Brendan Nyhan

It’s become a cliché to point out the way that our failure in Iraq is used to justify the need for a continued presence in Iraq (we have to stay to clean up the mess we created), but I still can’t let this line from President Bush yesterday pass without comment:

“Iraq is the convergence point for two of the greatest threats to America in this new century: Al Qaeda and Iran,” Mr. Bush said.

It’s enough to make anyone shrill. If Iran was such a dire threat, why did we invade Iraq? Also, Iran is a threat in Iraq precisely because we took out Iran’s principal rival in the region and created a security vacuum in Iraq that opened the door for Iran’s Shiite allies to gain influence. Finally, the Al Qaeda claim is misleading on multiple levels. The group wasn’t in Iraq before the war and Al Qaeda in Iraq is (a) only loosely allied with the terrorist group led by Osama bin Laden and (b) a small part of the insurgency.

Just yesterday, I was complaining about the way Media Matters has contributed to the distortion of John McCain’s comments about staying 100 years in Iraq. And then today (Via Matthew Yglesias) I learn that David Brock, the head of Media Matters, is leading an independent group planning a $40 million attack campaign against McCain. It’s all starting to make sense.

PS Doesn’t Brock realize that his leadership of this effort will hurt the credibility of Media Matters? The group has succeeded in large part because its articles are written in a neutral style and provide documented support for their claims. By contrast, paid advertising is almost inevitably unfair and poorly documented — often by design since the ad’s creators often want to generate controversy to ensure attention from the press. In other words, Brock is likely to be leading a smear campaign against McCain at the same time he’s decrying a smear campaign against Obama. Good times!

In search of demographic insights into Pennsylvania, Brian Schaffner posts an amusing graph from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study — the percentage of Wal-Mart shoppers vs. the percentage of pickup truck owners by state:

His conclusion? “On these measures, Pennsylvania is most like Florida, Wisconsin, Virginia, Delaware, Ohio and Illinois. And, of course, Obama won four of those states (WI, VA, DE, and IL) while Clinton won two (FL and OH).”

The constant distortions of what John McCain said about staying in Iraq for 100 years make me want to start Spinsanity back up. Liberals are tying themselves in knots trying to provide justifications for why it’s not being taken out of context. Sorry, but it is.

Here’s what McCain actually said:

QUESTIONER: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years —

McCAIN: Maybe a hundred.

QUESTIONER: Is that — is that —

McCAIN: We’ve been in South Korea — we’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That’d be fine with me as long as Americans —

QUESTIONER: So that’s your policy?

McCAIN: — As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, then it’s fine with me. I hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al Qaeda is training, recruiting, and equipping and motivating people every single day.

Leading Democratic politicians turned that statement into a claim that McCain wants to keep fighting a war like the one we’re in today for 100 years in Iraq — something he expressly ruled out.

Bob Somerby has a nice summary of why this interpretation is wrong:

McCain didn’t say that he wanted a hundred-year war. He expressly said something different.

Therefore:

If you claim that he said he wanted a hundred-year war, you’re misstating what he said.

Beyond that:

You may believe it’s absurd to think that Iraq could be like Japan or Germany. Have at it! But let’s be honest: Because that’s a fairly dry point, Obama and Clinton both went out and misstated what McCain really said.

As Somerby notes, both Democratic presidential candidates are distorting McCain’s remarks. For instance, Obama recently said that “John McCain wants to continue a war in Iraq perhaps as long as 100 years” while Hillary Clinton said that “McCain’s willing to keep this war going for 100 years – you can count on him to do that.”

Now leading Democratic bloggers and fact-checkers are offering bogus, ideologically-grounded rationales for claiming that this interpretation is correct. The leader, as Somerby notes, has been Josh Marshall, who suggests that Democratic politicians say the following:

Why doesn’t every Democrat, when saying anything about the presidential race, start their remarks by saying: John McCain says he’d be happy to see our troops in Iraq for another hundred years. I just can’t agree with that.

That’s really all you need to say. Keep it simple.

This formulation falsely suggests McCain was advocating 100 more years of US troops fighting and dying at the current rate. Again, Marshall has every right to disagree with McCain’s premise that Iraq can become like Japan or South Korea, but not to take his remarks out of context in this way.

Marshall also praised the latest misleading attack on McCain from Hillary Clinton, who said this during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania:

At a speech at Hopewell High School in Aliquippa, Pa., Mrs. Clinton praised Mr. McCain, but then added that the Senator “has said that it would be alright with him if we kept troops in Iraq for up to 100 years and again yesterday, he basically reiterated his commitment to the course that we are on in Iraq. Well, I don’t agree with that.”

Clinton’s spin here is especially slick (and dishonest). She strings together the 100 years comment with McCain’s support for the troop surge to suggest that McCain wants to continue US involvement at its current intensity for 100 years. Marshall’s headline? “Good for her.”

