Brendan Nyhan

I want to revisit a couple of points from the controversy over Dick Durbin’s remarks on the Senate floor, for which he was forced to apologize yesterday.

First, while I’m no fan of Nazi comparisons, I do think the subtlety of Durbin’s point was completely lost amidst the manufactured outrage. Andrew Sullivan does a good job of explaining why:

If Durbin had said, as Amnesty unfortunately did, that Gitmo was another Gulag, I’d be dismayed and critical, as I was with Amnesty. There’s no comparison in any way between the scale, intent and context of the Soviet gulags and Gitmo. If Durbin had said that what was being done there in the aggregate was comparable to Auschwitz or Siberian death camps, the same would be true. But Durbin said something subtler. Now I know subtlety is not something that plays well on talk radio. But in this case, it matters. Durbin focused on one very credible account of inhumane treatment and abuse of detainees and asked an important question:

“If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime–Pol Pot or others–that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.”

So go ahead: answer his implied question. If you had been told that prisoners had been found in this state in one of Saddam’s or Stalin’s jails, would you have believed it? Of course, you would. In fact, I spent much time and effort before the war documenting the cruel and inhumane conduct of the regime we were trying to destroy – a regime whose cruelty encompassed low-level inhumanity like Gitmos – and, of course, unimaginably worse.

And his response to Durbin’s critics is even better:

The moral question is not simply of degree – how widespread and systematic is this kind of inhumanity? It is of kind: is this the kind of behavior more associated with despots than with democracies? Of course it is. When a country starts treating its prisoners like animals, it has lost its moral bearings; and, in the case of the United States, is also breaking its own laws (and, in this case, the president has declared himself above the law). I don’t know about Hugh Hewitt, Bill Kristol or NR, but I supported this war in large part because I wanted to end torture, abuse and cruelty in Iraq. I did not support it in order, two and a half years later, to be finding specious rhetorical justifications for torture, abuse and cruelty by Americans. I’m sick of hearing justifications that the enemy is worse. This is news? This is what now passes for analysis? They are far, far worse, among the most despicable and evil enemies we have ever faced. Our treatment of their prisoners is indeed Club Med compared to their fathomless barbarism. But since when is our moral compass set by them? The West is a civilization built on a very fragile web of law and humanity. We do not treat people in our custody as animals. We do not justify it. We do not change the subject. We do not accuse those highlighting it of aiding the enemy. We do not joke about it. We simply don’t do it. This administration – by design, improvisation, desperation, arrogance, incompetence, and wilfull blindness – has enabled this to occur. They must be held accountable until this cancer is rooted out for good. It has metastasized enough already.

And what’s worse is the way that press accounts leave out the awful details of the FBI report that Durbin described — sanitizing the atrocity to make things seem cleaner. Here’s what Durbin quoted the official as saying (PDF):

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and
foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated
or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one
occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so
cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold….On another
occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the
unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the
floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out
throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot,
but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day
before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

Mark Steyn, a conservative columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, left out almost all of those facts so that he could mock Durbin:

The “atrocities” [the FBI official] enumerated — “Not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room” — are not characteristic of the Nazis, the Soviets or Pol Pot, and, at the end, the body count in Gitmo was a lot lower. That’s to say, it was zero, which would have been counted a poor day’s work in Auschwitz or Siberia or the killing fields of Cambodia.

And as Bob Somerby points out, Mark Leibovich has an article in the Washington Post today that also whitewashes what happened:

[Durbin] read from an FBI memo that described the ordeal of a prisoner at Guantanamo who was allegedly chained to the floor, forced to listen to loud rap music and subjected to extreme heat and bitter cold, among other unpleasantness.

Being chained “for 18-24 hours or more” until they urinated or defecated on themselves is “unpleasantness”?

Sure, none of the allegations are as bad as the Soviets or the Nazis. But I ask Sullivan’s question again: since when is our moral compass set by our enemies?

You just cannot trust the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Here are two more reasons why:

1) Kevin Drum on the first column by the frequently deceptive pundit/activist Stephen Moore, who just joined the paper’s editorial board:

Moore’s sermon today is about the wonders of supply side economics:

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan chopped the highest personal income tax rate from the confiscatory 70% rate that he inherited when he entered office to 28% when he left office and the resulting economic burst caused federal tax receipts to almost precisely double: from $517 billion to $1,032 billion.

