Brendan Nyhan

I missed this, but on Monday, President Bush again denied linking Iraq and 9/11:

Mr. President, at the beginning of your talk today you mentioned that you understand why Americans have had their confidence shaken by the events in Iraq. And I’d like to ask you about events that occurred three years ago that might also explain why confidence has been shaken. Before we went to war in Iraq we said there were three main reasons for going to war in Iraq: weapons of mass destruction, the claim that Iraq was sponsoring terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11, and that Iraq had purchased nuclear materials from Niger. All three of those turned out to be false. My question is, how do we restore confidence that Americans may have in their leaders and to be sure that the information they are getting now is correct?

THE PRESIDENT: That’s a great question. First, just if I might correct a misperception. I don’t think we ever said — at least I know I didn’t say that there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein. We did say that he was a state sponsor of terror — by the way, not declared a state sponsor of terror by me, but declared by other administrations. We also did say that Zarqawi, the man who is now wreaking havoc and killing innocent life, was in Iraq. And so the state sponsor of terror was a declaration by a previous administration. But I don’t want to be argumentative, but I was very careful never to say that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks on America.

Bush was very careful about not saying that Saddam “ordered the attacks,” but he and his adminstration constantly linked Iraq and 9/11 in their public statements, helping to create a massive misperception among the American public. Here’s a classic example from Bush’s October 7, 2002 speech that is featured in the book:

We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy — the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein’s regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America.

As we wrote: “The statement bracketed assertions about operational contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda with broad rhetoric suggesting that their shared dislike for the U.S. meant that they were somehow allied. More important, it muddled the blame for September 11, suggesting that the Iraqi government was somehow connected to the attacks because it ‘gleefully celebrated’ them.”

(See All the President’s Spin, pages 177-84 and 207-216, for more.)

Ben Domenech is the new “Red America” blogger at WashingtonPost.com. He was apparently hired to balance the allegedly liberal slant of Dan Froomkin.

I have a little history with Domenech. As a reader reminded me by email, I debunked a false quotation he published in a defense of President Bush’s false “trifecta” story on Spinsanity back in 2002:

Blogger Ben Domenech claims to have proof that President Bush said he would run deficits in times of war during a debate with other candidates for the Republican nomination, but it’s not true — and even if it was, it doesn’t negate the “trifecta” lie Bush has been pushing. Blogger Bill Quick highlights Bush telling Paula Zahn he might run a deficit during a recession, but again it’s not close to sufficient.

First, Domenech. Here’s his key quotation:

“If I ever commit troops, I’m going to do so with one thing in mind, and
that’s to win,” Bush said.

“And spend what it takes? Even if it means deficits?” asked the moderator,
NBC’s Tim Russert.

“Absolutely,” Bush replied, “if we go to war.” (AP, from Boston Globe)

But if you read the full transcript of the debate,
you’ll see that Russert never asks “Even if it means deficits?” (Jason McCullough beat me to this point.) If you want verification, watch the C-SPAN video or read the Boston Globe account. This question is absolutely fictitious. There is no match for Bush AND Russert AND “even if it means
deficits” in the entire Nexis database, and I can’t find the AP article in
question in a Westlaw search for Bush AND “even if it means deficits”
either (though Domenech claims it came from Westlaw)…

Update 6/20 3:40 PM EST: Domenech is pulling back: “I’ve listened to the online version of the NH debate now, and I don’t hear the second part of Russert’s question as printed in the AP article. Considering that most accounts of the debate don’t include this part of the question either, I’m close to believing that the AP article I have is inaccurate. I’ve been taken in by faulty reporting before, but never by the AP. Either way, I’ll post the article tonight.”

Update 6/24 11:09 PM EST: Domenech hasn’t produced the alleged AP article despite requests from me by email and via comments on his site. You can read me debating this issue in the comments on Domenech’s original post, or in the comments below Quick’s post.

