Brendan Nyhan

Even philosophy major Matthew Yglesias is offended by the mathematical failings of Robert Samuelson, who writes that “If you move to a home 25 percent larger and then increase energy efficiency 25 percent, you don’t save energy.” But as Yglesias points out, 1.25*.75=.9375, which is less than 1. Ouch.

PS Yglesias later noted that “irrespective of mathematical quibbling, Samuelson’s gotten the physics of home energy use wrong. Energy usage should grow proportionately to the surface area of your house, not to its volume.”

The liberal blogosphere has been very quiet about the predicament of NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who seems determined to create an awkward parallel to the White House:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer vowed on Wednesday to fight any State Senate inquiry into his administration’s internal operations, even as Republican senators were laying the groundwork for an investigation that could lead to subpoenas of top officials.

Sound familiar?

Did you know the famous “Do Nothing Congress” of 1947-1948 actually accomplished a great deal? I didn’t. When I interviewed him for my dissertation, National Journal’s Carl Cannon pointed me to this piece of his (NJ sub. req.), which debunks the myth:

By 1948, while running for his own election, Truman denounced his rivals as the “Do-Nothing” Congress. Actually, the 80th Congress created the Air Force, the CIA, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and funded every element of the Truman Doctrine, including the Marshall Plan. “It’s astounding the things that Congress accomplished,” says congressional scholar Michael Robinson, co-author of an account of the 80th Congress. “It’s a complete crock to call it a ‘Do-Nothing’ Congress. And Truman knew it.”

But Truman also knew that despite the significant accomplishments of the 80th Congress, many Americans had concluded that with their myriad investigations and oversight hearings, Republicans had overindulged their partisan impulses, giving credence to accusations of gridlock.

“Even though they did so much, there were a lot of partisan clashes, and oversight-type investigations that went too far,” congressional expert Norman Ornstein says. “The lesson here is that except in the most extraordinary circumstances, Congress cannot stage a confrontation with the president and win.”

Democrats of the present day, beware…

The latest in conservative postmodernism — WSJ’s Kimberley Strassel defines “truth” as what White House officials tell Congress in private not under oath:

Mr. Conyers, of course, has yet another honorable option: to take up the White House on its offer of making top officials available for questioning in private, and not under oath. If it’s truth he’s after, Mr. Bush has offered to give it to him.

Of course, the Attorney General won’t even tell the truth when testifying in public under oath, but what is “truth” anyway?

My friend and former Spinsanity co-editor Ben Fritz and I have written a new column for the site on the debate over Michael Moore’s “Sicko.” Here’s how it begins:

The mainstream media has started fact-checking Michael Moore one movie too late.

As veteran fact-checkers of Michael Moore, we should be taking a victory lap in the wake of “Sicko.” The liberal icon’s latest film has been aggressively fact-checked by major outlets including CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, the Associated Press, and USA Today.

However, the media has decided to pounce on Moore just when he seems to be addressing his problems with accuracy. As a result, they have little to say — indeed, the weakness of the criticism makes Moore look thoughtful and careful with his facts by comparison.

Please make sure to read the whole thing.

No one understands that it takes sixty votes to pass non-budget legislation in the Senate because of the filibuster. Apparently this ignorance extends to the editors of the New York Times op-ed page, who let Jean Edward Smith write the following in a piece about changing the number of seats on the Supreme Court:

If the current five-man majority persists in thumbing its nose at popular values, the election of a Democratic president and Congress could provide a corrective. It requires only a majority vote in both houses to add a justice or two.

No, it requires sixty votes, and no Republican will ever vote for such a plan. Hence, court-packing is unlikely to happen again unless one party secures a filibuster-proof Senate majority. In short, the premise of the piece (that such a change is feasible) is false.

Matthew Yglesias makes a crucial point that all pundits should take to heart:

I spent a lot of time puzzling over Bush’s sincerity or lack thereof with regard to his idealistic rhetoric before the war, and in retrospect it was all wasted time. It’s interesting to wonder how it’s possible — or if it’s possible — for a man to speak grand words about liberty in the morning and defending systematic torture in the afternoon, but it’s not actually relevant. The main point was that there was simply never any good reason to believe the more idealistic aspiration sometimes associated with the war had any decent prospects of success…

It’s ultimately futile to have a debate about motives or sincerity. You can’t prove that someone has acted in bad faith. That’s why we bracketed the word “lie,” which implies motive, in All the President’s Spin. Regardless of what he intends at any given moment, which we can never know with certainty, Bush’s statements are frequently misleading. As the President, it’s his duty not to mislead the public. Therefore, his actions are wrong.