Tax revenue doubled! That does sound like a triumph for the tax cut jihadists, doesn’t it? But this is Stephen Moore, after all, so perhaps we should take a more careful look:

1. First, we should adjust for inflation, shouldn’t we? In 1980 dollars, $1,032 billion is actually $670 billion.

2. And of course, population increased over that time too, which naturally increases tax payments. Adjusting for that, tax revenue was $2,283 per person in 1980 and $2,694 per person in 1990.

3. That’s not double. It’s an increase of 18%. And it’s worth noting that a lot of that is due to consistent tax increases throughout the 1980s (details here). Without that, Reagan wouldn’t have gotten even the anemic growth in tax revenue that he did.

But wait. Is “anemic growth” fair? Why yes. After all, we can play this game with any decade. Annual tax receipts are here. Adjusting for inflation and population growth, the supposedly horrible 70s produced an increase in tax revenue per person of 25%. The Clinton 90s produced growth of 40%. In fact, Reagan produced the slowest growth in tax revenue of any decade since World War II. That’s a real supply side triumph.

2) Media Matters on the Journal using a 15-year-old graph in a global warming editorial:

The Journal claimed that “the case for linking fossil fuels to global warming has, if anything, become even more doubtful” in recent years. As evidence, the Journal presented a graph from the First Assessment Report of the IPCC, released in 1990 (not available online), which shows that global temperatures were higher 700 years ago than they are today…

The IPCC’s Third Assessment Report, however, refutes this claim. The report features a graph similar to the one the Journal touted, but the more recent graph shows that since 1900, fluctuating surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere have spiked well beyond pre-industrial levels. The report credited increased amounts of data and technological advancements for its findings: “Since the SAR [Second Assessment Report, 1996], a number of studies based on considerably expanded databases of palaeoclimate information have allowed more decisive conclusions about the spatial and temporal patterns of climate change in past centuries.”

What a mess.

There’s some strange analysis of the 2008 presidential race in a new AP story by Ron Fournier.

First, a Democratic consultant I’ve never heard of claims that John McCain will be the “heavy favorite” in the Republican primaries — an implausible claim given how much he’s disliked by establishment conservatives:

If you want to be the next president, it’s time to start running — unless your name is Hillary Rodham Clinton or John McCain. They can wait. And wait, as front-runners tend to do. “They’re 800-pound gorillas,” says Democratic consultant Jeff Link of Iowa. “They’re well-known, well-liked and will be heavy favorites in their respective parties.”

Later, Fournier claims that McCain is “favored by a majority of Democrats and independents”:

McCain has the opposite problem. He is favored by a majority of Democrats and independents who would vote in a general election, but his support among Republicans is less than ideal.

But, while it’s true that McCain has high favorability ratings among Democrats and independents, the most recent trial heat that breaks down support for McCain by party — the Quinnipiac University Poll from March 2-7, 2005 — shows that Democrats would vote for Hillary Clinton over McCain in a 2008 race 73%-15%, and independent support of McCain also fars short of a majority (44%-34%). Meanwhile, Republicans would vote for McCain 79%-7%.

This raises an interesting question — why is John McCain so well-liked by Democrats? I went back and looked at his favorability ratings over time. Here’s a plot of the major polls that have consistently asked voters whether they have a favorable impression of him:

As you can see, McCain spiked upward in popularity at the time he made his run in the 2000 presidential primaries, and has barely declined since — even though he has generally been a strong defender of President Bush.

The reason, I think, is that Democratic politicians don’t criticize McCain (some even ask him to be their vice presidential nominee). He’s more or less the only partisan politician who Democrats and Republicans generally praise. As a result, the public likes him across the board — the Quinnipiac poll shows his favorabe ratings as 37% favorable, 8% unfavorable among Republicans; 31% favorable, 8% unfavorable among Democrats; and 40% favorable, 9% unfavorable among independents.

But this will inevitably change if McCain runs in 2008. The reason is that he’s never received significant Democratic criticism. He was defeated in 2000 before the Democrats felt the need to open up on him, and since then they all praise him because they want to look bipartisan and co-sponsor bills with him in Congress. But he won’t get the Republican nomination unless he starts unloading on the Democrats, and if he does get nominated (which I think is unlikely), things will turn around really quickly. Pretty soon Democrats will start pointing out that he’s a pro-life, ultra-hawkish, government-cutting conservative, and his favorability profile will start to look like most other Republicans. And even though McCain’s numbers look great today, few Democrats would actually vote for him — if he’s only getting 15% against Hillary Clinton right now, imagine what he’d draw against a more moderate Democrat like John Edwards at the end of a vicious presidential campaign.

This is how partisan politics works. Why Ron Fournier and Jeff Link can’t figure it out is beyond me.

