Ugh. Then conservative pundit at Townhall writes, “JD Vance Absolutely Wrecked an Anti-Trump Commentator Over This Trump White House Post.“
No, Matt, that is not a witty, persuasive or devastating reply to poor, useless Bill Kristol’s tweet. Vance’s retort is the equivalent of “Oh, yeah? Well, your mother is fat!” or You suck!” or “Your favorite President, Bush, would make an even worse Pope!” Or George Costanza’s immortal, “Oh, yeah? Well, I had sex with your wife!”
True, there are some mitigating elements here. Vance, as Veep, is obligated to defend the President even when Trump’s words or conduct are indefensible. It is also true that Bill Kristol, who became so Trump-Deranged that he has turned against principles his entire career was dedicated to advocating and defending, is such an embarrassment that the response he deserves would be, “Bill, nobody cares what you think about anything any more, including me. Go away.”
But Vance resorting to flagrant deflection and “whataboutism” further corrupts civic discourse by endorsing logical fallacies and rationalizations. And for Vespa to cheer such lazy argumentation on compounds the sin.
Ethics Alarms 
I have a brief, and probably grossly wrong, take on Vance’s comment to Kristol. In the area of debate over various topics, one question that often crops up is what kind of evidence it would take to make someone change his mind. For example, what evidence would I need to stop believing that Catholicism is true? Or one could pose to an atheist, what evidence would you accept that would lead you to believe atheism is wrong? If Kristol is attempting to shake Vance’s confidence or trust in Trump, he failed, but Vance’s reply, rather than being whataboutism, should be taken as what it would take for him to lose confidence in Trump. Going forward, I would use that tweet against Vance if Trump did eventually start a stupid war that killed thousands of our countrymen. Granted, just as I would probably fight tooth and nail against examples of Church doctrine flatly contradicting other Church doctrine, Vance would probably point to any future conflict as either not stupid, or started by someone else. But now we have a metric by which to judge Vance’s authenticity.