Brendan Nyhan

Intellectual giants of the Court.

Harriet Miers:

“[Miers] also found [Governor Bush] ‘cool,’ [and] said he and his wife, Laura, were ‘the greatest!’”

…”Ms. Miers wrote to thank the Bushes, saying,’Texas has a very popular governor and first lady!’”

…”Ms. Miers wrote to thank [Bush] ‘for taking the time to visit in the office and on the plane back – cool!’”

Antonin Scalia:

“If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again. You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That’s flexibility.”

“The Freedom of Information Act is the Taj Mahal of the Doctrine of Unanticipated Consequences, the Sistine Chapel of Cost-Benefit Analysis Ignored.”

“There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.”

Update 10/11: You can view some of the correspondence between Bush and Miers here.

Dick Morris has kept himself afloat by becoming a professional Clinton-basher, but this quote from his new book Condi vs. Hillary (co-authored with his wife) is especially pathetic:

If elected, Clinton would “reinvent what we have called the secret police to destroy those who stand in her way.”

Apparently Halloween has come early. Watch out for the Clinton secret police! Boo!

Here’s a snapshot from the strange world of 21st century politics in Venezuela, where left-wing dictator Hugo Chavez is hyping the possibility of a US assassination attempt against him:

Bush administration officials may not hide their distaste for Mr. Chávez – that, everyone agrees, is a big part of the problem – but American officials still cringe at the accusations, which they dismiss as ludicrous.

“The U.S. has not planned, is not planning, will not plan and cannot plan to assassinate Hugo Chávez,” the American ambassador to Venezuela, William Brownfield, said in Caracas. “It would be a violation of both U.S. law and policy.”

In Venezuela, though, where state television has broadcast video images of American officials criticizing Mr. Chávez as the evil empire music from “Star Wars” plays in the background, the threat is taken seriously.

It’s the symbolic equivalent of asymmetric warfare – using our own pop culture against us. I’d love to see that video.

If you read All the President’s Spin closely, you’ll be astonished at the Bush administration’s love for straw men. Here’s a great example from President Bush’s speech on Iraq yesterday:

Some have also argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals. I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001 — and al Qaeda attacked us anyway. The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse.

As Matthew Yglesias points out, this is a ludicrous argument:

The president takes an accurate statement (“extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq”), rephrases it in straw-man form (“our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of the radicals”), and then rebuts the straw-man (“we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001”) and goes home. Obviously, there were radicals before the Iraq War. But as the CIA has pointed out, there are now even more radicals thanks to it. That Bush inherited a pre-existing bad situation is hardly an excuse for making it worse.

The New Republic’s valuable guide to the Bush hackocracy has a particularly brutal take on Claire Buchan, a former White House “spokesbot” who was made chief of staff of the Department of Commerce, from a reporter who worked with her:

Some of Buchan’s erstwhile colleagues in the White House press corps were left speechless when her new assignment was announced in February. One White House reporter who worked closely with Buchan for five years called her “the most useless in a Bush universe of enforced uselessness. She took empty banality to a new low.”

Tell us what you really think!

Al Gore gave a thoughtful speech on the media and democracy today that was marred by this paragraph:

The present executive branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news organizations: from PBS to CBS to Newsweek. They placed a former male escort in the White House press pool to pose as a reporter – and then called upon him to give the president a hand at crucial moments. They paid actors to make phony video press releases and paid cash to some reporters who were willing to take it in return for positive stories. And every day they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President.

There’s no evidence that the White House “placed” Jeff Gannon/Guckert in the White House press pool – they merely approved his credential. The journalists they allegedly paid for positive stories were actually pundits (Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher), not “reporters.” And the claim that “every day they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President” is also unsubstantiated — the administration certainly pushes back against press coverage it doesn’t like, but what evidence exists that they “unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts” against journalists each day?

I have worked to expose the dishonest tactics of the White House PR operation for more than four years. I share much of Gore’s outrage, but this sort of partisan attack will obscure, rather than clarify, the fundamental democratic issues that are at stake.

Update 10/6: As the Washington Post explains, Williams was paid to “promote Bush’s No Child Left Behind law through advertising on his cable TV and syndicated radio shows and other efforts,” while Gallagher “had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to help promote the president’s” marriage initiative, which included “drafting a magazine article for the HHS official overseeing the initiative, writing brochures for the program and conducting a briefing for department officials.” Both Williams and Gallagher offered favorable commentary on the policies they were being paid to promote at the same time that they were receiving funds from the administration. Whether they were paid to promote Bush administration policies is more complicated, however, so I have amended the phrasing above to state that they were “allegedly paid for positive stories” (referring to Gore’s claim).