Update 7/2 3:09 PM EST: …I’ve been alerted that Domenech posted the alleged AP article (apparently slightly before the above update). I’’ve found two AP articles that mirror parts of his in Nexis, but the key passage, including the fictitious question from Russert, does not appear in any articles in Nexis or Westlaw. Domenech has failed to respond to requests for a Westlaw search that can be duplicated proving its existence, and has not engaged in a serious effort to respond to many other questions raised by myself and others. Given the criticism he initially leveled at others based on this alleged source, this is irresponsible, especially from someone who writes professionally.

Draw your own conclusions…

Update 3/21 10:15 PM EST: On the larger issue of what Domenech’s hiring means, see Josh Marshall:

So, to ‘balance’ Froomkin, who may be a commentator with liberal tendencies, the Post goes out and gets a high octane Republican political activist who hits the ground running with a tirade of Red State America revanchism and even journalism itself.

That’s balance. That’s the Post’s balance.

Managing perceptions is the death of good journalism, especially manufactured perceptions, and even more those manufactured for the easily cowed.

I’m embarrassed for the Post. Embarrassed by the Post.

Their explanation doesn’t cut it. If they want to make a blogger Crossfire with a firebreather on the left and on the right, they should do it. It might even be interesting. But here they’ve just been played by bullies and played for fools.

Jump! How high?

I can think of more than a few actual journalists at the Post who must feel a bit embarrassed too.

Over at TNR’s The Plank, Noam Scheiber quotes from a Fred Barnes article:

One issue that needs to be developed is the economy, according to Blunt. “People take a strong economy for granted. We have to show that this didn’t just happen,” but is the result of Republican policies like tax cuts. Republican candidates will argue that if Democratic policies had been followed, a strong economic recovery would not have occurred. And job creation–243,000 in February–would have been weaker.

Scheiber’s response is to belittle upper income tax cuts as a costly and inefficient economic stimulus:

Barnes–sorry, Blunt–argues that the job number proves the superiority of an economic policy based almost entirely on cutting taxes. As far as I can tell, though, the only thing it proves is that if you’re president and you’re determined to goose the economy for a few years, you can probably do it.

But has Bush really goosed the economy? The evidence we have indicates that this is one of the weakest recoveries of the post-World War II era — here’s Edmund Andrews from the New York Times in January:

Consider jobs, the focus of the Treasury chart. A unique aspect is that the job count continued to fall for 18 months after the 2001 recession ended. The number of jobs in November was up 3.4 percent from the job low 30 months earlier.

That measurement, which is the way the Bush administration chose to look at the data, ranks eighth among the 10 postwar recessions, a fraction ahead of the recovery after the 1990-91 recession, and better than the period after the recession that ended in July 1980, when another recession followed a year later.

Were job growth instead to be measured from the end of the recession, this recovery is the slowest ever, with the job count up 2.6 percent in four years. The previous low was a 4 percent gain in the four years after the 1953-54 downturn.

Any analysis of the recovery after the 2001 recession must ask why huge tax cuts that began in 2001 had so little – and so long delayed – effect.

So why is this some great political issue for Republicans?

In addition, Blunt is claiming the recovery would have been worse if Democratic economic policies had been followed, but that’s just an assertion. As Andrews documents, it’s hard to imagine doing much worse than the current administration. Moreover, the historical evidence indicates that Republican presidents have been less successful at creating jobs than Democrats — Princeton’s Larry Bartels finds that unemployment has been thirty percent lower under Democratic presidents since World War II (PDF).

Scheiber argues credibly that job losses under Bush were largely attributable to structural changes in the US economy. That’s fair enough. But why should we give Republicans credit for a lousy recovery?

Stuart Rothenberg explains why he thinks George Allen’s presidential prospects are in decline:

[T]he Virginia Senator’s White House prospects have been steadily eroding since my first column on this topic one year ago. The reason: President Bush’s reputation has nosedived.

Allen is perfectly positioned as heir to the Ronald Reagan-George W. Bush legacy. The only problem is that the legacy doesn’t look nearly as valuable now as it did as recently as a year ago — even within the GOP.

….Voters often look for a different type of person to fill the White House than the man who served immediately prior. They turned to John F. Kennedy after Dwight Eisenhower. They opted for Bill Clinton after George H.W. Bush. They opted for George W. Bush after Clinton.

