I hate to see this happening. I hate to see Republicans raising unconnected issues, and often in untruthful ways, to distract from real problems.

Rhetorically speaking, that’s kind of more “dead cat" than “both sides.” A dead-cat attack in rhetoric is about distracting. Throw a dead cat on the table, and it’ll smell so bad nobody will notice the stench coming from the defective argument.

Not that this matters a great deal, but I think the examples you raise are kind of combinations of both-sidesism and dead-catism, maybe leaning more to the dead cat.

I mean, Antifa is a classic dead cat. As is raising Afghanistan in response to an unconnected issue.

True bothsides-ism in rhetoric would be something more like presenting “both sides" of the flat Earth argument or of anthropological climate change, even though only one set of arguments has genuine validity.

It’s interesting that in the British press, dead-catting is called out all the time, while we Americans don’t usually recognize it as a separate phenomenon in misleading journalism.

Anyway, the point of your article is critical regardless of what we call it, and I don’t mean to distract from that. I’m kind of a nerd. Sorry.