Update 10/7: Michael Barone of US News & World Report linked to this post on his blog today, calling Spinsanity “admirable” and describing me as “a liberal who places honesty and accuracy ahead of scoring partisan points.” Thanks Michael!

In a little-noticed development last week, the Government Accountability Office, an independent government watchdog, ruled that the Bush administration’s “covert propaganda” efforts are illegal:

Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush’s education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated “covert propaganda” in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.

…Lawyers from the accountability office, an independent nonpartisan arm of Congress, found that the administration systematically analyzed news articles to see if they carried the message, “The Bush administration/the G.O.P. is committed to education.”

The auditors declared: “We see no use for such information except for partisan political purposes. Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds.”

The report also sharply criticized the Education Department for telling Ketchum Inc., a public relations company, to pay Mr. Williams for newspaper columns and television appearances praising Mr. Bush’s education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act.

…The ruling comes with no penalty, but under federal law the department is supposed to report the violations to the White House and Congress.

In the course of its work, the accountability office discovered a previously undisclosed instance in which the Education Department had commissioned a newspaper article. The article, on the “declining science literacy of students,” was distributed by the North American Precis Syndicate and appeared in numerous small newspapers around the country. Readers were not informed of the government’s role in the writing of the article, which praised the department’s role in promoting science education.

The auditors denounced a prepackaged television story disseminated by the Education Department. The segment, a “video news release” narrated by a woman named Karen Ryan, said that President Bush’s program for providing remedial instruction and tutoring to children “gets an A-plus.”

Ms. Ryan also narrated two videos praising the new Medicare drug benefit last year. In those segments, as in the education video, the narrator ended by saying, “In Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting.”

The television news segments on education and on Medicare did not state that they had been prepared and distributed by the government.

This is a crucial step in avoiding the ugly dystopian future of Karen Ryan that we warned about in the conclusion to All the President’s Spin. Americans should not have to wonder whether the news they are viewing is disguised government PR.

Update 10/5: Here’s the GAO report.

Despite all the posturing and rhetoric, this administration has simply failed to make us safer at home — here are some disturbing statistics from Richard Clarke’s Atlantic column this month (subscription required):

[T]he Bush administration simply dislikes spending money on many domestic initiatives, in contrast to its open-ended attitude toward military outlays and expeditions. Of all the new funding that went to national defense in the four years following 9/11, only 14 percent went to homeland security. People concerned about readiness on the home front have taken to comparing the cost of specific projects to the “burn rate” of spending on the war, as in this analysis published in Mother Jones: security upgrades for all subway and commuter-rail systems, or twenty days in Iraq; security upgrades for 361 U.S. ports, or four days in Iraq; explosives screening for all U.S. passenger-airline baggage, or ten days in Iraq.

The anti-Bush/DeLay conservative underground continues to go public. The latest dissident to follow in the footsteps of David Brooks, David Frum, Bruce Bartlett and many others is Matthew Continetti of the Weekly Standard, who
published a scathing New York Times op-ed about the state of conservatism on Saturday:

Young conservatives in particular will react to the new, post-DeLay reality in different ways. I know I have. First, looking at your party’s troubles, you see perverse confirmation of conservatism’s animating idea: that as the sphere of public decision-making expands, so do the opportunities for graft and wrongdoing. Next you note, with sadness, that while political power helped bring about some achievements – welfare reform, pro-growth tax cuts, an assertive, moralistic foreign policy – it may have also exhausted conservatism’s fighting spirit, lowered the movement’s intellectual standards and replaced a healthy independence with partisan water-carrying.

But then you take solace in the idea that the Republican Party has once again bested the Democrats, who after all took 40 years to sprout the warts of power.

Who will go public next?

A lot of people don’t realize that “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance during the 1950s. But it’s pretty embarrassing that Karen Hughes, our illustrious Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, is telling opposition leaders in Egypt that the phrase is part of the Constitution (via It Affects You by way of Atrios):

UNDER SECRETARY HUGHES: I had one person at one lunch raise the issue of the President mentioning God in his speeches. And I asked whether he was aware that previous American presidents have also cited God, and that our Constitution cites “one nation under God.” He said “well, never mind” and went on to something else. So he sort of was trying to equate that with the terrorists’ (inaudible). So I explained that I didn’t really think that was something you could equate. And he sort of dropped it and moved on. He was one of the opposition leaders in Egypt.

Bush administration diplomacy at work!