If Republican voters decide that eight years of George W. Bush is enough, they may well look for a different kind of person to carry their party’s banner in 2008. And that’s why Allen is no longer the man to beat for the GOP presidential nomination.

I’m skeptical; primary voters will still turn against McCain, I think, given conservative elite support for other candidates. But if things get ugly enough for Bush, anything can happen…

This weekend, I praised the Associated Press story on how President Bush repeatedly attacks straw men. But yesterday I realized that it raises an important question — how did the AP handle those straw men attacks in real time?

The answer is not encouraging. Just like newspapers that credulously report or ignore misleading claims that they later debunk in fact-checking stories, the AP appears to have only cast doubt on one of the Bush quotes in question according to a Nexis search.

Here’s how the article begins:

“Some look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude that the war is lost and not worth another dime or another day,” President Bush said recently.

Another time he said, “Some say that if you’re Muslim you can’t be free.”

“There are some really decent people,” the president said earlier this year, “who believe that the federal government ought to be the decider of health care … for all people.”

Of course, hardly anyone in mainstream political debate has made such assertions.

However, the first quote was taken by the AP as a serious acknowledgment of doubts about the war in its original report:

President Bush asserted Sunday night the United States is winning the war in Iraq but acknowledged setbacks and the doubts of some “that the war is lost and not worth another dime or another day

…Acknowledging doubts about his strategy, Bush said, “Some look at the challenges in Iraq, and conclude that the war is lost, and not worth another dime or another day.

On the other hand, a featured quote about people in the US not believing in the terrorist threat was properly debunked in a January article:

“Officials here learn information about plotters and planners and people who would do us harm,” Bush said, reading from note cards. “Now, I understand there’s some in America who say, ‘Well, this can’t be true there are still people willing to attack.’ All I would ask them to do is listen to the words of Osama bin Laden and take him seriously.”

However, no one in the political debate over the war on terror or the NSA program has suggested that terrorists no longer want to attack the United States. Rather, Bush’s critics have argued that the law requires him to get permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to eavesdrop on communications involving Americans.

Other quotes in the article don’t appear to have been reported by the AP, which is problematic. Shouldn’t it be news when the President of the United States is shadow-boxing with straw men? Of course, all politicians use the straw man tactic, but President Bush has gone far beyond his predecessors in his use of it. Citizens deserve to know.

Update 3/22 10:42 AM: Media Matters has posted a longer reexamination of how the AP failed to point out straw men arguments in real time.

In his column today, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman makes an underappreciated point — conservative moaning about Bush’s big spending ways fail to take into account the fact that the deficit is largely driven by tax cuts and defense spending, not discretionary programs:

Well, it’s safe for conservatives to criticize Mr. Bush for presiding over runaway growth in domestic spending, because that implies that he betrayed his conservative supporters. There’s only one problem with this criticism: it’s not true.

It’s true that federal spending as a percentage of G.D.P. rose between 2001 and 2005. But the great bulk of this increase was accounted for by increased spending on defense and homeland security, including the costs of the Iraq war, and by rising health care costs.

Conservatives aren’t criticizing Mr. Bush for his defense spending. Since the Medicare drug program didn’t start until 2006, the Bush administration can’t be blamed for the rise in health care costs before then. Whatever other fiscal excesses took place weren’t large enough to play more than a marginal role in spending growth.

So where does the notion of Bush the big spender come from? In a direct sense it comes largely from Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation, who issued a report last fall alleging that government spending was out of control. Mr. Riedl is very good at his job; his report shifts artfully back and forth among various measures of spending (nominal, real, total, domestic, discretionary, domestic discretionary), managing to convey the false impression that soaring spending on domestic social programs is a major cause of the federal budget deficit without literally lying.

But the reason conservatives fall for the Heritage spin is that it suits their purposes. They need to repudiate George W. Bush, but they can’t admit that when Mr. Bush made his key mistakes — starting an unnecessary war, and using dishonest numbers to justify tax cuts — they were cheering him on.

Here’s the key graphic from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that sums it all up (see source article for more):

The Associated Press has produced one of the best rhetoric-busting stories on President Bush in a long time — an analysis of his obsession with attacking absurd straw men rather than engaging the arguments of his opponents:

“Some look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude that the war is lost and not worth another dime or another day,” President Bush said recently.

