Brendan Nyhan

In the wake of the attack on Hillary Clinton by Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman, two major conservative editorial pages have published editorials suggesting that supporters of withdrawal from Iraq are treasonous and support genocide.

First, the New York Post published an editorial titled “Comforting the enemy” that suggested Clinton’s focus is on “undermining [the] mission” of US troops:

Comforting the enemy

Don’t be misled by the outraged tone of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s response to a top Pentagon aide who accused her of “reinforcing enemy propaganda” on Iraq. The Democratic presidential front-runner was handed a political opportunity – and is milking it for all it’s worth.

The fact is, Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman was on the mark in his attack. Asked by Clinton about plans for withdrawing troops from Iraq, he wrote in reply:

“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.”

It’s difficult to argue with that – especially the part about “public discussion.”

…Clinton responded with a public display of mock outrage, insisting Defense Secretary Robert Gates declare whether he agrees with Edelman’s letter. Taken as a whole, it’s hard to see why Gates would take issue with it.

The focus in Washington should be on helping the troops – not on undermining their mission…

In addition, the Washington Times ran an editorial titled “The genocide-ocrats?” suggesting Democrats “plan to milk defeatism,” accusing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of attempting “to damage the war effort,” and calling Clinton “invested in defeat”:

The genocide-ocrats?

Although the Senate’s refusal on Wednesday to permit the Democratic leadership to attach a surrender timeline to the defense authorization is welcome news, congressional Democrats remain convinced that opposing the war is a politically popular position, and they plan to milk defeatism for all it’s worth…

The failure of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s latest attempt to damage the war effort gives our soldiers and diplomats in essence a two-month reprieve until Gen. David Petraeus delivers his much-awaited report on the situation. But we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that things will change dramatically one way or the other in the next few months…

Yet Mrs. Clinton is apparently so invested in defeat that she has been trying to browbeat the Defense Department into publicly discussing contingency plans for withdrawing from Iraq. After she sent a letter on the subject to DoD, Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman responded by warning bluntly that premature discussion of withdrawal “reinforces enemy propaganda” that the United States will abandon our allies in Iraq — as we previously did in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Kerry responded by introducing legislation requiring a Pentagon briefing on an Iraq pullout — in other words advertising U.S. willingness to abandon another ally. For the record, here’s the way Osama bin Laden characterized Mrs. Clinton’s husband’s ignominious withdrawal from Somalia in an October 2001 interview with CNN: “America exited dragging its tails in failure, defeat, and ruin, caring for nothing. America left faster than anyone expected.” Now, Mrs. Clinton is apparently hoping to stage a repeat performance in Iraq.

David Brooks is pulling out all the conservative pundit tricks in this passage from his column today:

If you’ve paid attention to the presidential campaign, you’ve heard the neopopulist story line. C.E.O.’s are seeing their incomes skyrocket while the middle class gets squeezed. The tides of globalization work against average Americans while most of the benefits go to the top 1 percent.

This story is not entirely wrong, but it is incredibly simple-minded. To believe it, you have to suppress a whole string of complicating facts.

The first complicating fact is that after a lag, average wages are rising sharply. Real average wages rose by 2 percent in 2006, the second fastest rise in 30 years.

The second complicating fact is that according to the Congressional Budget Office, earnings for the poorest fifth of Americans are also on the increase. As Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution noted recently in The Washington Post, between 1991 and 2005, “the bottom fifth increased its earnings by 80 percent, compared with around 50 percent for the highest-income group and around 20 percent for each of the other three groups.”

Brooks later claims that “the Democratic campaign rhetoric is taking on a life of its own, and drifting further away from reality… [C]andidates now compete to tell dark, angry and conspiratorial stories about the economy.”

Another way to frame this might be to say that pundits compete to tell optimistic, context-free fables about the state of the economy.

The first trick that Brooks uses is to present an out-of-context statistic that sounds promising about the state of the economy under Bush, the same technique used by, for instance, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, NRO’s Jerry Bowyer, and the administration (here and here).

