Brendan Nyhan

Yesterday, Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), a decorated war veteran and leading Democratic figure on military affairs, called for an immediate pullout from Iraq. In response, as TNR’s Michael Crowley pointed out, two House Republicans engaged in vicious, anti-democratic attacks on Murtha.

Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ) said “many on the Democratic side have revealed their exit strategy: surrender.” And most egregiously, Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY) said this:

Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, as well as Abu Musab Zarqawi, have made it quite clear in their internal propaganda that they cannot win unless they can drive the Americans out. And they know that they can’t do that there, so they’ve brought the battlefield to the halls of Congress.

And, frankly, the liberal leadership have put politics ahead of sound, fiscal and national security policy. And what they have done is cooperated with our enemies and are emboldening our enemies.

To claim that terrorists have “brought the battlefield to the halls of Congress” and that Democrats have “cooperated with our enemies” is truly beyond the pale.

It’s important to view this attack in long-run perspective. Each time that Democrats cross a previously unbroken threshold of post-9/11 dissent, Republicans try to silence them by claiming that they are aiding the enemy. Drawing on my 2004 Spinsanity column on this subject, let’s reconstruct the timeline.

December 2001: In response to Democratic plans to question parts of the USA Patriot Act during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, John Ashcroft suggests that people who disagree with the administration’s anti-terrorism policies are on the side of the terrorists. “To those who pit Americans against immigrants, and citizens against non-citizens; to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies, and pause to America’s friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil.”

February 2002: Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle expresses mild disagreement with US anti-terror policies, saying US success in the war on terror “is still somewhat in doubt.” In response, Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) says that Daschle’s “divisive comments have the effect of giving aid and comfort to our enemies by allowing them to exploit divisions in our country.”

May 2002: After the disclosure that President Bush received a general warning about possible Al Qaeda hijackings prior to 9/11, Democrats demand to know what other information the administration had before the attacks. In response, White House communications director Dan Bartlett says that the Democratic statements “are exactly what our opponents, our enemies, want us to do.”

September 2004: As John Kerry steps up his criticism of the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq and the war on terror, Republicans repeatedly suggest that he is emboldening the enemy. Senator Zell Miller (D-GA) tells the GOP convention that “while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats’ manic obsession to bring down our Commander in Chief.” President Bush says, “You can embolden an enemy by sending a mixed message. You can dispirit the Iraqi people by sending mixed messages. You send the wrong message to our troops by sending mixed messages.” And Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) claims that terrorists “are going to throw everything they can between now and the election to try and elect Kerry,” adding that Democrats are “consistently saying things that I think undermine our young men and women who are serving over there.”

November 2005: With Democratic critics of the war in Iraq growing increasingly vocal, President Bush lashes out, claiming that “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.”

Update 11/18: The White House continues to claim that they are not attacking dissent… even as they attack dissent. Up is down!

Via the Washington Post, President Bush claimed that it is “patriotic as heck to disagree with the president” even as he disagrees with Chuck Hagel’s defense of dissent:

Q Mr. President, Vice President Cheney called it reprehensible
for critics to question how you took the country to war, but Senator
Hagel says it’s patriotic to ask those kinds of questions. Who do you
think is right?

PRESIDENT BUSH: The Vice President.

Q Why?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, look, ours is a country where people ought
to be able to disagree, and I expect there to be criticism. But when
Democrats say that I deliberately misled the Congress and the people,
that’s irresponsible. They looked at the same intelligence I did, and
they voted — many of them voted to support the decision I made. It’s
irresponsible to use politics. This is serious business making —
winning this war. But it’s irresponsible to do what they’ve done. So I
agree with the Vice President.

Q — (inaudible) —

PRESIDENT BUSH: I think people ought to be allowed to ask
questions. It is irresponsible to say that I deliberately misled the
American people when it came to the very same intelligence they looked
at, and came to the — many of them came to the same conclusion I did.
Listen, I — patriotic as heck to disagree with the President. It
doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is when people are irresponsibly
using their positions and playing politics. That’s exactly what is
taking place in America.

