Brendan Nyhan

The GOP email list is burning up with vicious smears against the Democratic Party. Last week, President Bush said Democrats “will wave the white flag of surrender in the global war on terror.” Yesterday, RNC chairman Ken Mehlman suggested that Democrats do not want to interrogate terrorists, stating that “84% of the Democrats in the House voted against interrogating terrorists, as did 73% of the Democrats in the Senate.” And today, Senator Sam Brownback claims in an email to supporters (PDF) that Democrats “want to … weaken our ability to fight an effective War on Terror”:

Everything our Party has achieved in the past six years is at risk of being lost in just one day.

On November 7, voters will go to the polls to determine the future of our country.

Will we turn over control to the Democrats who want to raise taxes across the board, weaken our ability to fight an effective War on Terror, and launch impeachment hearings?

This language not only falsely suggests Democrats don’t want to win the war on terror — part of the long history of GOP attacks on dissent since 9/11 — but it dodges the real debate. Part of the reason Democrats oppose coercive interrogation is that they question whether the tactics are “effective” given the possibility of receiving bad information and the potential damage to America’s image overseas.

My updated timeline of GOP attacks on dissent since 9/11 is below the fold.

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What happened to Josh Marshall? He’s one of my favorite bloggers, but lately he’s been sounding increasingly conspiracy-obsessed.

In late September, Marshall made the joke “Time to hit the Diebold panic button?” in this post on President Bush’s low approval ratings. Even if he wasn’t serious, the suggestion of conspiracies to rig elections using electronic voting machines was probably taken seriously by some of his readers.

Today, Marshall went much further,
suggesting without any evidence that the 2004 presidential election was stolen:

Helping steal the 2004 election wasn’t enough. Down by double digits and facing a career-ending election, Ken Blackwell accuses Ted Strickland of being pro-pedophile, possibly gay.

Blackwell’s charges against Strickland are sleazy, but it’s an even more serious allegation for Marshall to accuse someone of “[h]elping steal” a presidential election. Where did this come from? As far as I can tell from Google, Marshall’s never mentioned Blackwell before.

Moreover, there’s no evidence that the 2004 election was stolen. As I wrote last year, “Democrats even conceded that there was no evidence of fraud when releasing their report on irregularities in Ohio” and “Walter Mebane, a respected political scientist at Cornell who consulted on the DNC report, told the Washington Post that it is ‘highly unlikely’ that Kerry would have won Ohio no matter what.”

Update 10/18 9:02 PM: To be clear, there are allegations that Blackwell acted in bad faith in his role as the chief election official in Ohio in 2004. But there is no credible evidence that he helped “steal” the election.

In an email to supporters this morning (PDF), RNC chair Ken Mehlman escalates the pre-election demogoguery with the suggestion that Democrats do not want to interrogate terrorists:

There is nothing more important than protecting the American people and ensuring that we have the intelligence we need to stop attacks on our homeland. The vast majority of Democrats in Congress did not agree. Shockingly, 84% of the Democrats in the House voted against interrogating terrorists, as did 73% of the Democrats in the Senate.

Notice how Mehlman redefines a vote against a complex piece of legislation that legitimizes the use of certain coercive interrogation techniques as outright opposition to all terrorist interrogation. It’s similar to the way President Bush suggested that Democrats in the Senate who opposed his legislation to create the Department of Homeland Security were “not interested in the security of the American people.”

Mehlman then claims that Democrats opposed the bill “out of concern for terrorist civil liberties”:

The Democrats who voted against this bill out of concern for terrorist civil liberties include all of their key leaders in Congress: would-be Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader-in waiting John Murtha, and Senate Democrat leader Harry Reid. Would the Military Commissions Act have ever seen the light of day in a Democrat-led Congress?

Apparently, Mehlman thinks terrorists should have no civil liberties. But more importantly, what about the civil liberties of those people who are interrogated using these techniques and turn out to be innocent? Isn’t it possible that Democrats were concerned about them too?

I’ve added Mehlman’s statement to my timeline of Republican attacks on dissent since 9/11, which is below the fold.

Update 10/18 11:00 AM: Karl Rove took a similar tack in a luncheon at the Washington Times, defining the bill as “the terrorist-interrogation act”:

It is useful to remind people what [Democrats] said and what they do. I think they have given us here, especially in the last couple of weeks, a potent set of votes to talk about. You had 90 percent of House Democrats voting against the terrorist-surveillance program, nearly three-quarters of Senate Democrats and 80 percent of House Democrats voting against the terrorist-interrogation act. Something is fundamentally flawed.

