Brendan Nyhan

In addition to advocating restrictions on freedom of speech, Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House and current presidential candidate, is bemoaning the meanness of today’s politics:

Political parties in Presidential primary states should host events that invite candidates from both parties to discuss issues, said Gingrich, who criticized the sharpness of today’s politics.

Just remember, this is the same man whose political action committee, GOPAC, circulated a document to Republicans titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” intended to help them “speak like Newt.” It urges them to refer to their opponents using “contrast” words such as “anti- (issue): flag, family, child, jobs,” “betray,” “corrupt,” “endanger,” “lie,” “pathetic,” “radical,” “shame,” “sick,” “steal,” “threaten,” and “traitors.”

Indeed, his efforts to make the Republican Party more vicious date back to his successful run for Congress in 1978 (his third), in which he said this during a speech to College Republicans:

I think that one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire, but are lousy in politics.

So don’t listen when Newt complains about today’s discourse. He’s shedding crocodile tears.

Via Power Line, Hot Air features video of Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings getting spanked on Celebrity Jeopardy. She was more than $20,000 behind at the start of Final Jeopardy — ouch.

But that’s still not as bad as Christie Todd Whitman’s Final Jeopardy answer. Here’s what I wrote last year:

The final Jeopardy question asked how many members of the Senate there were in 1958. Now, the only possible answers that make sense are 96, 98, and 100 given that the only two states that had not entered the Union by World War I were Alaska and Hawaii. Whitman’s guess? 46. Yes, that would mean there were 23 states in the Union in 1958 — something that was true in … 1820-1821. It doesn’t even make sense if she thought each state had one senator. (Correct answer: 96. Alaska and Hawaii entered in 1959.) Time to go back to civics class, Governor.

It didn’t end up mattering, though — Whitman was ahead by so much that she won anyway. Spellings, by contrast, went down to defeat.

PS Has anyone noticed how much time the Bush cabinet secretaries have on their hands? First Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez waited in line for an hour to get Doris Kearns Goodwin to sign his book, and now the Secretary of Education is on Jeopardy. Doesn’t anyone have, you know, work to do?

Via Atrios (can’t find the link), the pathologies of the Washington pundit class in one paragraph — Richard Cohen admits he supported the war in Iraq because he thought “the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic”:

On the contrary, I thought. We are a good country, attempting to do a good thing. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic. The United States had the power to change things for the better, and those who would do the changing — the fighting — were, after all, volunteers. This mattered to me.

There were legitimate reasons to support the Iraq war before the fact, but feeling better about ourselves after 9/11 is not one of them.

Writing on Tapped, Mark Schmitt is the latest pundit to succumb to pointless third-party speculation, writing that it’s “quite obvious” that McCain and Lieberman will mount a third-party presidential campaign:

It’s tempting to make fun of Marshall Wittmann’s newest guise, as Lieberman’s communications director, as if it were just another twist in one of the oddest careers in Washington. The New York Times has some fun with that theme today.

However, it’s quite obvious where this is going. John McCain will fail to win the Republican nomination, and he and Lieberman will turn up as a third party presidential ticket. They will have a great shtick: “We were each rejected by the ideological extremists in our parties, therefore we represent the true forgotten center of American politics.” The Broders of the world will salivate over the possibility.

Except, of course, it will not be a centrist party. It will be the Neoconservative party, with Lieberman having taken that angry turn and McCain already there. And both are rank opportunists, for whom “straight talk” is an empty slogan.

There are many ways this could go wrong, but be aware: someone is certainly thinking about it.

Understatement of the year: “There are many ways this could go wrong.” No kidding. For instance, McCain would have to not win the GOP nomination and he and Lieberman would both have to give up any allegiance to their parties, which would cast them out as traitors. More importantly, they would have to decide to run despite the near-impossible obstacles posed by the public’s partisan loyalties, the structure of the Electoral College, the need to raise tens of millions of dollars to mount a plausible campaign, and their lack of any voter mobilization infrastructure. Other than that, it’s “quite obvious” that they’ll run! (For more, see my previous posts on unrealistic third party speculation.)