He writes that “after a lag, average wages are rising sharply. Real average wages rose by 2 percent in 2006, the second fastest rise in 30 years.” But the “lag” Brooks briefly mentions means that workers haven’t gained much during the current expansion — here’s what real average wages look like since 1993, for instance:

In general, the current recovery does not compare well to the post-WWII average (or the 1990s), as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out:

Brooks’s second claim is also misleading. In it, he uses the gains made under President Clinton to make the status of the poor look better than it is, writing that “according to the Congressional Budget Office, earnings for the poorest fifth of Americans are also on the increase.” He then cites statistics for the 1991-2005 period.

However, if you actually look up the CBO report in question (PDF), you’ll find this graphic, which illustrates that income hasn’t really been “on the increase” for the lowest quintile of households with children under Bush:

The earnings gains that Brooks highlights have tailed off particularly dramatically under Bush:

Of course, it is true that the economic situation is complicated. But Brooks is giving short shrift to concerns about an economy that is currently doing very little for most Americans.

Update 7/31 8:56 AM: Brooks ran this clarification today:

Last week I cited data on rising earnings among the working poor. I should have made it clear that the data referred to poor households with children, since poor households without children did not enjoy those gains.

No word, however, on the larger issues with his column.

President Bush’s soundbite on why he opposes SCHIP expansion is strangely inept:

President Bush has threatened to veto what he sees as a huge expansion of the children’s health care program, which he describes as a step “down the path to government-run health care for every American.”

It’s funny to denounce your opponents for taking a step toward “health care for every American.” Not universal health care! Nooooo!

Of course, Bush is trying to scare people by using the phrase “government-run health care,” which implies (falsely) that Americans would be in a government-operated system. In fact, SCHIP is a program that offers health coverage through the states to children in relatively low-income families who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid. (See this CBPP analysis for more on the administration’s misleading claims.)

Still, this seems like a case where Bush’s sincere ideological opposition to expanding government coverage led him to blurt out the truth — he really doesn’t want health care for every American if it means the coverage is provided by the government.

Dana Milbank catalogues the wackiness of Cindy Sheehan.

How outside the mainstream is Sheehan? Even left-wingers have ostracized her:

The left-wing Daily Kos Web site banned her postings because of her challenge to Pelosi. Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which has a large antiwar following, ran an article titled “The epic narcissism of Cindy Sheehan.”

How strange is her understanding of reality? She claimed impeachment is mandated under the Constitution:

“If Nancy Pelosi doesn’t do her constitutionally mandated job by midnight tonight, tomorrow I will announce that I am going to run against her,” Sheehan announced outside the cemetery’s gates yesterday. “I will beat her in California.”

Sheehan then waded into constitutional law, and the little- known mandatory impeachment clause. “Impeachment is not a fringe movement — it is mandated in our Constitution,” she asserted. “Nancy Pelosi had no authority to take it off the table. If she takes impeachment off the table, what else will she take off the table — the First Amendment?”

How paranoid is Sheehan?

[B]y yesterday Sheehan even thought the planes departing from National Airport were conspiring against her. “They stepped up the air traffic,” she complained as a jet interrupted her speech.

If you’re interested, Milbank made an accompanying video report on Sheehan’s protest march in Washington yesterday. It features a man with a President Bush mask and a devil suit as well as a Free Republic protester yelling about “sex, drugs, and Geritol.”

Given the long history of Republican attacks on dissent since 9/11, it’s not encouraging to see Mitt Romney posing with an “Obama Osama” sign (via TPM):

The best part, though, is the Romney campaign’s claim that the sign was “an alliterative play on words” that wasn’t “equating or comparing anyone” (via Matthew Yglesias). Right.

(Note: This episode fits into the recent Romney campaign pattern of trying to stir up the base. Along the same lines, he recently compared Hillary Clinton to Karl Marx and accused Barack Obama of advocating sex education for children in kindergarten.)

The endlessly creative spammers are now using Barack Obama to try to steal your money:

If you click through on the email, you get taken to a site (no link for obvious reasons) registered to someone in France that tries to charge you $1-2 to be added to the “petition wall.”