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The Washington Post published a generally excellent article fact-checking President Bush’s claims that recently announced improvements in the projected federal deficit are the result of his tax cuts:

With great fanfare, President Bush last week claimed credit for a striking reversal of fortune: New figures show the federal budget deficit shrinking by 40 percent over the past two years, a turnaround the president hopes will strengthen his push for further tax cuts.

Bush hailed the dwindling deficit as a direct result of “pro-growth economic policies,” particularly huge tax cuts enacted during his first term. “Tax relief fuels economic growth. And growth — when the economy grows, more tax revenues come to Washington. And that’s what’s happened,” Bush said.

Economists said Bush was claiming credit where little is due. The economy has grown and tax receipts have risen at historic rates over the past two years, but the Bush tax cuts played a small role in that process, they said, and cost the Treasury more in lost taxes than it gained from the resulting economic stimulus.

“Federal revenue is lower today than it would have been without the tax cuts. There’s really no dispute among economists about that,” said Alan D. Viard, a former Bush White House economist now at the nonpartisan American Enterprise Institute. “It’s logically possible” that a tax cut could spur sufficient economic growth to pay for itself, Viard said. “But there’s no evidence that these tax cuts would come anywhere close to that.”

Economists at the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and in the Treasury Department have reached the same conclusion. An analysis of Treasury data prepared last month by the Congressional Research Service estimates that economic growth fueled by the cuts is likely to generate revenue worth about 7 percent of the total cost of the cuts, a broad package of rate reductions and tax credits that has returned an estimated $1.1 trillion to taxpayers since 2001.

The Post also compiles yet another quote from a Bush official admitting that tax cuts don’t increase revenue:

Robert Carroll, deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax analysis, said neither the president nor anyone else in the administration is claiming that tax cuts alone produced the unexpected surge in revenue. “As a matter of principle, we do not think tax cuts pay for themselves,” Carroll said.

But, he said, “we do think good tax policy can lead to important economic benefits… The size of the tax base is larger than it would have been without the tax relief.”

However, the Post fails to point out that the administration has repeatedly suggested that tax cuts do pay for themselves, as I showed. The timeline is below the fold.

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Via TNR’s Isaac Chotiner, the New York Times quotes from a blog post by conservative talk show host and media critic Michael Medved about his recent visit to the White House along with other prominent conservative pundits.

Describing their off-the-record meeting with President Bush, Medved writes:

Asked about the possibility of immigration reform before the election, [President Bush] expressed passionate concern for establishing better security at the border, but indicated an unwillingness to change his “core principles.” He made the important point that if he abandoned his well-known commitments on this or other domestic issues, the nation’s enemies (and the rest of the world) would take away the belief that the President could be bullied, prodded, overwhelmed and initimidated — harming the war effort for which young Americans risk their lives. He deeply believes in the importance of resolution, determination, and consistency in world affairs– and emphasized several times that he refuses to govern according to trends, polls, or public opinion.

Not content to suggest that liberal criticism of him encourages the enemy, the President of the United States is now telling leading conservatives that he can’t change his mind on any issue or it will embolden the enemy. It’s interesting how the imagined reaction of the “enemy” is always so politically convenient for Bush. And even if he’s right about the reaction, we have a democracy that takes precedence.

Since it’s my birthday, I thought I’d take a page from the Chappelle Show’s immortal “Playa Hater’s Ball” sketch and offer my nominees for the best Brendan-haters from the past year. You won’t be surprised to hear that all of them stem from the controversy over my resignation from the American Prospect. There were literally hundreds of contenders to choose from, but these are my personal favorites.

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In an email to supporters today (PDF), President Bush claims that “Together, with a Republican majority, we passed tax relief that spurred unprecedented growth and now need to make that relief permanent.” But as this graph of changes in real gross domestic product since 1947 makes clear, growth under President Bush has hardly been “unprecedented”:

Nor do we find any support for Bush’s claim when we restrict our attention to the post-1980 period — indeed, it’s obvious that growth was generally higher under President Clinton:

Jeff Stein of CQ exposes the ignorance of the American political and intelligence leadership about Islam in a must-read New York Times op-ed:

FOR the past several months, I’ve been wrapping up lengthy interviews with Washington counterterrorism officials with a fundamental question: “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?”

