Brendan Nyhan

Yes, Robin Givhan wrote an entire Washington Post article on Hillary Clinton’s cleavage.

In the latest post-9/11 attack on dissent, a Pentagon undersecretary has accused Hillary Clinton of reinforcing enemy propaganda for requesting information about US plans for eventual withdrawal from Iraq. Here’s the AP account (see also the letter itself):

The Pentagon told Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton that her questions about how the U.S. plans to eventually withdraw from Iraq boosts enemy propaganda.

In a stinging rebuke to a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman responded to questions Clinton raised in May in which she urged the Pentagon to start planning now for the withdrawal of American forces.

…”Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia,” Edelman wrote.

He added that “such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks.

My updated timeline of GOP attacks on dissent since 9/11 is posted below the jump. (If I’m missing anything from the last few months, please let me know.)

(more…)

Ron Brownstein provides the most convincing argument I’ve seen for why Bush is likely to devastate the GOP’s fortunes in 2008:

when a departing president has been as unpopular as Bush is now, his party has usually lost the White House in the next election.

There’s no guarantee that history will repeat itself. But the weight of experience suggests that Republicans in Congress and in the presidential race are vastly underestimating the challenge of escaping the undertow Bush is creating. If he cannot recover at least somewhat, or if the party does not separate itself from him more effectively — or both — the GOP may be dragged under.

In the elections to replace departing presidents, weakness seems more contagious than strength. Outgoing presidents with a high job approval rating haven’t always succeeded in passing on the White House to their chosen candidates. Ronald Reagan did in 1988, but, in two nail-biting contests, Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 and Bill Clinton in 2000 could not.

Unpopular departing presidents, though, have consistently undercut their party in the next election. Democrats lost the White House in 1952 and 1968 after Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson saw their approval ratings plummet below 50%. Likewise, in the era before polling, the opposition party won the White House when deeply embattled presidents left office after the elections of 1920 (Woodrow Wilson), 1896 (Grover Cleveland), 1860 (James Buchanan) and 1852 (Millard Fillmore). The White House also changed partisan control when weakened presidents stepped down in 1844 and 1884. Only in 1856 and 1876 did this pattern bend, when the parties of troubled presidents Franklin Pierce and Ulysses S. Grant held the White House upon their departure.

This shouldn’t be shocking. Voters dissatisfied with a departing president typically want change. And they usually believe the opposition party will deliver more change than the president’s. The most recent elections to replace retiring two-term presidents — Reagan in 1988 and Clinton in 2000 — help us quantify that instinct. In each case, media exit polls found that the same share — 88% — of voters who disapproved of the retiring president’s job performance voted against his party’s nominee, George H. W. Bush in 1988 and Al Gore in 2000. By contrast, about four-fifths of voters who approved of the outgoing president’s performance voted for his party’s nominee each time.

Those are ominous numbers for Republicans today. On the day of the election to succeed them, both Reagan and Clinton enjoyed approval ratings just over 55%, with about 40% of voters disapproving. In last week’s Gallup/USA Today poll, Bush’s approval rating stood at just 29%, with 66% disapproving. If voters divide as they did in 1988 and 2000, and Bush’s ratings do not improve, that would translate into a 2008 Democratic landslide. That’s why Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz says flatly, “There is no way any Republican can win the presidential election next year if Bush’s approval rating remains anywhere near where it is now.”

In fact, to survive 2008, Republicans will probably need some combination of separation (from Bush) and rehabilitation (for him). But neither end of that equation will be easy. Bush’s disapproval rating has exceeded 58% all year and has not fallen below 50% for two years — the longest stretch of such presidential weakness since Truman finished his second term beleaguered by Korea, corruption and Joe McCarthy.

It’s true that Republicans in 2008 should perform slightly better among voters who disapprove of the president than George H.W. Bush and Gore did, because their nominee, unlike those men, won’t be the retiring president’s vice president. But another pattern underscores how hard the challenge will remain: On average, 80% of voters who disapproved of a president’s performance have voted against his party’s candidates even in House races since 1986, according to the respected University of Michigan post-election polls. When a president takes on water, in other words, everyone in his party flounders.

Dana Milbank captures a classic no-comment by Susan Collins on the plight of her colleague David Vitter:

Though they ultimately rewarded his contrition with a standing ovation, some colleagues weren’t sure they liked the smell of things, either. “I don’t have any thoughts,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said of Vitter as she arrived. She reconsidered. “I have many thoughts,” she revised. “They’re just unexpressed.” Did Vitter break the law? “I’m not an expert in prostitution law, I’m pleased to say,” she replied.

You know things aren’t going well when you have to clarify that you “have many thoughts.”

I’m currently attending the summer meeting of the Society for Political Methodology in lovely State College, PA so blogging may be light through Sunday…

I’m sick of pundits flippantly accusing their opponents of wanting some potential bad outcome that could result from a policy position, as Matthew Yglesias does in this post (and yes, I recognize that it’s supposed to be funny or ironic):

George Bush Wants Kids to Get Sick and Die

Just kidding. He’d like kids to stay healthy. It’s just that if they get sick, he wants them to die. Thus, his plan to veto a bill expanding S-CHIP, a program to give health insurance to kids.