So it’s patriotic to dissent, but unpatriotic to play politics with this issue? Isn’t that what Bush is doing?

White House communications director Nicole Wallace also told the Washington Post that “There is a recognition that debate and dissent are what make this country strong, especially in a time of war,” adding, “But a bright line has to be drawn that separates those things that are maliciously false and flat-out wrong.”

Wallace says that dissent makes the country strong… except that every major statement of dissent by Democrats is denounced by White House officials as encouraging the enemy. And she denounces statements that are “maliciously false and flat-out wrong” even as the administration wildly distorts prewar history.

It’s all doubletalk.

Via Wonkette, this line from Richard Cohen’s latest column is really unnecessary:

It would be nice, fitting and pretty close to sexually exciting if Bush somehow acknowledged his mistakes and said he had learned from them.

And who cares if he admits he admits some mistakes and claims to have learned from them? Talk is cheap.

As Josh Marshall noted last night, this excerpt from Vice President Dick Cheney’s speech last night is staggering:

I know what it’s like to operate in a highly charged political environment, in which the players on all sides of an issue feel passionately and speak forcefully. In such an environment people sometimes lose their cool, and yet in Washington you can ordinarily rely on some basic measure of truthfulness and good faith in the conduct of political debate. But in the last several weeks we have seen a wild departure from that tradition.

As Marshall says, “The up-is-downism is truly bracing — hilarious or outrageous depending on your mood.” Cheney, of course, comes from an administration that has broken new ground in its use of dishonest rhetoric to market its policies (see All the President’s Spin for more). And the Vice President stands out within the White House for the number of misleading claims he has made — check out the size of his index entry in ATPS.

Cheney’s speech is full of such mock outrage. He continues:

And the suggestion that’s been made by some U.S. senators that the President of the United States or any member of this administration purposely misled the American people on pre-war intelligence is one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city.

The goal here is to characterize accusations of pre-war presidential dishonesty as out of bounds and uniquely disreputable. But the horse is out of the barn on this one.

Cheney soon went on to join the administration’s effort to silence dissent by implying that critics are undermining US troops:

What we’re hearing now is some politicians contradicting their own statements and making a play for political advantage in the middle of a war. The saddest part is that our people in uniform have been subjected to these cynical and pernicious falsehoods day in and day out. American soldiers and Marines are out there every day in dangerous conditions and desert temperatures — conducting raids, training Iraqi forces, countering attacks, seizing weapons, and capturing killers — and back home a few opportunists are suggesting they were sent into battle for a lie.

The President and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing their memory, or their backbone — but we’re not going to sit by and let them rewrite history.

We’re going to continue throwing their own words back at them. And far more important, we’re going to continue sending a consistent message to the men and women who are fighting the war on terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other fronts. We can never say enough how much we appreciate them, and how proud they make us.

They and their families can be certain that this cause is right and just, and the performance of our military has been brave and honorable. And this nation will stand behind our fighting forces with pride and without wavering until the day of victory.

Clearly, Cheney needs to listen to fellow Republican Chuck Hagel:

The Bush Administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and should not be demonized for disagreeing with them. Suggesting that to challenge or criticize policy is undermining and hurting our troops is not democracy nor what this country has stood for, for over 200 years.

Who else in the GOP will stand up against this demagoguery?

Today I stand in praise Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, a man of deep integrity who is willing to buck his party for the greater good of American democracy.

In 2002, Republicans engaged in demagogic attacks on Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle for daring to question the conduct of the war on terrorism. As I wrote at the time in The American Prospect Online, “Hagel was the first leading Republican to disavow these criticisms, telling CNN’s Jonathan Karl that while Daschle ‘may have used a bit of a blunt object in some of his language … the foundational part of his question was appropriate.’ Hagel also said, ‘I don’t think there’s any question that Senator Daschle supports the president’ and was reportedly critical of Lott’s statement.”