A “gotcha” question? Perhaps. But if knowing your enemy is the most basic rule of war, I don’t think it’s out of bounds. And as I quickly explain to my subjects, I’m not looking for theological explanations, just the basics: Who’s on what side today, and what does each want?

After all, wouldn’t British counterterrorism officials responsible for Northern Ireland know the difference between Catholics and Protestants?…

But so far, most American officials I’ve interviewed don’t have a clue. That includes not just intelligence and law enforcement officials, but also members of Congress who have important roles overseeing our spy agencies. How can they do their jobs without knowing the basics?

The answer: They can’t. What an embarrassment.

Jonathan Chait of The New Republic offers a hilarious tour through pre-2004 conservative hero worship of Donald Rumsfeld:

Nordlinger’s cover story also featured a series of more specific descriptions of Rumsfeld that do not seem terribly prescient in light of subsequent events. For example, Nordlinger gushed that Rumsfeld “must be the most uneuphemistic person alive. He is totally immune, and allergic, to ‘spin.’” This, of the man who would go on to describe the disintegration of order in postwar Iraq as “untidy” and portray hunger strikers in Guantánamo Bay as being on a “diet.” Nordlinger’s article also graciously noted that, despite their man being proven absolutely correct on absolutely everything, “Rumsfeld staffers take pains not to say ‘I told you so.’” (Today, presumably, Rumsfeld’s allies find it easier not to gloat.)

A recurrent theme among the Rumsfeld hagiographers was that their hero was a brilliant executive, arriving at the correct decision time and again through his peerless command of the bureaucratic process. This image was reflected in the 2002 bestseller The Rumsfeld Way. The author, Jeffrey Krames, has written a similar paean to iconic CEO Jack Welch, and his Rumsfeld book followed the conventions of executive porn, turning Rumsfeld’s career into leadership dictums that can be applied to the corporate world. He was firm yet flexible, thorough yet decisive, ruthless yet moral, and so on. Each chapter concluded with a series of bullet-point takeaway lessons from Rumsfeld’s career. Thus the reader learned that Rumsfeld’s management style was governed by such principles as “Never underestimate the importance of listening,” “Underpromise and overdeliver,” “Decentralize,” and “Avoid false forecasts.”

This same awed deference to Rumsfeld’s managerial genius is a primary theme in Decter’s book. “[O]ne of Rumsfeld’s special talents,” she notes at one point, is creating “a process where everyone is learning and everyone is contributing.” Tell that to Brigadier General Mark Scheid, who told the Newport News Daily Press that, in the run-up to the war, Rumsfeld threatened to fire the next subordinate who pestered him about the need to plan for a possible occupation.

…In retrospect, though, the quasi-salacious hero worship stands out less than Decter’s wholehearted endorsement of Rumsfeld’s hallucinatory worldview. In Decter’s telling, Rumsfeld had the brilliant foresight to transform the military into a lighter, smaller force. (“[W]ho could honestly doubt the brilliance of the military plan [in Iraq]?” she asked, in what was at the time intended to be a rhetorical question.) Alas, as she explained, his masterful strategy aroused the envy of lesser minds around him. As she put it, “[t]hose whose resistance he had successfully put down would set out to exact their revenge by attacking his plan for the conduct of the approaching war in Iraq.” For instance, she noted incredulously, “Ralph Peters complained that there were still not enough troops in Iraq to do what was necessary. They might have won the war handily … but now there were not enough boots on the ground to establish the rule of law.” Decter presented this objection as self-evidently wrong.

Greg Mankiw quotes Michael Barone’s attack on John Edwards:

His stump speech includes a line about a little girl whose parents couldn’t afford a winter coat. Give me a break. You can buy a little girl’s winter coat at Wal-Mart for $10. That’s the price of taking the little girl out to lunch at McDonald’s.

But Brad DeLong writes that “neither Greg nor Barone shops at Wal-Mart often enough to know or surfs on over to the Wal-Mart web site to learn what girls’ winter quotes actually cost,” pointing out that the winter coats at Walmart.com actually cost $20-$35.

Along the same lines, has Barone ever eaten at McDonald’s? Two people can eat lunch there for way less than $10.