So I assume Yglesias would have no objection to Bush saying that supporters of withdrawal from Iraq want tens of thousands of people to die in the resulting chaos?

Predictably, the wheels are falling off of John McCain’s campaign (Intrade currently puts his probability of winning the GOP nomination at 4.3%), but at least he’s going out in style:

In April, McCainiacs gathered at the Tabú Ultra Lounge in the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. His finance reports say that he paid the club $18,735 for “Equip Rental/Catering.” The nightclub’s Web site describes it this way: “Interactive projections mesmerize with sensual images. Internationally renowned DJs conjure a cool and casual vibe that put it on everyone’s list of Las Vegas nightclubs. Stunning models/servers tempt with nouveau classic cocktails. This is the forbidden world of Tabú, where only one rule applies: anything goes. Are you ready for a nightspot that’s too hot to touch?”

…On May 17, it was Tenjune, a club in New York City, for a Young Professionals cocktail reception hosted by his daughter Meghan. McCain paid the club $6,669 twice, for “Catering/Personnel SVC/Equip.”

…The club’s Web site features a picture of two women in a sensuous embrace.

“As you descend the main stairway, you enter the middle section with its soft, velvet seating and wood flooring,” the site says. “Behind the bar, a marble wall twinkles with points of light. Overhead, wooden waves undulate across the ceiling with soft light spilling out between the ripples that continue into the dance room.”

The meme that Barack Obama is inexperienced has come back with a vengeance.

Writing in The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch asserted recently that Obama “has a record of inexperience no other serious contender could match”:

Consider a candidate like Barack Obama, who—well, there is no candidate like Barack Obama, who entered the race with a record of inexperience no other serious contender could match.

And as Matthew Yglesias notes, New York Times Magazine reporter Matt Bai made an even more sweeping claim yesterday, stating that Obama “would set a new precedent for inexperience in the White House”:

Obama, who leads the field in financial contributions, would set a new precedent for inexperience in the White House; he was a state senator only three years ago, when he delivered the keynote address at the Democratic convention, and before that he was a community organizer.

But as I’ve noted (here and here), Obama’s tenure in elected office is comparable to most of the top presidential candidates. And as Yglesias notes, the historical claim is also unsupportable:

If Obama is elected to the White House, he will have served eight years in the Illinois State Senate and four years in the United States Senate. In the twentieth century, I count Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan as all having served fewer than 12 years in public office before assuming the Presidency and I count exactly twelve for Warren Harding. To find a President with as few as six years of public office under his belt before becoming President, you need to go all the way back to . . . the current President of the United States so it’s not like you need to be a historian to figure this out.

Now arguably some of these people were “more experienced” than Obama along other metrics than a raw count of years would indicate, but there’s still no obvious sense in which Obama is a precedent-shattering figure. At a minimum, Carter and Abraham Lincoln were unambiguously less experienced.

Slowly, press outlets are starting to push back against President Bush’s frequent misleading references to Al Qaeda as the enemy in Iraq.

The critical coverage began with McClatchy reporter Jonathan Landay, who wrote this on June 28:

Facing eroding support for his Iraq policy, even among Republicans, President Bush on Thursday called al Qaida “the main enemy” in Iraq, an assertion rejected by his administration’s senior intelligence analysts.

The reference, in a major speech at the Naval War College that referred to al Qaida at least 27 times, seemed calculated to use lingering outrage over the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to bolster support for the current buildup of U.S. troops in Iraq, despite evidence that sending more troops hasn’t reduced the violence or sped Iraqi government action on key issues.

Bush called al Qaida in Iraq the perpetrator of the worst violence racking that country and said it was the same group that had carried out the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

“Al Qaida is the main enemy for Shia, Sunni and Kurds alike,” Bush asserted. “Al Qaida’s responsible for the most sensational killings in Iraq. They’re responsible for the sensational killings on U.S. soil.”

U.S. military and intelligence officials, however, say that Iraqis with ties to al Qaida are only a small fraction of the threat to American troops. The group known as al Qaida in Iraq didn’t exist before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, didn’t pledge its loyalty to al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden until October 2004 and isn’t controlled by bin Laden or his top aides.

On July 8, the excellent new public editor for the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, who used to direct McClatchey’s Washington bureau (formerly Knight Ridder), flagged the pattern and criticized the Times for failing to call Bush on it:

As domestic support for the war in Iraq continues to melt away, President Bush and the United States military in Baghdad are increasingly pointing to a single villain on the battlefield: Al Qaeda.

Bush mentioned the terrorist group 27 times in a recent speech on Iraq at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. In West Virginia on the Fourth of July, he declared, “We must defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq.” The Associated Press reported last month that although some 30 groups have claimed credit for attacks on United States and Iraqi government targets, press releases from the American military focus overwhelmingly on Al Qaeda.