Note: The Economist has a good column on McCain in this week’s issue (subscribers only). I’ll update this post with a quote once I can pull it up in Nexis.

Gary Ackerman probably didn’t intend this statement to come out the way it did:

“The reason our flag is different is because it stands for burning the flag,” Representative Gary L. Ackerman, Democrat of New York, said in a speech on the House floor, wearing a flag-print necktie. “The Constitution this week is being nibbled to death by small men with press secretaries.”

Congressman, the flag doesn’t stand for burning the flag. It stands for the right to free expression. There’s a difference.

Via Jim Romenesko, I see that that Washington Times editor Wes Pruden announced that he’s planning to step down in the next few years, so this seems like a good occasion to paw through a few of the skeletons in the closet of Washington’s influential conservative newspaper.

First, there’s its owner, the cult leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who (among other things) appears to have pressed the newspaper into promoting the dictatorial regime in North Korea, which he eventually enticed into lucrative business deals. And, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center and other sources, the staff isn’t any better. Pruden — the son of a leading segregationist — has repeatedly expressed sympathy with the Confederate cause, which is regularly featured in the newspaper, often in laudatory articles written by assistant editor Robert Stacy McCain, a member of a hate group that opposes racial intermarriage. And SPLC reports that Fran Coombs, the man who is reportedly being groomed for the editorship, has allowed his wife Marion Kester Coombs to publish at least 35 articles in the Times while also writing for white supremacist publications.

In addition, the Times is arguably the least reliable print outlet in elite journalism. At Spinsanity, I had my biggest run-in with the newspaper when I helped debunk the Times story which spawned the myth that the National Education Association told teachers not to blame Sept. 11 on Al Qaeda. I contacted Coombs for comment, but even after the story had been exposed as blatantly misleading, he would only say “We stand behind the story as reported and written.” And that was far from the only incident — in fact, we ended up publishing a huge number of articles about Times news reports or op-eds during the 3+ years Spinsanity was in existence.

As the blog TalkLeft noted, the latest incident came just last week when Bill Frist picked up on a classic misleading Times headline — “Gitmo called death camp” — to falsely accuse Dick Durbin of using the phrase to describe the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay (PDF). (Durbin never used those words.) Frist obviously didn’t realize that he needed to account for the spin built into almost every report in the newspaper.

So as we ponder the next generation of leadership at the Times, the question for conservatives is this: will they finally disavow this vile institution? Or will they cozy up to Moon and his racist minions for another twenty years?

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge of The Economist have published an op-ed titled “Cheer Up, Conservatives!” in today’s Wall Street Journal that includes this disturbing paragraph:

If the American dream means anything, it means finding a plot of land where you can shape your destiny and raise your children. Those pragmatic dreamers look ever more Republican. Mr. Bush walloped Mr. Kerry among people who were married with children. He also carried 25 of the top 26 cities in terms of white fertility. Mr. Kerry carried the bottom 16. San Francisco, the citadel of liberalism, has the lowest proportion of people under 18 in the country (14.5%)

Minorities don’t want to find a plot of land to shape their destiny and raise their children? Sorry, but I grew up in the Silicon Valley in California, and the immigrants who come there from all over the world to make a better life of their families are the living embodiment of the American dream.

Also, there are several other possible explanations for this pattern of Bush/Kerry voting:
1) Cities with more gay people, which tend to be more liberal, will have lower fertility rates.
2) People with graduate education — who are more likely to vote Democratic — cluster in some information economy cities. They have fewer children and have them later, on average, than other social groups.
3) Religious people who are more likely to support Republicans may cluster in other cities and have a larger number of children, on average, than the rest of the population.

What nonsense.

Today’s long, anecdotal article on Social Security in the New York Times includes a passage reinforcing the canard that the program is a bad deal for blacks:

Here as elsewhere, Social Security has paid back some more generously than others. Created to protect the most vulnerable, it redistributes money from rich people to poor people, and from men to women, who often have no pension or assets.

But as family structures have evolved from the one-earner nuclear model of the 1930’s, the program has not always kept up. It rewards married couples more than single people, and couples with one stay-at-home spouse more than those in which both spouses worked.

Groups with shorter life expectancies, like African-Americans, receive fewer benefits than those who live longer.

This may be technically true, but it’s highly misleading. Here’s what the AP’s Matt Crenson found in a story I praised back in January:

Does Social Security cheat black Americans?

Yes, President Bush insisted last week as he pushed his proposal to revamp Social Security. But some Social Security experts say the answer is clearly “no.”

The way Bush explained it to a group of black supporters last week, blacks are shortchanged because they are more likely than whites to die before receiving their fair share of retirement benefits.