There’s a comparable lesson in the debate over John Ashcroft’s confirmation as Attorney General, which I wrote about for Spinsanity in 2001. As I pointed out, defenders of Ashcroft shifted the focus of the debate from his inflammatory public statements about race to his (unprovable) feelings about race by claiming his critics were calling him a racist:

This rhetorical trick left Ashcroft’s opponents reeling. By most accounts, Ashcroft is a decent person who does not personally hate people on the basis of race – and no one can definitively prove otherwise (hence President Bush: “This is a good man; he’s got a good heart”). But this does not mean that Ashcroft should be exempt from criticism for capitalizing on racial animus and being indifferent to civil rights in his political career…

In the end, Ashcroft’s supporters created a standard that is effectively insurmountable, precluding race-related criticism of the more ambiguous political appeals, statements and positions that constitute the vast majority of American politics…

Ezra Klein, unfortunately, has not fully internalized this point, though he converged to it asymptotically on Tuesday.

When he first wrote about the misleading David Brooks column that I criticized, Klein spent much of the post questioning whether Brooks is writing in good faith:

Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam are always telling me to cut David Brooks more slack, to extend the assumption of good faith, to listen to the interesting things he has to say. So I’d really like one of them to dissolve my current impression that Brooks’ latest column — which tries to make the argument that the economy really is in very good shape, save for some issues with inequality — isn’t a pack of lies and deceptions..

These are serious qualms and, if not factually rebutted, they call into question the accuracy of Brooks’ article. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t answers to these objection. But readers deserve to have them. And without them, it’s hard to extend that presumption of good faith. Particularly with pieces like this one providing past context.

After linking to my piece, he reiterated this concern:

But this is Brooks’ main dodge in the article: He repeatedly factors in gains created during the final years of the 90s, averages them out with the losses during the Bush years, and uses the resultant positive number as proof that the economy is doing well. The actual conclusion this data suggests is that the economy was doing well and has been in decline for most of the last decade — but that doesn’t fit the story Brooks is trying to tell, which is that all those worried about the economy and intent on restoring (and possibly even enhancing) the progressivity of the Clinton years are mendacious alarmists. So again, someone explain to me how to read this in good faith.

A third post again questions Brooks’ motivations:

Now why would David Brooks want to use such an inaccurate and even misleading measure? Particularly when median household income shows a 3% fall between 2000 and 2004? And has completely divorced itself from productivity gains? Doesn’t Brooks find any of that worth mentioning?

In his final post, however, Klein finally concedes that we can’t know Brooks’ intent for sure and that we should instead focus on the effect of his column:

I want to emphasize, again, that this article is dishonest and misleading, in effect if not intent. I’m perfectly willing to believe some rightwing Heritage type impressed a perfectly well-intentioned David Brooks with these points at a party, but either way, the resulting article served to deceive readers of the New York Times op-ed page as to the state of the economy.

This is the correct position. Let’s not waste our time and energy worrying about Brooks’ motivations. Instead, focus on the stronger claim that his column was objectively misleading to Times readers and does not fulfill his obligations to them as a columnist.

Update 7/27 11:46 AM: After approvingly citing my original post on Brooks, Ross Douthat makes a similar point about the assumption of bad faith:

I think the liberal critics are right, and Brooks’ use of the data in these two examples deserves criticism and correction.

Whether that justifies calling him a “liar,” or whether it might be more appropriate to treat him the way I would assume Ezra would like to be treated himself – as a fallible pundit who is sometimes insufficiently skeptical about information that dovetails with his preconceptions, and who merits respectful disagreement in such cases rather sneering and name-calling – well, make up your own mind.

By Ben Fritz and Brendan Nyhan

The mainstream media has started fact-checking Michael Moore one movie too late.

As veteran fact-checkers of Michael Moore, we should be taking a victory lap in the wake of “Sicko.” The liberal icon’s latest film has been aggressively fact-checked by major outlets including CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, the Associated Press, and USA Today.

However, the media has decided to pounce on Moore just when he seems to be addressing his problems with accuracy. As a result, they have little to say — indeed, the weakness of the criticism makes Moore look thoughtful and careful with his facts by comparison.

The primary focus of these analyses is to point out that he only tells one side of the story. That is undoubtedly true, as it has been in all his work, but also obvious. Despite Moore’s protestations to the contrary on NPR Monday, he is a propagandist. As such, he is under no obligation to present a balanced perspective.

The rest of the critiques — which focus on discrepancies in health care statistics — are so minor that even we can hardly protest. For instance, USA Today wrote, “The film says health care costs $7,000 a person each year; the World Health Organization says it costs $6,100.” However, it soon had to issue a correction after Moore’s team documented that the original statistic came from a reputable source. Did USA Today just look up an estimate online and then assume that it had proved Moore was wrong?

Similarly, CNN’s primary objection is that Moore’s estimates are drawn from different sources. In one case, it points out that Moore got the figure that Cuba spends $251 per year on health care (which Gupta inaccurately reported as $25 in his original piece) from a BBC report, but he ignores the BBC estimate of US healthcare spending and instead uses a higher estimate from the Department of Health and Human Services. CNN is correct to argue that it is preferable to make apples-to-apples comparisons of statistics from the same report, but Moore is at least citing legitimate sources and doing so accurately.

That’s a big improvement over his films Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 and his books Stupid White
Men and Dude, Where’s My Country?, all of which featured numerous factual errors and deceptive claims.