Yesterday, Hagel again stood up for open democratic debate during a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations, challenging the Bush administration’s latest attack on dissent (link via The Note):

The Iraq war should not be debated in the United States on a partisan political platform. This debases our country, trivializes the seriousness of war and cheapens the service and sacrifices of our men and women in uniform. War is not a Republican or Democrat issue. The casualties of war are from both parties. The Bush Administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and should not be demonized for disagreeing with them. Suggesting that to challenge or criticize policy is undermining and hurting our troops is not democracy nor what this country has stood for, for over 200 years. The Democrats have an obligation to challenge in a serious and responsible manner, offering solutions and alternatives to the Administration’s policies.

Vietnam was a national tragedy partly because Members of Congress failed their country, remained silent and lacked the courage to challenge the Administrations in power until it was too late. Some of us who went through that nightmare have an obligation to the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam to not let that happen again. To question your government is not unpatriotic — to not question your government is unpatriotic. America owes its men and women in uniform a policy worthy of their sacrifices.

Amen.

To paraphrase Andy Warhol: In the future, everyone can be a political hack for fifteen months.

According to a report from Kenneth A. Konz, the inspector general of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, former CPB chairman Kenneth Tomlinson repeatedly broke federal law during his tenure:

According to the report, Tomlinson consulted with Bush administration officials — including Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove — about his efforts, even though the former chairman told The Times in May that he had had “absolutely no contact from anyone at the White House saying we need to do this or that with public broadcasting.”

However, Konz discovered that in late 2003 and again this year, Tomlinson exchanged e-mails with White House officials about possible candidates to serve as the corporation’s president. Some of the notes discussed Tomlinson’s desire to hire Patricia Harrison, a former Republican Party co-chairwoman, whom the board appointed to the post in June.

“While cryptic in nature, their timing and subject matter give the appearance that the former chairman was strongly motivated by political considerations in filling the president/CEO position,” Konz wrote.

The corporation, a private nonprofit organization that distributes federal funding to local TV and radio stations, is supposed to act as a buffer between Congress and broadcasters.

In an interview, the inspector general said Tomlinson exchanged e-mails with “two or three” White House officials, including Rove. He declined to name the other officials or provide copies of the e-mails, which were given to the full board in a separate report.

Konz concluded that Tomlinson’s efforts to hire Harrison violated provisions of the Federal Broadcasting Act, which prohibits the use of “political tests” in employment.

He also determined that the former chairman broke federal law barring interference in programming when he promoted the development of “The Journal Editorial Report,” a public affairs program on the Public Broadcasting Service featuring the conservative editorial page board of the Wall Street Journal. The report said Tomlinson urged PBS to air the program even as he offered editorial page editor Paul Gigot advice about the program’s format.

The report said Tomlinson was so zealous in what he termed his pursuit of political balance that he instructed corporation staff to threaten to withhold federal funds from PBS to achieve it — an action that would have required congressional approval.

The machine politics of the Bush administration run so deep that Karl Rove is consulting on CPB appointments! Unbelievable.

In the latest phase of his offensive against critics of the war in Iraq, President Bush quoted a series of Democrats about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein during a speech today:

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.

But as TNR’s Ryan Lizza points out, they’re ripped wildly out of context:

The problem is that some of the quotes Bush now uses are highly misleading. “Another senior Democrat leader said, ‘The war against terrorism will not be finished as long as Saddam Hussein is in power,’” Bush told his Alaskan crowd. The quote is from Senator Carl Levin during a CNN appearance on December 16, 2001. Here’s the full context:

The war against terrorism will not be finished as long as he is in power. But that does not mean he is the next target.

And the commitment to do that, it seems to me, could be disruptive of our alliance that still has work to do in Afghanistan. And a lot will depend on what the facts are in various places as to what terrorist groups are doing, and as to whether or not we have facts as to whether or not the Iraqis have been involved in the terrorist attack of September 11, or whether or not Saddam is getting a weapon of mass destruction and is close to it. So facts will determine what our next targets are.

In other words, Levin’s full quote shows exactly the opposite of what Bush was trying to say it showed. Levin was laying out the case against attacking Iraq, arguing presciently that there was unfinished work in Afghanistan, that war in Iraq could damage alliances, and specifically cautioning against targeting Iraq absent hard evidence of Saddam’s WMDS or his role in September 11. It’s ludicrous to argue, as Bush did Monday, that Carl Levin “reached the same conclusion” on Iraq as Bush. Levin didn’t even vote for the war resolution.