Media Matters catches former NYPD detective Bo Dietl citing the fictional TV show “24” as evidence of the terrorist threat during a guest appearance on Fox News:

The fact of the matter is — I mean, you don’t watch 24 on Fox TV? They’re out there. They’re out there. There are cells out there. We have to protect ourselves against it, as Americans, and you know something, if you’re on a plane with me, Hassan, and you’re sitting next to me, you’ll be looked at a little careful — more carefully than me. That’s the facts of life. That’s what we’re living with today. I’m sorry to say, 9-11 changed our whole life.

Sadly, Diehl is following in the footsteps of a Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia, who cited “24” in a discussion of torture last month. It’s yet another example of the trend toward conservative postmodernism…

PS Here’s the appropriate response: “We’re in danger of invasion by robots from outer space. Didn’t you see ‘Transformers’?” Fox bookers, put me on the air!

News I can’t use — the New York Times reports on John McCain’s “gay sweater”:

When Senator John McCain’s campaign went into a midflight stall last week, it was not only the candidate’s hard-line stance on Iraq or problems with his party’s conservative wing that enthralled the thumb-tapping hordes of the blogosphere. It was leaks from inside the campaign alleging that Mr. McCain thought his handlers were dressing him up as a metrosexual.

Political blogs like the Stump and the Swamp, and gossipier ones like Radar, had a field day with Mr. McCain’s so-called “gay sweater,” a V-neck worn over a T-shirt. Fashion insiders, for their part, shrugged off the look as more appropriate to the buffet line at an assisted living center than the pages of Out.

As my friend Ben Fritz says, “Did somebody tell the NYT editors that the articles about Obama playing basketball and the Clintons’ marriage were too heavy and substantive?”

Indeed, the article raises a serious question — what is the most insipid article on the 2008 campaign thus far? Here are my nominees (please suggest other contenders in comments):

–The NYT on McCain’s “gay sweater”
–The Post on Hillary Clinton’s cleavage
–The Post investigation of John Edwards’s haircuts
–The NYT on how Obama plays basketball

What do you think?

Here’s a confidence-inspiring anecdote about the current Secretary of Defense from Evan Thomas’s review of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA:

Weiner, a reporter for The Times who has covered intelligence for many years, has a good eye for embarrassing detail. High-ranking officials, it appears, were often the last to know. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Robert M. Gates, who is now the secretary of defense but at the time was the first President Bush’s top intelligence adviser, was at a family picnic. A friend of his wife’s joined the picnic and asked him, “What are you doing here?” Gates asked, “What are you talking about?” “The invasion,” she said. “What invasion?” he asked.

In the age of Bush 43, people sometimes get wistful for the supposed competence of his father’s administration. Maybe they’re getting a little carried away…

Update 7/23 2:12 PM: Bruce Bartlett shares a related anecdote in comments:

I had a similar Bush 41 experience. A few days before the election in 1992 I ran into Charlie Black at the local supermarket. At the time, Charlie was one of Bush’s top campaign aides. I asked him what he was doing food shopping with his wife when Bush was fighting for his political life? He just shrugged his shoulders while his wife giggled. I knew then, with absolute certainty, that Bush would lose the election.

James Fallows, who wrote Blind Into Baghdad, is recommending No End In Sight, a new documentary on the war in Iraq:

Next week Charles Ferguson’s documentary No End in Sight opens in DC and New York, followed in August by “select other cities.” It is worth making time to see this film.

…My deeper bias might seem to work against the film. It covers almost exactly the same terrain, including many of the same sources and anecdotes, as did my book Blind Into Baghdad. But rarely have I seen a clearer demonstration of how much more powerful the combination of pictures, sound, music, real-people-talking, etc can be than words on a page. (Update: I’m not denigrating print, to which I’ve devoted my professional life — and which, indeed, is the medium through which big ideas about the world are generally changed. But there are times when the experience of seeing, for instance, chaos on the streets of Baghdad transcends any mere verbal description of it.)

I don’t know whether the highly-publicized Sicko is any good: hasn’t shown up in the pirate-video stores here yet. But if you’re looking for an auteur-produced, both intellectually and emotionally powerful, public-affairs-related documentary film, I say: try this one first.

Here’s the preview: