Brendan Nyhan

Today’s sign of doom for the republic — Phillip Klinkner at Polysigh notes that some attendees of the Conservative Political Action Conference were upset about Rudy Giuliani’s praise of Abraham Lincoln:

In interviews afterward, some attendees said Mr. Giuliani lost momentum when he heaped lavish praise on Abraham Lincoln.

While many conservatives regard the Civil War president as the spiritual founder of the Republican Party, others deeply resent him as a man who ruthlessly suspended constitutional rights and freedoms in order to militarily challenge the South’s belief in its right to secede. Some saw similar disdain for individuals’ rights in Mr. Giuliani’s successful war on crime in New York City.

Update 3/6 9:51 PM: A friend asks if I’m saying Lincoln should be beyond criticism — I can see how the post can be read that way, and it’s not what I meant to imply.

To clarify, here’s what Giuliani actually said.

We’re all different religions. And we’re all different races.

Since we’re not identified that way, what identifies us as Americans? The thing that identifies us as Americans are our ideas. And our ideas are wonderful ideas. And they’re ideas that the world is moving toward.

Ronald Reagan understood that. He understood that and he was able, therefore, to make very difficult decisions and to stick with them even when they were unpopular.

I remember when he deployed the cruise missiles and pointed them at the Soviets. Very, very unpopular. ABC did a documentary about the end of the world when he did that.

And then I remember when he walked out of Reykjavik — very, very unpopular.

A typical politician wouldn’t have done either of those two things. Maybe even a typical president wouldn’t have done either of those two things, because they made him unpopular. His unfavorability went up; his favorability went down.

So why did he make those decisions? He made those decisions because he could consult something broader than just public opinion. He could consult a set of ideas, a set of principles, a set of goals. And he could say: Well, right now public opinion actually isn’t correct.

Abraham Lincoln had to do the same thing during the Civil War. The Civil War was very, very unpopular. Draft riots in New York in 1863. Three generals that turned out to be failures.

Lincoln was viewed by many, many people as an incompetent president. The war took too long.

Well, Abraham Lincoln actually didn’t have to listen to polls on CNN. They didn’t have them then.

But I suspect, even if they did have polls on CNN, and ABC and NBC, Abraham Lincoln would have made exactly the same decision, which is: It’s my goal to keep this union together. It’s my goal to end slavery in order to extend freedom. And I’m not going to cave in to the immediate pressure of public opinion because, if I do and we end this war and we entreat frustration, we’re going to have two separate countries and they’re going to go to war with each other who knows how many times in the future and we’re going to lose a lot more lives.

It’s fine to criticize Lincoln’s suspension of civil liberties in principle (though I’m not a historian and don’t know enough about the Civil War to evaluate the wisdom of his decision). But I mocked the passage from the Washington Times because it smacks of anti-Lincoln agitprop from the neo-Confederate wing of the hard right. Giuliani didn’t get up at CPAC and praise Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus; he praised Lincoln’s determination to persevere in the Civil War.

To put it a different way, do liberals get upset about the Japanese internment whenever a Democrat offers general praise for FDR? No, because they still view Roosevelt as one of our greatest presidents on balance. Somehow I’m suspicious that the people the Washington Times talked to are really mad at Lincoln about civil liberties. Remember, this is a newspaper that is edited by racists…

I knew Senator Jim Inhofe is a kook on the issue of global warming, but this passage from Dana Milbank’s report on Inhofe’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference is especially absurd:

Inhofe repeated his view that man-made global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” and he quarreled with a Bush administration proposal to list polar bears as a threatened species. “They’re overpopulated,” he declared. “Don’t worry about it: The polar bear is fine.” His staff handed out supporting documentation, including the claim that “MARS HAS GLOBAL WARMING DESPITE ABSENCE OF SUVs.”

Hilarious!

WashingtonPost.com’s Dan Froomkin nailed the latest prevarications from White House spokesman Tony Snow in his column Friday:

All modern White House press secretaries can reasonably be expected to spend a lot of their time trying to spin the facts to make their boss look good. But in his fervor to make his case, Snow sometimes says things that are simply not true.

In the latest example, Max Blumenthal writes for Raw Story that at his speech yesterday to CPAC, Snow insisted: "We didn’t create the war in Iraq. We didn’t create the war on terror."

One could certainly argue that the 9/11 terrorist attacks demanded an aggressive response and that President Bush’s campaign against terror was not a matter of choice. But the war on Iraq was a war of choice if there ever was one. The Iraqis didn’t start it.

To say the White House didn’t create that war may be a thrilling rhetorical flourish, but it is also a blatant rewriting of history.

I’ve been chronicling Snow’s more egregious behavior in my column.

Among the recent examples: Snow’s assertion in a Feb. 6 briefing that "by some calculations" Bush’s tax cuts "have paid for themselves and then some." Bush himself has found all sorts of artful ways to imply that his tax cuts have paid for themselves, without exactly saying as much — because it’s simply not true, as even Bush’s economic advisers admit. But Snow has no such scruples. (See the "Tax Cuts Don’t Pay for Themselves" section of my Feb. 7 column.)

More on the decline of Talking Points Memo — main page blogger David Kurtz approvingly quotes reader “RB” saying the following:

Why doesn’t a progressive with an audience say something to the effect “This is who and what the once proud and honorable Republican Party has turned itself into. It is a party of hate, intolerance, incompetence, greed, treason, fanatical, hostile to science and reality, and totally corrupt. They have no honor and no shame. They’re fascists and a cancer on our great nation, plain and simple and this is just another example of that.”

