Russia and America Aren't Morally Equivalent

Two muffins are sitting in an oven, baking. One muffin turns to the other and says: “Is it just me, or is it getting really hot in here?”  The second muffin turns to the first and says: “Holy cow, a talking muffin!”

This joke is funny, the blogger Aaron M. Brown explains, because it commits a logical fallacy “and then immediately turns around and calls itself on it.” Ascribing qualities to an object that can’t possibly possess them is known as a “category error”—in this case the quality of talking belongs to the category of humans, not to the category of food. Conflating things from different categories can lead sometimes to witty wordplay, but also to sloppy analysis and confusion.

So it is when commentators assert that Russian meddling in U.S. elections is ultimately not different from what the U.S. has long been doing abroad. “As for Russian trolling in our election,” the right-wing isolationist Pat Buchanan recently, “do we really have clean hands when it comes to meddling in elections and a of 117 known instances between 1946 and 2000 when either Moscow or Washington intervened overtly or covertly to affect the outcome of elections in other countries—and finds that more often in that period it was the Americans who did the meddling. (Such meddling could take a wide range of forms, from releasing false rumors or fake emails to damage on one side; to public statements of U.S. support for an incumbent or challenger; to the provision of money or technicians to help one side in the campaign.)