Brendan Nyhan

In another anti-woman smear from the originator of “feminazi,” Rush Limbaugh explains Nancy Pelosi’s criticism of Vice President Cheney by saying “You know, girl’s gone hormonal”:

RUSH: My hero, Dick Cheney, is back. The highest levels of the administration are not backing down. He was on Good Morning America today from Sydney, Australia. Correspondent Jonathan Karl again talking to him. Question: “The speaker of the House was so upset about your comment that she called the White House to complain.” But Cheney did not back down.

CHENEY: I’m not sure what part of it is that Nancy disagreed with. She accused me of questioning her patriotism. I didn’t question her patriotism. I questioned her judgment. Al-Qaeda functions on the basis that they think they can break our will. That’s their fundamental underlying strategy. My statement was that if we adopt the Pelosi policy, that we will validate the strategy of Al-Qaeda. I said it, and I meant it. And I’m not backing down.

RUSH: My hero, not backing down. Nancy Pelosi, not referring to her as Speaker Pelosi, just referring to her as Nancy. You know, girl’s gone hormonal. Next question from Jonathan Karl. Get this. “But hasn’t our strategy been failing? Isn’t that why the president has had to come out with a new strategy?”

Earlier this month, I noted a Rick Reilly column in Sports Illustrated that gently turned against the war in these concluding paragraphs:

Athletes love teams, and when they run out of sports teams they sometimes join bigger teams, ones with Humvees for huddles and tombstones for trophies and coaches they’ve never met sending them into a hell they never imagined.

And they throw their whole selves into it anyway, because they are brave and disciplined and will chew through concrete to win the game.

But what if the game can’t be won?

Sadly, one of the four letters that SI published responding to Reilly uses tactics straight out of the GOP playbook (even in Sports Illustrated, I can’t escape attacks on dissent!). Mike Castelluccio of Liberty, Missouri wrote the following:

Great article, Rick. Al-Qaeda and Jane Fonda would be proud of you. To call our cause a game that “can’t be won” is a slap in the face to our government, our armed forces and our country.

It’s sad to see ordinary people parroting this rhetoric — and sad to see the letter get printed. Surely some war supporter out there had a more useful take on Reilly’s column.

A new AP survey finds that the public is knowledgeable about American military deaths in Iraq, but they “woefully underestimate the number of Iraqi civilians who have been killed”:

WASHINGTON – Americans are keenly aware of how many U.S. forces have lost their lives in
Iraq, according to a new AP-Ipsos poll. But they woefully underestimate the number of Iraqi civilians who have been killed.

When the poll was conducted earlier this month, a little more than 3,100 U.S. troops had been killed. The midpoint estimate among those polled was right on target, at about 3,000.

Far from a vague statistic, the death toll is painfully real for many Americans. Seventeen percent in the poll know someone who has been killed or wounded in Iraq. And among adults under 35, those closest to the ages of those deployed, 27 percent know someone who has been killed or wounded.

…The number of Iraqis killed, however, is much harder to pin down, and that uncertainty is perhaps reflected in Americans’ tendency to lowball the Iraqi death toll by tens of thousands.

Iraqi civilian deaths are estimated at more than 54,000 and could be much higher; some unofficial estimates range into the hundreds of thousands. The U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq reports more than 34,000 deaths in 2006 alone.

Among those polled for the AP survey, however, the median estimate of Iraqi deaths was 9,890. The median is the point at which half the estimates were higher and half lower.

It is certainly troubling that Americans are so poorly informed about the consequences of the war. But Chris Gelpi, a professor in my department at Duke who studies public opinion toward war, told the AP that correcting these misperceptions would likely have little effect:

Christopher Gelpi, a Duke University political scientist who tracks public opinion on war casualties, said a better understanding of the Iraqi death toll probably wouldn’t change already negative public attitudes toward the war much. People in democracies generally don’t shy away from inflicting civilian casualties, he said, and they may be even more tolerant of them in situations such as Iraq, where many of the civilian deaths are caused by other Iraqis.

It would be interesting to see how casualty perceptions break down by party and views about the war.

Contrary to the lefty hypothesis that nationalism activates prejudice toward outgroups, a new study in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin finds that subliminal exposure to the American flag reduces hostility toward outgroups (PDF – subscription required):

Three studies examined the implications of nationalistic
ideologies and exposure to the U.S. flag for the activation of egalitarian concepts and outgroup hostility.
Study 1 demonstrated that subliminal exposure to the
U.S. flag activated participants’ egalitarian concepts. In
Study 2, highly nationalistic participants who were
exposed to the U.S. flag reported less hostility than did
those not exposed to the flag, whereas the flag did not
influence the hostility of participants low in national-
ism. Study 3 demonstrated that for participants high in
nationalism, greater activation of egalitarian concepts
on subliminal exposure to the U.S. flag was associated
with less hostility toward Arabs and Muslims in the
presence of the U.S. flag. The theoretical and practical
implications of these findings are discussed.

Update 2/26 7:27 AM: As a commenter points out below, my wording was imprecise. Individuals who are highly nationalistic are, in general, more hostile to outgroups. What I was trying to say is that this perspective would lead many on the left to suggest that exposure to the flag would prime this ingroup bias. Instead, the study above shows that subliminal exposure to the flag reduces hostility toward Arabs and Muslims. This encouraging finding mirrors other recent work distinguishing between nationalism and forms of patriotism that are not linked with outgroup hostility.