Another time he said, “Some say that if you’re Muslim you can’t be free.”

“There are some really decent people,” the president said earlier this year, “who believe that the federal government ought to be the decider of health care … for all people.”

Of course, hardly anyone in mainstream political debate has made such assertions.

When the president starts a sentence with “some say” or offers up what “some in Washington” believe, as he is doing more often these days, a rhetorical retort almost assuredly follows.

The device usually is code for Democrats or other White House opponents. In describing what they advocate, Bush often omits an important nuance or substitutes an extreme stance that bears little resemblance to their actual position.

He typically then says he “strongly disagrees” — conveniently knocking down a straw man of his own making.

…Because the “some” often go unnamed, Bush can argue that his statements are true in an era of blogs and talk radio. Even so, “‘some’ suggests a number much larger than is actually out there,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

…Bush has caricatured the other side for years, trying to tilt legislative debates in his favor or score election-season points with voters.

Not long after taking office in 2001, Bush pushed for a new education testing law and began portraying skeptics as opposed to holding schools accountable.

The chief opposition, however, had nothing to do with the merits of measuring performance, but rather the cost and intrusiveness of the proposal.

Campaigning for Republican candidates in the 2002 midterm elections, the president sought to use the congressional debate over a new Homeland Security Department against Democrats.

He told at least two audiences that some senators opposing him were “not interested in the security of the American people.” In reality, Democrats balked not at creating the department, which Bush himself first opposed, but at letting agency workers go without the usual civil service protections.

Running for re-election against Sen. John Kerry in 2004, Bush frequently used some version of this line to paint his Democratic opponent as weaker in the fight against terrorism: “My opponent and others believe this matter is a matter of intelligence and law enforcement.”

The assertion was called a mischaracterization of Kerry’s views even by a Republican, Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

…Last fall, the rhetorical tool became popular with Bush when the debate heated up over when troops would return from Iraq. “Some say perhaps we ought to just pull out of Iraq,” he told GOP supporters in October, echoing similar lines from other speeches. “That is foolhardy policy.”

Yet even the speediest plan, as advocated by only a few Democrats, suggested not an immediate drawdown, but one over six months. Most Democrats were not even arguing for a specific troop withdrawal timetable.

Recently defending his decision to allow the National Security Agency to monitor without subpoenas the international communications of Americans suspected of terrorist ties, Bush has suggested that those who question the program underestimate the terrorist threat.

“There’s some in America who say, ‘Well, this can’t be true there are still people willing to attack,’” Bush said during a January visit to the NSA.

The president has relied on straw men, too, on the topics of taxes and trade, issues he hopes will work against Democrats in this fall’s congressional elections.

Usually without targeting Democrats specifically, Bush has suggested they are big-spenders who want to raise taxes, because most oppose extending some of his earlier tax cuts, and protectionists who do not want to open global markets to American goods, when most oppose free-trade deals that lack protections for labor and the environment.

“Some people believe the answer to this problem is to wall off our economy from the world,” he said this month in India, talking about the migration of U.S. jobs overseas. “I strongly disagree.”

This subject deserves far more attention than it receives. The President almost never engages his opponent’s actual arguments. It misinforms his listeners and obstructs productive debate. And he won’t stop unless he gets called on it by the press. As with so many of Bush’s PR tactics, the media’s failure to speak up against Bush’s straw men arguments threatens to create a precedent that future presidents will follow. That’s why it’s so important to take a stand now. (For more on this theme, see the conclusion to All the President’s Spin.)

Time for another entry in the history of the nation’s most hacktastic newspaper, the Washington Times, whose inspired brand of “journalism” kept us busy at Spinsanity for years.

Their latest offense comes in an article disclosing a private memo distributed to Senate Democrats, which calls for senators to hold town halls at military bases. As the Times points out, this is prohibited:

Senate Democrats have mapped a political battle plan for the March congressional recess that calls on lawmakers to stage press events with active duty military personnel, veterans and emergency responders to bash President Bush on virtually every one of his national security policies.