Marshall clearly recognizes what McCain’s comments actually meant (at one point he referred to “the fantasy that Iraqis will be happy having us occupy their country forever and that the place will become like Finland”). When he came closest to acknowledging McCain’s intended meaning, he resorted to the fallback strategy of demanding answers to a series of additional questions:

Now McCain and his handlers are trying to say he wasn’t talking about ‘war’ in Iraq or even an ‘occupation’ but only a ‘presence’ in which no US military personnel are killed and seemingly one which doesn’t cost anything either.

If reporters who’ve bought into McCain’s explanation actually think this is true, then the logical follow-up is to ask: if he is only happy continuing the ‘presence’ in Iraq for a century under his fantasy conditions, how long is he willing to continue it with a price tage of $100 billion and hundreds of US military fatalities a year? Or how about $50 billion and only 500 fatalities a year. If he really wants to run away from the bold commitments he made as a primary season candidate, reporters really need to do some due diligence gaming out just what he means.

Note how the first paragraph quoted above uses scare quotes and a skeptical tone to call into question the obvious meaning of McCain’s comments. Of course McCain didn’t mean a war or occupation! He was using the analogy of Japan and South Korea — are we at war with those countries? No. Are we occuping them? No.

Another offender is Media Matters. While the group does excellent work on conservative spin, its analysis of this issue has fallen into the standard ideological watchdog pathology of pushing an agenda under the guise of media criticism.

For instance, one MM article follows the same strategy as Marshall, demanding answers to followup questions rather than conceding that McCain’s original remarks were mischaracterized:

A Washington Post “Fact Checker” item accused Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton of “twist[ing]” Sen. John McCain’s “words by claiming that he ‘wants’ to fight a 100-year war.” But the “fact check” did not note that, during the same event, McCain repeatedly avoided directly answering how many years he would be willing to fight a war in Iraq if Americans are “being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.”

Somerby also notes a Jamison Foser column on Media Matters that engages in an even more tortured defense of McCain’s remarks:

In effect, McCain is having it both ways—he refuses to set a date by which the United States will stop fighting in Iraq, but when critics accuse him of being willing to continue fighting in Iraq for 100 years, he and his campaign reject that. Well, which is it? If he refuses to set a date by which we will stop fighting, then it is fair to say he’s willing to keep fighting for 100 years. And if he isn’t willing to keep fighting for 100 years, then he doesn’t really refuse to set a date by which we must stop fighting. But neither the Times nor the Post explore that tension in their articles about McCain’s 100-years comments.

Logic like that would get you thrown out of an intro to philosophy class. But sadly it’s par for the course in this depressing debate.

Ezra Klein highlights Ray Fair’s model of presidential election outcomes in a recent post. Fair is projecting that the GOP will receive 48 percent of the two-party presidnetial vote, but (a) his projection assumes a much stronger economy than we’re likely to have and (b) he tinkered with the specification a lot over the years to maximize fit (PDF), which makes me and others uncomfortable.

I prefer Douglas Hibbs’s Bread and Peace model, which is more parsimonious. He currently projects 46-47% for the Republican two-party vote.

I apparently missed this back in 2003 — University of Chicago bioethicist Leon Kass, the chair of President Bush’s bioethics council, objects to the public licking of ice cream cones (via Kieran Healy):

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone –a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive.

I fear I may by this remark lose the sympathy of many reader, people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the view that eating in the street is for dogs. Modern America’s rising tide of informality has already washed out many long-standing traditions — their reasons long before forgotten — that served well to regulate the boundary between public and private; and in many quarters complete shamelessness is treated as proof of genuine liberation from the allegedly arbitrary constraints of manners. To cite one small example: yawning with uncovered mouth. Not just the uneducated rustic but children of the cultural elite are now regularly seen yawning openly in public (not so much brazenly or forgetfully as indifferently and “naturally”), unaware that it is an embarrassment to human self-command to be caught in the grip of involuntary bodily movements (like sneezing, belching, and hiccuping and even the involuntary bodily display of embarrassment itself, blushing). But eating on the street — even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat — displays in fact precisely such lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. Hunger must be sated now; it cannot wait. Though the walking street eater still moves in the direction of his vision, he shows himself as a being led by his appetites. Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. Eating on the run does not even allow the human way of enjoying one’s food, for it is more like simple fueling; it is hard to savor or even to know what one is eating when the main point is to hurriedly fill the belly, now running on empty. This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if WE feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.”

Kass, Leon: The Hungry Soul at 148-149. (University of Chicago Press, 1994, 1999)

Our civilization is doomed!