I’m currently visiting family in California, so posts are going to be intermittent until next week…

Andrew Sullivan catches the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer dissembling about the motivations for the Iraq war in his latest column, where he writes:

Our objectives in Iraq were twofold and always simple: Depose Saddam Hussein and replace his murderous regime with a self-sustaining, democratic government.

As Sullivan notes, however, something is missing from this list:

What’s missing from this assessment? No mention of weapons of mass destruction. Is this central argument made by the president and by the secretary of state at the U.N. now to be airbrushed from history? Is this a mere oversight on Charles’ part? Or is he now revealing that he never believed the WMD rationale in the first place? If so, a little clarification might be in order.

A review of Krauthammer’s columns from 2002-2003 shows that he certainly did believe that Iraq had WMD. In fact, he cited the alleged intersection of WMD and links to terrorists as the key reason for the war. Here’s a chronology of Krauthammer’s statements about Iraq, WMD, and the reasons for war:

2/1/02:
Iraq is Hitlerian Germany, a truly mad police state with external ambitions and a menacing arsenal.

4/19/02:
Saddam survived, rearmed, defeated the inspections regime and is now back in the business of building weapons of mass destruction.

…Time is running short. Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. He is working on nuclear weapons. And he has every incentive to pass them on to terrorists who will use them against us. We cannot hold the self-defense of the United States hostage to the solving of a century-old regional conflict.

9/13/02:
Kissinger says that regime change in Iraq is an appropriate goal. The point he made in his syndicated column, and which he continues to make, is that in its “declaratory policy” — i.e., public posture — the United States should emphasize weapons destruction rather than regime change in order to garner allies for the war. But our actual policy is to achieve both. After all, the goals are inseparable. Given the nature of Hussein’s rule, destroying these weapons requires regime change.

9/20/02:
The vice president, followed by the administration A Team and echoing the president, argues that we must remove from power an irrational dictator who has a history of aggression and mass murder, is driven by hatred of America and is developing weapons of mass destruction that could kill millions of Americans in a day. The Democrats respond with public skepticism, a raised eyebrow and the charge that the administration has yet to “make the case.”

10/4/02:
How far the Democrats have come. Forty years ago to the month, President Kennedy asserts his willingness to present his case to the United Nations, but also his determination not to allow the United Nations to constrain America’s freedom of action. Today his brother, a leader of the same party, awaits the guidance of the United Nations before he will declare himself on how America should respond to another nation threatening the United States with weapons of mass destruction.

10/7/02:
Hawks favor war on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is reckless, tyrannical and instinctively aggressive, and that if he comes into possession of nuclear weapons in addition to the weapons of mass destruction he already has, he is likely to use them or share them with terrorists. The threat of mass death on a scale never before seen residing in the hands of an unstable madman is intolerable — and must be preempted.

11/1/02:
[W]hy does the president, who is pledged to disarming Hussein one way or the other, allow Powell even to discuss a scheme that is guaranteed to leave Saddam Hussein’s weapons in place?

11/15/02:
President Bush remains apparently sincere in his determination to rid the world of Hussein and his weapons.

1/24/03:
The president cannot logically turn back. He says repeatedly, and rightly, that inspectors can only verify a voluntary disarmament. They are utterly powerless to force disarmament on a regime that lies, cheats and hides. And having said, again correctly, that the possession of weapons of mass destruction by Hussein is an intolerable threat to the security of the United States, there is no logical way to rationalize walking away from Iraq — even if the president wanted to.

1/31/03:
Blix never really found anything big in his scavenger hunt through Iraq, but he reported to the Security Council that Iraq’s regime had failed to cooperate and disarm.

Under Resolution 1441, that is a material breach. It is a casus belli.

2/14/03:
On Sept. 11, 2001, the cozy illusions and stupid pretensions died. We now recognize the central problem of the 21st century: the conjunction of terrorism, rogue states and weapons of mass destruction.

