Brendan Nyhan

Marc Ambinder flags an anti-Romney pamphlet handed out in Iowa that features a bizarre hypothetical:

Would Jesus Christ vote for Mitt Romney?

…We strongly believe that Jesus Christ, if he were alive in the flesh and voted, would never vote for Mitt Romney under any circumstances.

Forget WWJD. I’m going to start marketing WWJVFITASP — who would Jesus vote for in the Ames straw poll?

Update 8/11 10:10 PM: Romney won. Apparently Jesus was outvoted.

It’s great to see the New York Times at least suggest that Rudy Giuliani’s claim to have been “at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers” is bunk, but the headline (“Giuliani Missteps in Imagery of Sept. 11”) sucks. Note how it reframes the issue in terms of tactics rather than facts.

Unfortunately, this is part of a pattern in which journalists will frame factual disputes in terms of tactics in an effort to remain “objective.” And when real fact-checking does get into major newspapers, weak-kneed editors frequently pull their punches in the headlines. My favorite example is Dana Milbank’s pioneering 2002 takedown of President Bush in the Washington Post, which got the namby-pamby headline “For Bush, Facts Are Malleable.”

If you haven’t seen it yet, the Village Voice article on Rudy Giuliani’s phony claims about 9/11 is a must-read. We already knew that his “broken windows” strategy was probably not responsible for the drop in crime in New York City. And now it turns out that his reputation for effectively fighting and responding to terrorism is also bogus. So why is he running again? And will the press point any of this out?

Update 8/11 11:10 AM — Ross Douthat makes a good point about the Voice story:

I’m no great Rudy booster, but I’m much, much more likely to take this kind of story with a grain of salt because it appears in an extremely left-wing alternative weekly (but I repeat myself) that did nothing but bash Hizzoner, sometimes fairly but usually not, throughout his mayoralty. Forget [National Review]: There’s a whole world of more mainstream liberal publications that would lend far more credibility to a story like this, and that would be happy, I would imagine, to run a devastating takedown of Giuliani’s “hero of 9/11” reputation. And so fairly or not, the fact that it didn’t run in the Times Magazine or Time or Newsweek or The New Republic or Vanity Fair or Esquire or almost anywhere else makes me automatically inclined to approach it with more skepticism that it may deserve.

So who in the mainstream press is going to follow up on the story?

Wesley K. Clark and Kal Raustiala note an inherent contradiction in treating terrorists as “enemy combatants”:

Labeling terrorists as combatants also leads to this paradox: while the deliberate killing of civilians is never permitted in war, it is legal to target a military installation or asset. Thus the attack by Al Qaeda on the destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000 would be allowed, as well as attacks on command and control centers like the Pentagon. For all these reasons, the more appropriate designation for terrorists is not “unlawful combatant” but the one long used by the United States: criminal.

Some disturbing statistics from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press — 36% of Americans believe the press hurts democracy, including 48% of Republicans and 57% of those Republicans who get their news from Fox.

The data suggest that opposition to the press spikes among members of the president’s party during high-profile controversies such as Iran-Contra, the impeachment of President Clinton, and the war in Iraq:

Here’s the same data plotted in time series form:

A plot of General Social Survey data on media trust from a new article by Paul Gronke and the late Timothy Cook in Political Communication (sub. req.) shows a similar pattern:

As the authors note in the article, the decline in trust in the press is correlated with a general decline in trust in political institutions, but media trust has gone down even more than we would have expected.

You will almost never see an article as blatantly authoritarian as this column by Stu Bykofsky in the Philly Daily News:

One month from The Anniversary, I’m thinking another 9/11 would help America.

What kind of a sick bastard would write such a thing?

A bastard so sick of how splintered we are politically – thanks mainly to our ineptitude in Iraq – that we have forgotten who the enemy is.

It is not Bush and it is not Hillary and it is not Daily Kos or Bill O’Reilly or Giuliani or Barack. It is global terrorists who use Islam to justify their hideous sins, including blowing up women and children.

Iraq has fractured the U.S. into jigsaw pieces of competing interests that encourage our enemies. We are deeply divided and division is weakness…

America’s fabric is pulling apart like a cheap sweater.

What would sew us back together?

Another 9/11 attack…

If it is to be, then let it be. It will take another attack on the homeland to quell the chattering of chipmunks and to restore America’s righteous rage and singular purpose to prevail.

In his mind, apparently, thousands of Americans must die so that we’ll stop disagreeing with each other. Why does Stu hate democracy?

PS If this sounds familiar, remember that Bykofsky’s employer ran the ugliest post-9/11 editorial — here’s what we wrote about it at Spinsanity:

The words of the News were easily the most chilling for those who believe logic and rational argument are important in politics, as its argument came down to one simple statement: “[W]e will remember your actions, and crave only one thing: blood for blood.”

The News never identifies who the “you” in this sentence is, however, because we don’t yet know, but it does prime its readers for bloodthirsty vengeance: “REVENGE. Hold on to that thought. Go to bed thinking it. Wake up chanting it. Because nothing less than revenge is called for today.” These words border on the authoritarian and the savage. Many Americans support a strong military response, of course, but The News’s rhetoric encourages bloodlust rather than carefully reasoned action.