Today, the Wall Street Journal editorial page blames Democrats for problems with the Alternative Minimum Tax, which is going to hit millions of taxpayers in coming years if it is not reformed. Apparently, however, the WSJ has no use for budget rules — check out this creative use of scare quotes:

The estimated “cost” of this fix to the Treasury over 10 years would be some $632 billion, which is money Democrats in Congress would prefer to spend. But as Senator Grassley notes: “This tax was never meant to tax the middle class, so why should we count it as a revenue loss when we make sure they don’t have to pay it?”

That “cost” is, of course, real in the context of Congressional budgeting. President Bush has repeatedly used the revenue that would be generated by the AMT explosion to reduce the apparent cost of his tax cuts and to obscure the actual state of the federal budget.

The WSJ goes on to claim that liberal politicians’ “tax schemes” will eventually “soak the middle class because that’s where the real money is”:

There’s a larger policy lesson to keep in mind as the debate unfolds over both the AMT and the looming expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2010: Beware politicians who say they only want to tax the rich. Sooner or later their tax schemes will soak the middle class because that’s where the real money is. Regarding the AMT, Democrats are now saying they’ll be glad to provide AMT relief for the middle class but they’ll have to raise taxes on CEOs and other high-income Americans to do it. Where have we heard that one before?

But income is, in fact, actually heavily concentrated among top income earners. The top 5 percent now receive approximately 30 percent of national income and the top 10 percent now receive approximately 43 percent. That’s, uh, real money. (And it’s the reason that the majority of AMT revenue would still come from households making over $200,000 in 2010 under current law.)

Why oh why are these people showing their film at Duke?

Director Mike Berger and writer Rebecca Cerese, a resident of Chapel Hill, spoke Tuesday night in Richard White Lecture Hall and presented their film, “Improbable Collapse,” which presents a controversial take on the events of Sept. 11.

The documentary retraced the events of the attacks on the World Trade Center, analyzed evidence, interviewed experts and reviewed government records to present an argument pinning the collapse of the World Trade Center on the U.S. government.

Opening with footage of the Twin Towers’ collapse, the film claimed that Americans’ rights and freedoms have been curtailed by the government’s policies stemming from the Sept. 11 attacks.

“The true duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government,” the movie stated, supporting the producers’ message, which they discussed following the screening.

The audience, composed of both Duke students and local residents, engaged in an academic conversation with Berger and Cerese regarding the possibility of a Sept. 11 government conspiracy from both scientific and sociopolitical perspectives.

Berger contended that Sept. 11 was a conspiracy between the government and powerful corporations to further amass power. He said 7 World Trade Center, a third and smaller tower which collapsed, housed the second-largest CIA office as well as U.S. Securities Exchange and Commission files pertaining to Enron and WorldCom.

For those who might get sucked in by this nonsense, please read the well-regarded book by Popular Mechanics debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Writing in Slate, Will Saletan makes a convincing argument that Hillary’s refusal to apologize for her vote on Iraq is a mistake. Here’s how it begins:

Five years ago, Hillary Clinton supported a Senate resolution authorizing President Bush to use force in Iraq. So did I. It took me four years to admit this was a mistake. I’ve been wondering when Clinton would admit it. Now, from campaign insiders quoted in the New York Times, comes the answer: never. As she told voters a few days ago: “If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from.”

This is an amazingly stupid and arrogant position. If she sticks to it, it will probably kill her candidacy. And it should.

According to Clinton’s advisers, she has taken this position for several reasons. She believes in “responsibility” and would want congressional deference if she’s president. She wants to look “firm,” because that’s what voters want. She thinks an apology would look like a gimmick and a flip-flop, repeating the mistakes of Al Gore and John Kerry. That’s the “box” she’s trying to avoid.

This is a misreading of history, politics, character, and common sense.

It’s also worth noting that Hillary’s refusal to apologize is fueling some of the pathological news coverage recently highlighted on the Daily Howler. To be fair, there’s no excuse for the lousy journalism that she’s facing. But her heavily parsed position seems to be making it worse by (a) confusing reporters and (b) creating complexity that they try to cut through with (often misleading) narratives.

In the latest attack on dissent from the right, Matthew Yglesias flags National Review’s Mackubin Thomas Owens comparing Rep. John Murtha, a leading Democratic opponent of the war in Iraq, to JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald:

We Marines maintain that except for Lee Harvey Oswald, there is no such thing as an “ex-Marine.” I believe that John Murtha has just joined that small club.

Some people think the Senate has made Joe Biden more of a blowhard, but I think he’s always been one. Check out this quote from Oct. 27, 1990, which has to be one of the dumbest things anyone has ever said in Congress:

Cleaning up the mess created by S&L crooks over the next 10 years will cost us the same amount that bank robberies will cost us over the next 4,000 years.

Yes, Joe Biden knows how much bank robberies will cost us in the year 5990.

Update 2/21 4:03 PM: To be clear, I recognize Biden was trying to use hyperbole, not to make a literal claim. But his phrasing is, well, idiotic.

Here’s an amusing Byron Dorgan quote from the Congressional Record about Iran-Contra (2/25/87):

Mr. Speaker, I have not said much about the Iranian scandal because I think it is embarrassing enough for everyone concerned. But last night’s statement by the President, “Do you remember what you were doing on August 8,” the President asked, that really strains our imagination. I will tell you one thing, if I were approving arms to the Ayatollah Khomeini, I would remember what I was doing on that date.

Draw your own analogies to the Scooter Libby case…