3/12/03:
The reason you [President Bush] were able to build support at home and rally the world to at least pretend to care about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction is that you showed implacable resolve to disarm Iraq one way or the other. Your wobbles at the United Nations today — postponing the vote, renegotiating the terms — are undermining the entire enterprise.

6/13/03:
The inability to find the weapons is indeed troubling, but only because it means that the weapons remain unaccounted for and might be in the wrong hands. The idea that our inability to thus far find the weapons proves that the threat was phony and hyped is simply false.

The most damning, however, is his July 18, 2003 column on the reasons President Bush went to war, which explicitly cites the risk of Saddam acquiring WMD and passing them to terrorists, not the need to create democracy:

The charge is that the president was looking for excuses to go to war with Hussein and that the weapons-of-mass-destruction claims were just a pretense.

Aside from the fact that Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction was posited not only by Bush but also by just about every intelligence service on the planet (including those of countries that opposed war as the solution), one runs up against this logical conundrum: Why then did Bush want to go to war? For fun and recreation? Because of some cowboy compulsion?

…On the contrary, the war was a huge political gamble. There was no popular pressure to go to war. There was even less foreign pressure to go to war. Bush decided to stake his presidency on it nonetheless, knowing that if things went wrong — and indeed they might still — his political career was finished.

It is obvious he did so because he thought that, post-9/11, it was vital to the security of the United States that Hussein be disarmed and deposed.

Under what analysis? That Iraq posed a clear and imminent danger, a claim now being discounted by the critics because of the absence thus far of weapons of mass destruction?

No. That was not the president’s case. It was, on occasion, Tony Blair’s, and that is why Blair is in such political trouble in Britain. But in Bush’s first post-9/11 State of the Union address (January 2002), he framed Iraq as part of a larger and more enduring problem, the overriding threat of our time: the conjunction of terrorism, terrorist states and weapons of mass destruction. And unless something was done, we faced the prospect of an infinitely more catastrophic 9/11 in the future.

Later that year, in a speech to the United Nations, he spoke of the danger from Iraq not as “clear and present” but “grave and gathering,” an obvious allusion to Churchill’s “gathering storm,” the gradually accumulating threat that preceded the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. And then nearer the war, in his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush plainly denied that the threat was imminent. “Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent.” Bush was, on the contrary, calling for action precisely when the threat was not imminent because, “if this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions . . . would come too late.”

The threat had not yet even fully emerged, Bush was asserting, but nonetheless it had to be faced because it would only get worse. Hussein was not going away. The sanctions were not going to restrain him. Even his death would be no reprieve, as his half-mad sons would take over. The argument was that Hussein had to be removed eventually and that with Hussein relatively weakened, isolated and vulnerable, now would be more prudent and less costly than later.

He was right.

In addition, here’s what Krauthammer wrote on April 2, 2004:

What exactly was the failure? What was Bush supposed to do to prevent Sept. 11? Invade Afghanistan? [Former anti-terrorism official Richard] Clarke has expressed outrage at Bush’s preemptive invasion of Iraq. So: Bush deserves excoriation for preemptively invading Iraq based on massive, universally accepted intelligence of its weapons, to say nothing of its hostility and virulence; and, simultaneously, Bush deserves excoriation for not preemptively attacking Afghanistan on the basis of . . . what? Increased terrorist chatter in the summer of 2001?

The irony is that Krauthammer seems to have a good memory for recycling old material when it suits him. But in this case, apparently, he’s trying to erase his past writings.

One of my mentors at Duke, David Rohde, has an eloquent op-ed in the New York Times about the resurgence of the two major parties. Here’s how it begins:

THE midterm elections have been widely viewed as a sudden change of direction, with Democrats seizing the wheel from Republicans. While that may be true, the big electoral news — news that has gone largely unnoticed — is this: After decades of weakness, after sideswipes from independent candidates, the two major parties are back. Indeed, they are more potent and influential than at any time in the past century.