Bush also offered up this quote by Senator Harry Reid from a September 18, 2002 CNN appearance: “Saddam Hussein, in effect, has thumbed his nose at the world community. And I think the President is approaching this in the right fashion.” Again, Bush’s point in citing this quote is to blur any distinction between what Democrats said before the war and what Bush said before the war. But it is safe to say that Reid was not speaking of or praising Bush’s use of false intelligence concerning yellowcake from Niger, aluminum tubes for a uranium enrichment program, and contacts between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi spies in Prague. Here’s the full Reid quote:

As you know when his father went into Iraq, we had a very good debate. Some said one of the best debates in the last 40 years in Congress. We’re going to have a debate. But I think we have to acknowledge what’s gone on in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, in effect, has thumbed his nose at the world community. And I think that the president’s approaching this in the right fashion. He’s now trying to get the international community to join. Secretary Powell is basically living in New York, working with international community. And we have made progress.

Reid was offering support for Bush and Powell’s diplomacy at the United Nations because the administration had previously signaled that Bush was not going to seek U.N. approval for the war. Bush is now essentially using the quote to suggest that Reid supported every decision the president ever made about Iraq.

Up is down! (For more, as always, see All the President’s Spin.)

Bush also used a strange bit of rhetoric during his speech:

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.”

As TNR’s Noam Scheiber notes on The Plank, this seems like a dumb approach — why compare yourself to Saddam Hussein?

Once we actually have an investigation into how the administration used intelligence on Iraq–the crucial phase II of the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, which we’re still waiting on–we may learn that Bush also manipulated evidence and misled the world. In which case, according to Bush’s formulation, there will be only two people who’ve done that–Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush. Not exactly the company the president wants to be keeping at this point.

The Hotline has published an interview with me in its Blogometer section. Here’s an excerpt:

How do you see the new media and old media affecting and influencing each other in the next five years?

The old media will learn that blogging well is a lot harder than it looks. And the new media will learn about the hard economic realities of trying to make a profit from content.

Yesterday, the liberal watchdog Media Matters published an article calling on the public to protest the Los Angeles Times’ decision to fire left-liberal columnist Robert Scheer, writing, “Given both the history of conservative attacks on Scheer, and the Los Angeles Times’ failure to explain his firing, it seems plausible that the Times bowed to right-wing pressure in firing Scheer.” The group then called on readers to contact the Times “to register your protest of the newspaper’s decision to purge a Bush administration critic in the face of right-wing pressure.”

The key phrase here is “it seems plausible.” Media Matters has no idea why Scheer was fired. It could be because he’s a bad writer and a tiresome, predictable columnist. And it could be because he has a history of inaccuracy that we frequently wrote about on Spinsanity. No one knows. Yet in a leap of logic, Media Matters jumps from “it seems plausible” to describing the Times’ move as a “decision to purge a Bush administration critic in the face of right-wing pressure.”

The work of Media Matters is useful when they stick to the facts. But this kind of ideological ax-grinding makes the group seem more like the hacks at FAIR and MRC.

Update 11/15: The LAT’s editorial page editor, Andres Martinez, has published a column denying that Scheer was fired because of “ideological motives.”

On yesterday’s Meet the Press, Tim Russert asked Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean about attacks on Michael Steele:

RUSSERT: Picking up on what Ken Mehlman said about Michael Steele, the African-American Republican candidate in Maryland, being called an Uncle Tom, the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee seeking his credit report. Should you not…

DEAN: I don’t like that stuff, and I–now, look, the Republicans have a long history of saying that those things happened. And they may or may not have. So if that happened, it’s not right. But I didn’t hear Ken condemning the chairman of the Maryland party when he called me an anti-Semite. So let’s try to up–speaking of moral values, let’s have a better tone in our political campaigns. Because the truth is, the other thing that Time Kaine’s race showed is that the person with the better tone and the more positive agenda won, and I like to see voters exercising their rights in that way.

