 50 migrants, and while "gotcha" politics is base and unseemly, it's sometimes the best (or only) way to break through the cultural dominators' wall. That we have people who claim to be "journalists" demanding that the governor of Florida be charged with human trafficking for giving some people an airplane ride (does Biden also get charged?) shows us how unseriously we should take those scolds - and how ready they are to debase and devalue concern over a real and horrible problem (actual human trafficking, aka sex-slavery) with an expedient conflation in order to make their moral outrage known.

That "whodunit" matters as much as it does is the unfortunate lesson here. We should be better than that, we should judge policies on their merits and not on their originators. We are perfectly within propriety to ask, "why is it OK when you do it, but not OK when someone else does it?"

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