I’ve written before about the problems with journalistic mind–reading and story-telling “analysis” about the president’s visual appearance. Via a journalist to remain nameless, here’s an especially egregious example of both from Newsweek’s Evan Thomas:

At his post-election press conference, the president looked like a base runner trapped in a rundown, unable to go forward or scurry back. The president is probably stuck—he will have to embrace some kind of compromise approach on Iraq. He didn’t look too happy about it. As he japed and mugged and fidgeted, he seemed worried by something more than Iraq or the election returns; his whole character appeared to be wrestling with some more personal, inner demon.

Newsweek should run a disclaimer if it’s going to publish this kind of garbage journalism. I have a suggestion — just put this next to the offending text:

According to the Hotline On Call blog, Rep. Adam Putnam, a candidate for Republican conference chair in the House, cited a lack of turnout among “white rednecks who go to church on Sunday” as one of the factors contributing to the party’s midterm losses:

“White rednecks” who “didn’t show up to vote for us” partly cost GOPers their cong. majorities, Rep. Adam Putnam (R-FL) told fellow Republicans today. And Putnam, seeking the post of GOP conference chair, chided ex-Chair J.C. Watts (R-OK) for ruining the conference’s ability to serve its members.

Three Republicans in the room independently confirmed to the Hotline the substance and context of Putnam’s remarks. But Putnam’s chief of staff insists that the remarks were taken out of context.

Examining the 2006 midterms, Putnam blamed the GOP defeat on “the independent vote, the women vote, the suburban vote.” He said that “heck, even the white rednecks who go to church on Sunday didn’t come out to vote for us.”

The “context” that Putnam’s chief of staff cited as a defense is laughable:

Putnam’s chief of staff, John Hambel, said his boss has used the word “redneck” only in the context of sharing polling data from last week’s elections. Hambel said Putnam was listing off different constituencies and ended with saying: “Heck, we even had rednecks who go to church who didn’t come out to vote.”

Is “redneck” part of the polling data?

Meanwhile, Tapped’s Ezra Klein had the same reaction I did — if a Democrat had said this, all hell would have broken loose:

Imagine if Nancy Pelosi uttered the same remark, then compare that imaginary firestorm with the one likely to result from Putnam’s comments. It’s all well and good to argue that Democrats carry seeds of elite condescension towards low-income whites. What’s foolish is to think the GOP’s powerbrokers aren’t precisely as disconnected, though with a heapin’ helpin’ of opportunism and exploitation thrown in for good measure.

The reason for the double standard is that the imaginary Pelosi remark would have reinforced the stereotype of Democrats as elitists who condescend toward poor whites and religious people, whereas the Putnam remark does not reinforce any such stereotype of Republicans. But after the revelations in David Kuo’s book Tempting Faith, isn’t it time to revise this set of stereotypes? Shouldn’t we be offended when any politician uses the term “redneck”?

For an administration that micromanages its photo opportunities, going to Vietnam right now has to hurt:

Thirty-eight years later, at age 60, Mr. Bush finally arrived in Vietnam Friday morning. His motorcade sped into the city past roads that Americans once bombed, at the start of a 72-hour visit linked to an annual Asian summit meeting that the Communist government in Vietnam is playing host to for the first time.

In private, some White House officials concede it is spectacularly poor timing. Just as Lyndon B. Johnson did in 1968, Mr. Bush has ousted his longtime defense secretary and nominated a realist with “fresh eyes” to replace him. Just like President Johnson in 1968, he is conducting a broad rethinking of strategy, and is hearing options he does not like.

His aides argue that the analogies between these wars are mostly false. The comparisons will nonetheless be the unavoidable subtext of Mr. Bush’s every move as he travels in Hanoi and then stops in the city that in his youth was known as Saigon, and that became the scene of an American military debacle. And he will have to convince his allies, ordinary Americans, and perhaps himself, that Iraq will end differently.

Maybe they’ll put up one of those repeating-word backdrops with “Iraq is not Vietnam” on it…