RUSSERT: But the workers on the campaign committee who sought his credit report have been dismissed.

DEAN: They should have been. Absolutely, they should have been. I don’t like that kind of stuff.

It’s quite clear that Dean was questioning whether the claims about Steele were accurate, but saying that if they were, he doesn’t “like that stuff” and “it’s not right.” But here’s how “America’s newspaper” reported the story under the headline “No Dean apology for Steele” (via Drudge):

The chairman of the Republican Party yesterday challenged his Democratic counterpart to condemn racist statements against Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele, but Howard Dean demanded his own apology and ignored the question.

The former Vermont governor was asked by host Tim Russert on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to respond to the statements, in an appearance that Mr. Dean insisted be separate from an interview with Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman.

Mr. Dean gave no response, aside from saying he didn’t receive an apology for being called an anti-Semite by a member of the Republican Party.

Mr. Steele, a Republican candidate for the Senate, is the first black elected to statewide office in Maryland, where Senate President Thomas V. “Mike” Miller Jr. labeled him an “Uncle Tom” in 2001. Some black political leaders maintain that Mr. Steele is not exempt from racial comments because of his political views.

“There’s been an utter silence in response to what have been vicious and racist attacks on Michael Steele in Maryland,” Mr. Mehlman said.

Mr. Mehlman on “Meet the Press” called on Mr. Dean to “condemn this kind of racist and bigoted activity. It’s wrong.”

“He’s had racial epithets thrown at him. He’s been derided on a Web site that the Democrats have. And while some Democrats in Maryland have criticized it, there’s been utter silence from national Democrats on this important issue,” Mr. Mehlman said.

“I would also hope he’d condemn the following: There are a whole bunch of Democratic candidates and Republican candidates around the country. But Charles Schumer and the [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] chose one candidate [Mr. Steele] to go after his credit report and engage in identity theft against him,” Mr. Mehlman said.

Mr. Russert put forth both questions to Mr. Dean, who said “moral values” should bring a “better tone in our political campaigns.”

“I don’t like that stuff,” Mr. Dean said of the credit-report incident.

Mr. Dean declined to address the statements against Mr. Steele, but said, “I didn’t hear Ken condemning the chairman of the Maryland party when he called me an anti-Semite.”

Notice how “I don’t like that stuff” is narrowed to the credit report incident only. In addition, the Times utterly distorts what Dean said in claiming he “declined to address” the Steele issue, and it also takes the rejoinder to Mehlman out of context.

With media outlets like this, it’s no wonder conservatism is becoming so postmodern…

Andrew Sullivan is furious about the way that the Wall Street Journal softpedals “waterboarding” in this editorial:

As for “torture,” it is simply perverse to conflate the amputations and electrocutions Saddam once inflicted at Abu Ghraib with the lesser abuses committed by rogue American soldiers there, much less with any authorized U.S. interrogation techniques. No one has yet come up with any evidence that anyone in the U.S. military or government has officially sanctioned anything close to “torture.” The “stress positions” that have been allowed (such as wearing a hood, exposure to heat and cold, and the rarely authorized “waterboarding,” which induces a feeling of suffocation) are all psychological techniques designed to break a detainee.

But as I noted back in January, the Journal conceded at the time that the technique is “pushing the boundary of tolerable behavior” and called for a debate about whether it was torture:

As for al Qaeda, let us describe the most coercive interrogation technique that was ever actually authorized. It’s called “water-boarding,” and it involves strapping a detainee down, wrapping his face in a wet towel and dripping water on it to produce the sensation of drowning. Is that “torture”? It is pushing the boundary of tolerable behavior, but we are told it is also used to train U.S. pilots in case they are shot down and captured. More to the critics’ apparent point, is it immoral, or unjustified, in the cause of preventing another mass casualty attack on U.S. soil? By all means let’s have a debate; Mr. Gonzales should challenge a few Democrats to categorically renounce it and tell us what techniques they would tolerate instead.

(See my posts on the subject from January and February for more on the definition of waterboarding.)