Why Bush and the military are emphasizing Al Qaeda to the virtual exclusion of other sources of violence in Iraq is an important story. So is the question of how well their version of events squares with the facts of a murky and rapidly changing situation on the ground.

But these are stories you haven’t been reading in The Times in recent weeks as the newspaper has slipped into a routine of quoting the president and the military uncritically about Al Qaeda’s role in Iraq — and sometimes citing the group itself without attribution.

And in using the language of the administration, the newspaper has also failed at times to distinguish between Al Qaeda, the group that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an Iraqi group that didn’t even exist until after the American invasion.

On July 10, Landay again noted Bush’s misleading phrasing in a followup story:

Struggling to stem growing opposition to his Iraq policy even among Republicans, President Bush contended anew Tuesday that the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States are the same as al Qaida in Iraq, a violent Iraqi insurgent group that didn’t exist until after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

It was the second time in two weeks that Bush has made the link in an apparent attempt to transform lingering fear of another U.S. terrorist attack into backing for the current buildup of U.S. troops in Iraq.

“Al Qaida is doing most of the spectacular bombings, trying to incite sectarian violence,” Bush told a business group in Cleveland, Ohio. “The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is a crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims.”

Al Qaida in Iraq didn’t emerge until 2004. While it is inspired by Osama bin Laden’s violent ideology, there’s no evidence that the Iraq organization is under the control of the terrorist leader or his top aides, who are believed to be hiding in tribal regions of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan.

Moreover, the two groups have been divided over tactics and strategy.

While U.S. intelligence and military officials view al Qaida in Iraq as a serious threat, they say the main source of violence and instability is an ongoing contest for power between majority Shiites and Sunnis, who dominated Saddam Hussein’s regime.

And on July 13, the Times news pages finally covered the story, writing a solid piece fact-checking Bush:

In rebuffing calls to bring troops home from Iraq, President Bush on Thursday employed a stark and ominous defense. “The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq,” he said, “were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th, and that’s why what happens in Iraq matters to the security here at home.”

It is an argument Mr. Bush has been making with frequency in the past few months, as the challenges to the continuation of the war have grown. On Thursday alone, he referred at least 30 times to Al Qaeda or its presence in Iraq.

But his references to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and his assertions that it is the same group that attacked the United States in 2001, have greatly oversimplified the nature of the insurgency in Iraq and its relationship with the Qaeda leadership.

There is no question that the group is one of the most dangerous in Iraq. But Mr. Bush’s critics argue that he has overstated the Qaeda connection in an attempt to exploit the same kinds of post-Sept. 11 emotions that helped him win support for the invasion in the first place.

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia did not exist before the Sept. 11 attacks. The Sunni group thrived as a magnet for recruiting and a force for violence largely because of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which brought an American occupying force of more than 100,000 troops to the heart of the Middle East, and led to a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.

Ironically, this is the same approach the White House took to selling the Iraq war in the first place, as Frank Rich pointed out yesterday in the New York Times:

The White House’s game is to create a new fictional story line to keep the war going until President Bush can dump it on his successor. Bizarrely, some of the new scenario echoes the bogus narrative used to sell the war in 2002: an imaginary connection between Iraq and the attacks of 9/11. You’d think the Bush administration might think twice before recycling old lies, but things have gotten so bad in the bunker that even Karl Rove is repeating himself.

The White House also used the 9/11 link to defend the war after the US invasion (see All the President’s Spin for more). So why has it taken reporters so long to catch on? How long until the rest of the press starts distinguishing between the real Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia?

Josh Marshall has recently fallen into the bad habit of asserting things he can’t prove, including baseless or unsupported assertions like this one (my emphasis in bold):

A very revealing moment. For the first time the president was asked, now that all the legal stuff is over and there’s nothing more pending, whether he was disappointed in the fact that a number of his top advisors were responsible for revealing the name of a covert CIA operative.

He couldn’t even manage a perfunctory statement of disappointment or regret. He managed to slip in a dig at Rich Armitage, a general statement that the whole thing had been very rough on the White House staff and that now “we’re” moving on.

Needless to say, the president was involved from day one. He was always in favor of doing it. And he basically said so again today. Truly a shameful man.

Note the leap to the conclusion that “the president was involved from day one” and “was always in favor of doing it [outing Valerie Plame]”. Nothing Bush said today supports that claim, nor is there evidence in the public record that can back up either of those statements.

Over the last couple of years, Marshall has suggested that former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell helped steal the 2004 presidential election; asserted that the White House ordered Sen. Pat Roberts to investigate special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald; claimed that the White House “engineered” the timing of the verdict in Saddam Hussein’s trial; and stated that the President was “a party to the same underlying crime” in the Scooter Libby case.

It’s not OK to make serious accusations like these without the evidence to back them up, as Marshall knows.