The game plan, devised by the office of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, is contained in a six-page memo distributed to Democratic senators on Thursday at a closed-door meeting at the Capitol and provided to The Washington Times by a congressional staffer.

Titled “Real Security,” the political document calls for staged town hall events at military bases, weapons factories, National Guard units, fire stations and veterans posts.

… However, the Defense Department prohibits political events on military bases. The rule states, “commanders will not permit the use of installation facilities by any candidate for political campaign or election events, including public assemblies or town hall meetings.”

The problem, however, is that President Bush holds explicitly political events at military facilities all the time.

How does the Times get around this? By dissembling about what Bush does in front of the military:

As commander in chief, Mr. Bush has made frequent visits to military bases in the United States and abroad. His remarks are generally limited to explaining his war policies and encouraging the troops.

Generally limited? President Bush has given more divisive speeches in front of military audiences than any president in recent memory. Here’s one example, which I wrote about last year. In November 2005, President Bush came under fire from Rep. John Murtha, a hawkish Democrat who reversed his support for the war and called for the US to withdraw from Iraq. President Bush’s response, delivered at the Tobyhanna Army Depot in Tobyhanna, PA, was harsh and political:

The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important, for politicians to throw out false charges. These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America’s will. As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them. Our troops deserve to know that this support will remain firm when the going gets tough. And our troops deserve to know that whatever our differences in Washington, our will is strong, our nation is united, and we will settle for nothing less than victory.

Earlier that month, as I also pointed out, Bush delivered a similar attack on opponents of the war in Iraq to an audience at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska:

Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war, but it is
irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the
American people. Leaders in my administration and members of the United
States Congress from both political parties looked at the same
intelligence on Iraq, and reached the same conclusion: Saddam Hussein
was a threat.

Let me give you some quotes from three senior Democrat leaders: First,
and I quote, “There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is
working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons.” Another senior
Democrat leader said, “The war against terrorism will not be finished as
long as Saddam Hussein is in power.” Here’s another quote from a senior
Democrat leader: “Saddam Hussein, in effect, has thumbed his nose at
the world community. And I think the President is approaching this in
the right fashion.”

They spoke the truth then, and they’re speaking politics now.

The truth is that investigations of intelligence on Iraq have concluded
that only one person manipulated evidence and misled the world — and
that person was Saddam Hussein. In early 2004, when weapons inspector
David Kay testified that he had not found weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq, he also testified that, “Iraq was in clear material violation of
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441. They maintained
programs and activities, and they certainly had the intentions at a
point to resume their programs. So there was a lot they wanted to hide
because it showed what they were doing that was illegal.”

Eight months later, weapons inspector Charles Duelfer issued a report
that found, “Saddam Hussein so dominated the Iraqi regime that its
strategic intent was his alone. He wanted to end sanctions while
preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass
destruction when the sanctions were lifted.”

Some of our elected leaders have opposed this war all along. I
disagreed with them, but I respect their willingness to take a
consistent stand. Yet some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of
force are now rewriting the past. They are playing politics with this
issue and they are sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy.
And that’s irresponsible.

As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of
life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send
them into war continue to stand behind them. Our troops
deserve to know that this support will remain firm when the going gets
tough. And our troops deserve to know that whatever our
differences in Washington, our will is strong, our nation is united, and
we will settle for nothing less than victory.

We all have our ways of “encouraging the troops.” Apparently Bush’s is to try to silence dissent in the democracy that our soldiers have sworn to defend.

The estimable Jon Chait has a Los Angeles Times column criticizing the GOP claim that they are the party of ideas and Democrats are the party of the status quo. Here’s the key passage:

All this was based on a deep confusion between cause and effect. Republicans were pushing new ideas because they had political power; they didn’t have political power because of their ideas. (Anybody who believed last year that Bush won reelection because of his support for privatized Social Security surely has been disabused of that delusion.) When you lack power, the best you can do is prevent bad ideas from being enacted. That’s not the same thing as failing to have new ideas.

In truth, Bush’s agenda has run aground not because he has no ideas but because he has no power. His approval ratings have plummeted, and Republicans in Congress are running for cover. If Bush could rule by fiat he would have plenty of ideas to implement — more tax cuts for businesses and upper-income individuals, cutting regulations and poverty programs. He simply lacks the juice to implement them.