We know, because we (along with our Spinsanity partner Bryan Keefer) were among the few critics pointing out those errors and deceptions. Compared to the altered Bush/Quayle ad in “Columbine,” the numerous misstatements about the federal budget in “Stupid White Men,” or Moore’s misleading insinuations about President Bush’s Saudi connections in “Fahrenheit,” the objections to “Sicko” are miniscule.

So why are the media going after “Sicko” so aggressively? Ezra Klein of the American Prospect argues that the media has “status anxiety” next to Moore, a multi-millionaire celebrity filmmaker, and want to “separate what Moore does from what they do, both in order to explain away his successes and to underscore their own assumed strengths (objectivity, rationality, etc).” Klein may be right, but we don’t claim to possess the same kind of insights into the anxieties of CNN, AP, and USA Today reporters that he apparently has.

Here’s a different theory: When it comes to fact-checking, the mainstream media tends to wait until the evidence (or the narrative) that someone is a serial dissembler becomes overwhelming. It’s no coincidence that media outlets are starting to push back against the Bush administration’s dishonest attempts to link Al Qaeda and 9/11 to the debate over whether to withdraw troops from Iraq. It’s a trick Bush and his aides and allies have been using since 2002, as we chronicled extensively on Spinsanity and in All the President’s Spin. However, it has taken years of bloggers and pundits documenting Bush’s frequent dissembling for mainstream media outlets to take a more critical approach to these claims. In our experience, outlets that want to seem “objective” rarely fact-check without some sort of strong pretext.

The same logic seems to apply to Moore. With “Stupid White Men” and “Bowling for Columbine,” we were one of the few sources documenting his mendacity. However, after “Fahrenheit,” several major media outlets began to wake up and question Moore’s facts, including Newsweek and USA Today.

With Moore’s reputation for dishonesty growing along with his profile, we weren’t surprised that CNN, USA Today and the AP thought it was worth devoting their resources to checking the facts in “Sicko.” We did the same, assuming Moore would continue his pattern of deception. When we didn’t find compelling evidence, we decided not to write about the topic. But the media outlets who had assigned the story apparently felt that they had to write something. As a result, they attempted to critique a movie whose greatest sin was simply being one-sided.

The saddest part about this controversy is the way Moore has used the lame fact-checks of “Sicko” to dismiss all the complaints about his work. During his interview with Wolf Blitzer on “The Situation Room,” for instance, he made an astonishing claim about “Fahrenheit 9/11”:

I haven’t been on your show now for three years. The last time I was on, you ran a similar piece about “Fahrenheit 9/11” saying this can’t be true what he’s saying about the war, how it’s going to be a quagmire, the weapons of mass destruction.

You know, and — why don’t you start off actually with my first appearance back here on your show in three years and maybe apologize to me for saying that three years ago, because it turned out everything I said in “Fahrenheit” was true. Everything has come to happen.

Really? Has Moore’s disingenuous claim that the invasion of Afghanistan was a front to build a pipeline for Unocal been proven right? His dishonest implication that Osama bin Laden’s family and other Saudis were able to fly out of the country while air traffic was grounded after September 11? His incorrect accusation that “the Bush family, their friends and their related businesses” were given $1.4 billion by the Saudi royal family?

While “Sicko” may not have any major factual errors, we shouldn’t let Moore (or anyone else) whitewash his many problems with the truth.

According to House Republican leader John A. Boehner, offering SCHIP coverage that is superior to available private insurance options amounts to “[d]ragging people out of private health insurance”:

Top House Republicans objected to the House Democrats’ plan to finance their proposals, with increases in tobacco taxes and cuts in subsidies for private health plans serving older Americans on Medicare. Republicans say public coverage would in some cases replace private insurance.

“Dragging people out of private health insurance to put them into a government-run program is ‘Hillary care’ come back,” Mr. Boehner said, referring to the Clinton administration plan for universal coverage.

Apparently, free will doesn’t exist when it comes to choosing health insurance for children. Tie me to the mast! Don’t let me be tempted into government coverage!

(Of course, designing SCHIP expansion so that it covers currently uninsured children rather than displacing existing private coverage is a real issue. But no one is being “dragged” out of private insurance.)

Among all the norms that the Bush administration has overturned, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s repeated refusal to answer a direct question in Senate testimony without invoking executive privilege or the Fifth Amendment might be the most outrageous yet.

Josh Marshall has the story:

In this exchange Sen. Schumer (D) asks Gonzales who sent him and Andy Card to John Ashcroft’s bedside. And Gonzales just refuses to answer. He keep repeating that they went “on behalf” of the president. But he won’t say if the president sent them. He just won’t answer.

Schumer notes the key point: Gonzales isn’t even asserting any kind of privilege. He doesn’t say he can’t remember. He just won’t answer…

It really requires stepping back in this case to take stock of this exchange. Testifying before Congress is like being called to testify in court. You have to answer every question. Every question. You can fudge and say you don’t remember something and see how far you get. Or you can invoke various privileges. And it up to the courts to decide if the invocations are valid. But it’s simply not permitted to refuse to answer the question. It is quite literally contempt of Congress.

How is this man still the chief law enforcement officer of the United States?