Brendan Nyhan

Here are my posts today on The Horse’s Mouth:
–Newsweek flags Bush straw man rhetoric
–Two liberal bloggers politicize a suicide

Note to Brendan-haters and group polarization scholars: Don’t miss the comments on the second post or the Atrios comment threads here and here. The similarities to the Free Republic thread on my first Spinsanity column about Ann Coulter are striking.

Here are my posts on The Horse’s Mouth yesterday:
–Bad Times coverage of Bush speech reaction
–Fox News Watch host: Bias exaggerated
–The myth of the White House PR offensive

Via Michael Crowley at TNR, here’s another disturbing anecdote about College Republicans:

The College Republicans have other ideas, some not quite as mainstream as parading popular politicians.

Morgan Wilkins, the intern hired by the Republican National Committee to win the hearts and minds of Michigan 20-somethings, is planning events that some may find odd. To others, they may be offensive.

One such idea is “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day,” in which a volunteer would play the part of an illegal immigrant and hide somewhere on campus while others try to find him. The winner would receive a prize.

Her other ideas include an event called “Fun with Guns,” in which young Republicans would use a BB gun or paintball gun to shoot cardboard cut-outs of Democratic leaders such as Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.)

For more uplifting stories about the organization that trains many top Republican politicians and operatives, see here, here, and here.

Via Wonkette, here’s one of those special moments that make you proud of the men and women who represent us in the nation’s capital:

C-SPAN is a national treasure.

Josh Marshall points to the latest in a long sequence of post-9/11 smears suggesting that Democrats are traitors. According to the New York Times, House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) “wondered aloud at a news conference ‘whether Democrats are more interested in protecting the terrorists than protecting the American people.’”

I’ve updated my timeline of attacks on dissent since 9/11 to include Boehner’s statement; it’s posted below the fold. (If you can think of ones that are missing, please let me know.)

Update 9/13 6:39 AM: The AP provides the full quote:

“I wonder if they are more interested in protecting the terrorists than protecting the American people,” said House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio. “They certainly do not want to take the terrorists on and defeat them.”

I’ve updated the timeline accordingly.

(more…)

I’ve been remiss in failing to link to Stuart Taylor’s Slate takedown of the recent New York Times article hyping the prosecution’s side of the Duke lacrosse case (which Steve Verdon pointed out in a comment on my post about the article).

Here are the money grafs:

The Wilson-Glater piece highlights every superficially incriminating piece of evidence in the case, selectively omits important exculpatory evidence, and reports hotly disputed statements by not-very-credible police officers and the mentally unstable accuser as if they were established facts. With comical credulity, it features as its centerpiece a leaked, transparently contrived, 33-page police sergeant’s memo that seeks to paper over some of the most obvious holes in the prosecution’s evidence.

This memo was concocted from memory, nearly four months after the underlying witness interviews, by Durham police Sgt. Mark Gottlieb, the lead investigator. Gottlieb says he took no contemporaneous notes, an inexplicable and indefensible police practice. Gottlieb had drawn fire before the alleged Duke rape—perhaps unbeknownst to the Times—as a Dukie-basher who reveled in throwing kids into jail for petty drinking infractions, noise violations, and the like, sometimes with violent criminals as cellmates.

Gottlieb’s memo is contradicted on critical points by the contemporaneous notes of other police officers, as well as by hospital records seeming to show that the accuser did not have the injuries Gottlieb claims to have observed. The Times blandly mentions these contradictions while avoiding the obvious inference that the Gottlieb memo is thus unworthy of belief.

In related news, the Duke Chronicle has published an article about student charges of misconduct against Gottlieb in previous incidents:

Gottlieb has occasionally used violent tactics and misrepresented the truth in court, students who he has arrested allege.

Gottlieb also jailed students for noise violations while allowing a non-student charged with the more serious charge of carrying a concealed weapon to walk away with a citation, according to his documented arrest history.

Here are my posts on The Horse’s Mouth yesterday:
–An experiment in Times corrections
–Sloppy New York Times errors

Here are my posts on The Horse’s Mouth yesterday:
–Longest disclaimer ever
–Twisting criticism of “The Path to 9/11”
–David Brooks needs wonk assistance

Here are my posts from The Horse’s Mouth on Thursday and Friday:
–MRC protests changes to inaccurate 9/11 docudrama
–Limbaugh calls war critics unpatriotic
–The pros and cons of Times Select
–Rauch uses Coulter as baseline for partisanship
–Typo alert
–ABC’s “Path to 9/11” teaching material promotes Iraq WMD misperception

Duke University (where I’m a graduate student) is holding a series of events commemorating the fifth anniversary of 9/11 that includes two movies about the war in Iraq:

The following events, which are all free and open to the public, will be held at Duke University to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks:

…A three-day film series, sponsored by several Duke units, will be held. The first film, “Underexposure,” is the first feature made on location in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It will be shown at 8 p.m. Sept. 11 at the Richard White Lecture Hall, on Duke’s East Campus.

…On Sept. 13, “Iraq in Fragments” will be shown beginning at 8 p.m. in the Griffith Film Theater. The award-winning documentary looks at the war in Iraq from Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish viewpoints.

The Bush administration has managed to confuse millions of Americans about this, but there is no credible evidence linking Iraq to 9/11. So why show films about the Iraq war on the anniversary of the attacks? Shouldn’t one of the nation’s leading universities be trying to correct this misperception rather than holding events that reinforce the linkage?

Update 9/10 2:32 PM: Commenters are suggesting that the Iraq war is the result of 9/11, so the program may be appropriate. But there is good evidence that the Bush administration wanted to go into Iraq long before 9/11. The Iraq war was sold using 9/11, but it was not a direct or necessary result of the terrorist attacks (like the war in Afghanistan), so I still object to the linkage.