So he’s left defending the status quo against “new ideas.” Remaining in Iraq is status quo; pulling out is a new policy. Keeping the tax cuts is status quo; repealing them and using the resources elsewhere is new. If the situation were reversed, conservatives would be taunting liberals for having no ideas and defending the tired status quo. Turning the taunt around is satisfying, but it doesn’t really explain the situation.

Chait is on to something here. This is a layman’s version of the pivotal politics theory popularized by Keith Krehbiel, David W. Brady and Craig Volden. Imagine a single left-right dimension of ideology with all the members of Congress and the president represented as points from the most liberal to the most conservative. The gridlock zone represents the ideological range defined by the filibuster and the veto. In the current Congress, it ranges from the 41st most liberal senator (the filibuster pivot) to the 67th most liberal senator and 290th most liberal House member (the veto pivots).

According to pivotal politics, legislative action happens when a policy that is outside the gridlock zone gets mapped into it. For instance, consider a policy that only the 20 most liberal senators support. It is trivial for the chamber to create a super-majority coalition that can’t be overriden by a filibuster or veto and to move that policy to a point on the ideological spectrum between the two pivots. However, once the policy is mapped inside the gridlock zone, it’s trapped — any action to change it will be blocked by one of the two pivots, who will prefer the status quo to a change.

Pivotal politics is a powerful explanation for the travails of President Bush (as well as other second-term presidents). In the first term, shifts in the composition of Congress and/or the party of the President often mean that a number of policies are outside the gridlock zone. So Congress and the president can move policies that are outside the gridlock zone inside of it. For Bush before 9/11, this included education, stem cells and the tax cut. 9/11 shifted the political terrain further, allowing more policies to be moved ranging from the Patriot Act to invading Iraq.

But at this point, there are few policies outside the gridlock zone that Bush wants to move. As Chait points out, this doesn’t mean the party is out of ideas. The President still has a long wish list, but almost none of it is politically feasible (ie the policies are trapped in the gridlock zone). So he’s forced to play defense — protecting those policies that are threatening to slip out of the gridlock zone and be revisited by an increasingly skeptical Congress. New “ideas” aren’t worth much if they’re infeasible.

Correction 8/22 12:34 PM: Krehbiel points out that the 41st most liberal senator is the current filibuster pivot, not the 40th. The mistake is corrected above — apologies for the error.

E.J. Dionne is clearly not reading this blog. Today, he writes the following:

As one of Feingold’s colleagues pointed out, a censure proposal related to any aspect of the president’s policies on terrorism would once have unleashed an unrelenting Republican attack on the sponsor’s patriotism. Now, Republicans have to content themselves with using calls for censuring or impeaching Bush to rally their own dispirited troops.

I’m not sure it’s been “unrelenting,” but a number of conservatives have implicitly questioned Feingold’s patriotism this week, as I showed:

Frist later attacked Feingold again, stating, “This is a political stunt, a political stunt that is addressed at attacking the president of the United States of America when we’re at war.” The implication, of course, is that it’s illegitimate to criticize the president during wartime – a dangerous and anti-democratic notion.

Other attacks on dissent came from Speaker Dennis Hastert’s spokesman, Ron Bonjean, and Vice President Cheney. Bonjean asked the rhetorical question, “Just who is the enemy to the Democrats, the president of the United States or the terrorists working to destroy our way of life?” And Cheney said in a speech that “Some Democrats in Congress have decided the president is the enemy.” By this pseudo-logic, which Republicans have used repeatedly since 9/11, criticism of the President means that Democrats aren’t serious about fighting the terrorist enemy.

Republican chairman Ken Mehlman also used this approach in an email to supporters (PDF), stating that “Democrat leaders never miss an opportunity to put politics before our nation’s security. And now, they would rather censure the President for doing his job than actually fight the War on Terror.” Again, the implication is that Democrats are weakening national security and choosing not to fight the war on terror.

…Media Matters reports that “Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, called Sen. Russ Feingold’s introduction of a resolution to censure President Bush ‘borderline treasonous behavior’” — yet another anti-democratic attack on dissent.