It is true that blacks, on average, have shorter lifespans than whites. But that is not the only factor that needs to be considered, say economists who study the government’s retirement program.

Social Security pays lower-income workers more, relative to what they pay into the program, than higher-income workers. Blacks are paid less than whites on average, so the distribution of benefits favors them. That evens out the discrepancy caused by the difference in death rates, said economist Jeffrey Liebman, a former Clinton administration official whose research is often cited by the Bush administration in support of its own policies.

But there are other features of Social Security that tip the balance further toward blacks. Spouses and dependents of Social Security beneficiaries who die continue receiving half of the deceased person’s benefits. Furthermore, the program pays not just retirement benefits but disability benefits to those too sick or injured to work. Blacks, 13 percent of the population, comprise 17 percent of the disability beneficiaries.

On balance, the program may actually benefit blacks more than whites, according to analyses by AARP, scholars such as Liebman and the Social Security Administration’s actuaries. Only the conservative Heritage Foundation has concluded otherwise.

Would it have killed Leland and Wilgoren to do some actual policy research?

Update 6/21: Media Matters has also published an article on this. (But you read it here first!)

I’m not the only one to notice that Bill Frist is squandering his medical credibility:

These days he seems not so much the leader of the Senate conservatives, but someone who is playing the role. And because he is behaving in ways that don’t seem entirely authentic, he is often trying just a bit too hard, striking the notes more forcefully than they need to be struck.

That is what happened during the Terri Schiavo affair. It’s not quite fair to say that Frist diagnosed Schiavo from a TV screen, but he did put himself on the wrong side of the autopsy that came out last week. He did betray his medical training, which is the core of his being, to please a key constituency group.

Writing in the New York Times Week in Review, Sheryl Gay Stolberg revisits the George Allen image makeover campaign, including describing the noose he hung from a tree in his law office as a “lasso”:

One open question is what benefit a politician gets from apologizing. Senator George Allen, Republican of Virginia, for instance, has been criticized in the past for displaying a noose in his law office; he called it a lasso and said it was part of a Western paraphernalia collection. Now contemplating a run for the presidency, Mr. Allen was the lead Republican sponsor of the lynching apology – a wise move, said Scott Reed, a Republican strategist.

“Anytime you’re going to run for national office you make a list of who your attackers will be,” Mr. Reed said. “Anything you can do to mollify them or take them off that list is a smart move.”

But Ms. [Donna] Brazile, the Democratic strategist, was not so certain. “That all depends,” she said, “on what comes after the apology. They have to walk the walk after they talk the talk.”

Does anyone think the critics of Allen’s ugly racial history are going to be mollified? For example, here’s New Hampshire state Rep. Claire Clarke in the Foster’s Daily Democrat in Dover, NH commenting on an upcoming Allen visit to the state:

“I hope he will answer questions about why, according to the Washington Post, he hung a noose outside his law office or a confederate flag in his home,” Clarke said. “Does he think sponsorship of this bill absolves him of his past actions?”

If local politicians are already bringing up the issue in New Hampshire, home to the country’s first and most important presidential primary, Allen’s going to have problems.

Let the flailing begin!

With approval for President Bush down to the low- to mid-40s and private accounts doing even worse, the Bush White House and Congressional Republicans are finally starting to try to scramble to pick up the pieces.

One idea being raised by Senate Republicans is to pay for private accounts with surplus Social Security revenues — a brilliant way to drive home the enormous transition costs that privatization requires. As the Washington Post points out, “The strategy is controversial because it would create new budget problems. Either the diverted money would have to be replaced with new taxes, or Congress would have to slash programs now funded by Social Security’s excess payroll taxes.” Why anyone thinks this will work is beyond me.

Other, more realistic Senate Republicans have reportedly told the White House that “they are stuck in a deep rut and suggested it is time for an exit strategy” on Social Security. The problem, as the Post noted, is that Republicans are now stuck in a Catch-22:

Democrats are united in their opposition, and the [Senate] Finance Committee does not have the Republican votes to approve a Social Security plan that would divert some payroll taxes to private investment accounts. But the committee, which has jurisdiction over the issue, also does not have the votes to pass a plan that would preserve Social Security’s solvency without the personal accounts because too many GOP conservatives want them.

And on top of all this, the White House has delayed the release of the recommendations of President Bush’s tax reform panel until the end of September, hoping that it will have passed a Social Security package by then. But if not, it’s unlikely that Bush will pass a tax reform package while he is President.

In short, the wheels are coming off the wagon. Absent another terrorist attack, we may be looking at Jimmy Carter part II.