The Washington Post’s Philip Bump predictably does the best analysis of this “both sides” excuses for the “classified documents” story: Look, when there’s no need for your rhetoric not to be lazy, you land on lazy rhetoric. If you can carry the day — at least with those who you’re most worried about convincing — with little effort or logical consistency, why bother putting in the effort or assembling that consistency? If your target audience hasn’t even heard the nuances that undercut your point, why bother rebutting those nuances? So it is that we enter our second (third? Who can keep track) week of apologists for former president Donald Trump seeking to equate his effort to retain documents sought by the government with a clutch of documents with classification markings found at President Biden’s home and an office he used. Despite the ongoing incomparability of the situations, the relentless, overlapping desires to curry Trump’s favor and to appeal to his loyal followers by echoing his rhetoric has generated a new series of arguments from Republicans, encapsulated over the weekend in a revealing demand. Where, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) demanded to know, are the visitor logs from Biden’s personal residence? To which the White House responded, in short: It’s a house. Before we adjudicate that demand — and show the failings of Comer’s efforts to defend the request — let’s take a thousand-foot look at the situation. In November, attorneys working for Biden discovered documents with classification markings at an…