In the hierarchy of idiotic online criticism, this DNC release attacking John McCain for a Google banner ad that appeared on some sketchy blog is one step above comparing him to a Nazi:

Even as he quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words that “someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and evil,” John McCain’s own campaign ran advertising on a website run by a Northern Virginia blogger “to sign up members for his anti-illegal-immigrant organization” [Washington Post, 4/4/08; John McCain remarks, 4/4/08]

McCain’s campaign is running banner ads on the website http://www.bvbl.net/, which includes posts blaming “illegal aliens” for the “real estate meltdown” and sensationalizes “illegal alien crime.” The blog is credited with helping shape public opinion in Prince William County, Virginia, which has embraced policies to crack down on illegal immigration. [Washington Post, 4/4/08]

DNC Hispanic Caucus Chair Ramona Martinez, Black Caucus Chair Virgie Rollins, and APIA Caucus Chair Bel Leong-Hong issued the following joint statement calling on John McCain to stop advertising on the hate-promoting web site:

“John McCain can’t apologize for one mistake while making another of the same ilk. As recently as 1994 John McCain voted to cut off funding for the Commission promoting Dr. King’s holiday, but today says he made ‘a mistake.’ If McCain is truly regretful of those past actions, how can he justify advertising on a website that promotes the same type of hate and division Dr. King gave his life to end?”

The premise of the release is directly misleading — McCain is running a banner ad via Google, not choosing to advertise on that specific site. It’s reminiscent of the the Bush campaign’s attempt to attribute member-created ads comparing Bush and Hitler to MoveOn.org — yet another step in the trend toward liberals adopting spin tactics predominantly used by conservatives.

Via TNR’s Josh Patashnik (here and here), the New York Times has run two hilarious articles in the last few days on the strange things that happen in state politics. The first tells the story of a referendum that ends the Wisconsin governor’s bizarre ability to edit specific words out of bills:

Wisconsin governors have long been allowed to sign off on budget bills but do some tricky erasing first. They could delete words, numbers, sentences, paragraphs or some combination of all of those, to create entirely new meanings never intended by the original authors — a legislative twist on the game of Mad Libs.

Like when Gov. James E. Doyle, a Democrat, scratched out some 700 words from a section of the 2005 budget bill, leaving behind just 20 words that, when stitched back together, moved $427 million from the transportation fund to education.

But on Tuesday, Wisconsin voters put an end to some of the governor’s fancy editing power. Seventy-one percent of voters favored a referendum that read to outsiders like some indecipherable grammar lesson, barring the governor from creating “a new sentence by combining parts of two or more sentences.” Wisconsin voters, who have been living with the unusual “partial veto” (distinct from the more common line-item veto) since 1930, needed little translation.

They have fought (and laughed) over this before. Voters limited the veto once before, in 1990, rejecting what critics then called the “Vanna White veto,” allowing a governor to cross out letters inside words to make whole new words.

With the letter-flipping practice banned, critics, led by Republican legislators, this time re-named their target the “Frankenstein veto,” focusing on the governor’s ability to merge whole sentences through deletions, and thus, they said, cobble together weird bits of provisions to create whatever monster one cared to.

The Frankenstein veto graphic has to been to be believed — how could this really happen?

Then there was
this report on Arkansas legislators passing a law with the opposite meaning of what they intended:

Last year, the state legislature botched a law intended to make 18 the minimum age for marriage, instead mistakenly removing the limit entirely.

As long as they had the consent of their parents, children–no matter how young–could have demanded matrimonial bonds under the law passed in error in 2007: “In order for a person who is younger than eighteen (18) years of age and who is not pregnant to obtain a marriage license, the person must provide the county clerk with evidence of parental consent to the marriage.”

The idea was to allow an exception for teenagers who were pregnant. The problem was with the “not,” which crept in by accident, according to Representative Will Bond, who sponsored the bill.

Oops.

Reader Joel Wiles points out that one of Barack Obama’s latest fundraising emails presents a little case study in the use of misleading statistical comparisons:

In February alone, more than 94% of our donors gave in amounts of $200 or less. Meanwhile, campaign finance reports show that donations of $200 or less make up just 13% of Senator McCain’s total campaign funds, and only 26% of Senator Clinton’s.

…Senator McCain has raised more than 70% of his total campaign funds from high-dollar donors giving $1,000 or more. Senator Clinton has raised 60% of her funds from $1,000-and-up donors.

These two sets of figures are non-comparable. Even though 94% of Obama donors gave less than $200, a large proportion of his funds are still likely to come from high dollar donors. Conversely, even though McCain and Clinton have raised a large proportion of their total funds from high dollar donors, a high percentage of their donors might have given less than $200. Obama’s numbers are likely to be less skewed than McCain’s or Clinton’s but we don’t know because he never gives us the relevant comparison.

Since when did this sort of crack become acceptable in a straight news story?

Seattle would appear to be the first in the United States to impose fees on both kinds of shopping bags. Last year, San Francisco banned plastic grocery bags outright, but paper bags can still be used, and without a fee.

Seattle, often just as liberal but less loopy than San Francisco, determined that the production and shipping costs of paper bags made them “actually worse for the planet” than plastic bags, according to a recent local study.

I’m from the Bay Area so I know all about San Francisco’s wackiness. But since when do supposedly news reporters refer to entire cities as “loopy? I blame the Washington Post Style section, which helped popularize the attitude-driven style that is slowly poisoning Times news coverage.