A Sooner friend alerted me that Oklahoma is now offering special “Global War on Terrorism” plates featuring an image of the World Trade Center:

It’s always great to see public agencies parroting Bush administration propaganda.

File this under debates I wish I had seen:

By seeking out a few incompetents or cranks just to have “balance” and create sparks, news shows may be unintentionally misleading viewers by implying that isolated views that are well outside the mainstream actually have validity…

This is a pet peeve of my own and a reason why I avoid these sorts of programs. One thing that annoyed me particularly was that the producers would often put me up against some total nobody who had no clue about what he was talking about. In one case–I kid you not–I debated the minimum wage with an honest-to-God, fresh-off-the-streets homeless person. I refused to ever appear on that channel ever again and it eventually went off the air…

I want to see a transcript…

PS This is the same “balance” problem that plagues news reporting. When you present two opposing views as equally valid, viewers have no way to parse the evidence and reach an informed judgment about who’s right.

Update 8/9 4:27 PM: Via email, Bartlett shares his recollections:

It was some years ago–at least 10. I don’t remember the name of the cable
channel. It was like America’s Talking or something like that. I knew the
guy was homeless because he said so on air. He also admitted to some
extraordinary number of children by an equally large number of women. It was
pretty clear why this guy was homeless. Where the producers found him, I
have no idea. Like I said, I was so insulted I never appeared on that
channel ever again despite repeated requests.

Amazing. I’m sad that video isn’t available.

For more, see the America’s Talking page on Wikipedia, which makes it pretty obvious why the channel failed. My favorite show concept is definitely “Bugged! – A comedic look at what bugs people, hosted by Brian O’Connor.”

The notion that Hillary Clinton is a “winner” who knows how to take on the right wing is ridiculous, but she keeps touting it:

“I’ve noticed in the last few days that a lot of the other campaigns have been using my name a lot,” Mrs. Clinton said. “I’m here because I think we need to change America; it’s not to get into fights with Democrats.”

“For 15 years, I have stood up against the right-wing machine and I’ve come out stronger, so if you want a winner who knows how to take them on, I’m your girl.”

Actually, it was Bill Clinton who knew how to take them on. Hillary was not a “winner” but a presidential spouse/adviser whose public image and poor political instincts held her husband back. She only became a sympathetic figure who helped Bill after the Monica Lewinsky affair became public. And her only significant political victory was defeating Rick Lazio in 2000, a race in which she performed about as well as Chuck Schumer did in 1998. In short, her entire claim to being a “winner” is to do about as well as a generic Democrat in a Democratic-leaning state. It’s not so impressive. (Or if it is, why isn’t Chuck Schumer running for president on his record of defeating Republicans?)

In fact, one thing that’s striking about the current Democratic field is how few tough political races they’ve won. Bill Clinton won a number of competitive races in Arkansas before entering presidential politics. However, the top three contenders for the Democratic nomination have a combined total of two wins in competitive general elections above the state legislative level (Hillary’s Senate victory in 2000 and Edwards’s in 1998) and only four wins total (add on Obama in 2004 and Hillary’s re-election in 2006). Only one of those — Edwards’s win in 1998 — came in unfavorable territory.

By contrast, the top three Republicans at this point have three wins in competitive generals (Giuliani’s first mayoral election in 1993, Fred Thompson’s first Senate election in 1994, and Mitt Romney’s 2002 election as governor) and five wins total (add Thompson and Giuliani’s re-elections in 1996 and 1997, respectively), with both Giuliani and Romney winning on hostile turf.

If you believe UCLA political scientist John Zaller that politicians are like prizefighters, Democrats might be in trouble (PDF):

World heavyweight champions, like [members of Congress], compete in a sequence of contests in which the winner continues for
as long as possible to fight new challengers, most of whom have never previously been a
champion. Incumbent champions in both professions are thus a much more selected group
than their opponents. This structural similarity creates a likelihood that the champions,
whether boxers or MCs, will be, in some general sense, “better” competitors than most
challengers and may seem to enjoy a special incumbency advantage for this reason alone.

Of course, the political environment may be so favorable to Democrats that any top candidate could win, but let’s just say that the contenders for the championship belt are not exactly proven “winners”.

Correction 8/9 9:11 AM: This post previously said the top three Democratic presidential contenders had won three times above the state legislative level. In fact, they’ve won four times. The error has been corrected above.

At Spinsanity, we wrote a lot about comparisons between one’s political opponents and Saddam Hussein, terrorists, the Taliban, etc. These kinds of analogies have become (sadly) commonplace in the post-9/11 era.

The latest examples come from both sides of the aisle. On the left, Rep. John W. Olver recently referred to House Republicans as “jihadists,” while conservative pundit Glenn Beck compared Al Gore’s fight against global warming to Hitler’s attacks on Jews in Nazi Germany.

There’s nothing else to say about rhetoric this stupid, but I feel compelled to single it out on principle.