Kurtz endorses the sentiment, with only the mildest parenthetical disclaimers about blanket accusations that the GOP is a party of “treason” and “fascists”:

Around here we focus on showing it rather than just saying it. But with Coulter and her ilk, it’s probably necessary to just say it from time to time. So, yeah, what RB says pretty much covers it. (Treason is not a charge to throw around lightly, so I’ll hedge on that; and we probably flatter ourselves by saying the GOP is fascist, although I agree its fascist tendencies are alarming.)

The reason that TPM has become far more strident and one-sided since becoming a large commercial enterprise is left as an exercise for the reader.

Chronicling political hypocrisy is almost too easy, but Q&O’s Bruce McQuain has a nice post showing how several prominent Democrats took diametrically opposed positions during the debates over Kosovo and Iraq. Back then, many of them argued against a resolution that would have required congressional authorization for President Clinton to send in ground troops, arguing that it would “send the wrong signal” to our enemies, etc. Needless to say, they don’t feel the same way today.

Matthew Yglesias makes an excellent point about the way in which people confuse vulgar or strident rhetoric with extreme ideology:

Joe Klein’s “you might be a left-wing extremist if…” list is quite revealing. A number of his items are somewhat strawmannish substantive positions. Many of them, however, rather plainly have nothing whatsoever to do with extremism of any sort. To wit:

1. Dismissively mocks people of faith, especially those who are opposed to abortion and gay marriage.
2. Regularly uses harsh, vulgar, intolerant language to attack moderates or conservatives.

I mean, there’s a term for people who express left-of-center views in a vulgar manner and it isn’t “extremist” — it’s vulgar. The sentiment “that asshole Bush ruined the balanced budgets of the 1990s all for the sake of his fucking tax cuts” is perfectly centrist. Similarly, whether or not you tend to mock people you disagree with about matters of religion is just a matter of politeness. But rudeness has no ideology. Under certain circumstances, of course, it’s important to maintain a certain standard of politeness, but there’s no reason to elevate this to a core ideological point.

This is the same mistake that many people make in analyzing Paul Krugman, for instance, who was portrayed as some sort of crazed leftist for his strident opposition to the Bush administration. But Krugman is a trained economist who won the prestigious John Bates Clark medal and was, until recently, known as a moderate Democrat. Similarly, Atrios (aka Duncan Black) is an economist with (basically) center-left policy views. Rhetorical and ideological extremism may tend be correlated, but extreme rhetoric doesn’t make one an ideological extremist.

My Duke Blue Devils were vanquished for the second time this year by a superior UNC team yesterday. So I must alert you to the blog of a fellow Triangle grad student, UNC’s Micah Weinberg, who challenged me to a friendly Tobacco Road wager on the outcome of the game. Next year we will have our revenge…

Via another grad student in my department, here’s the headline of the year:

Swiss Accidentally Invade Liechtenstein
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 2, 2007

Filed at 8:43 a.m. ET

ZURICH, Switzerland (AP) — What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

A spokesman for the Swiss army confirmed the story but said that there were unlikely to be any serious repercussions for the mistaken invasion.

”We’ve spoken to the authorities in Liechtenstein and it’s not a problem,” Daniel Reist told The Associated Press…

When is perjury not perjury? When your party is under investigation!

Washington Monthly has the goods:

GOP Rep. Lindsey Graham (now Senator) on Clinton, 1998: “I believe it is a crime–it’s a high crime that should subject any president for removal.” Graham also served as one of the GOP’s managers of the impeachment case.

And on Libby, 2006: “When it came to the grand jury, he gave false testimony allegedly about his interaction. But the underlying charge that started this investigation never materialized. So you have to put it in that perspective…It’s a bad story but it’s a different story than the way it started.”

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Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes on Clinton, 1998: “It’s going to be hard not to impeach the president for prejury.”

And on Libby, 2006: “Fitzgerald should terminate his probe immediately. A correction–perhaps the longest and most overdue in the history of journalism–is in order.”

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GOP Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, on Clinton, 1998: “Something needs to be said that is a clear message that our rule of law is intact and the standards for perjury and obstruction of justice are not gray.”

And on Libby, 2005: “I certainly hope that, if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn’t indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollar.”
(Thanks to The New Republic’s Jon Chait for this one. [subscription required])

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GOP Sen. Don Nickles on Clinton, 1998: “In my opinion, President Clinton is guilty of perjury. He is guilty of obstruction of justice.”

Nickles now serves on the Libby Defense Board.

Via Atrios, Hotsoup co-founder and former hotshot Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier has fled back to the welcoming embrace of the AP. Why? Because the concept for the site — “the first online community that joins Opinion Drivers from across the spectrum” — makes no sense. As a result, no one is reading it. The gory Alexa traffic data shows a peak when the site launched followed by a slide into oblivion:

Like the floundering third-party group Unity ’08, Hotsoup was supposed to capitalize on Americans’ hunger for bipartisanship. But the idea behind both organizations is wrong. Would most Americans like more choices in politics or less polarization? Sure. But Hotsoup and Unity ’08 fail to understand two fundamental principles of politics:

(1) Investing time and energy in building a new party — or contributing to an online political community — is essentially irrational from a cost-benefit perspective. The only reason to spend the time to do it is if you really, really care. And the people who really, really care tend to be ideologically extreme, not centrists.
(2) Getting people involved in a new party or political community is a coordination game. Person A has little incentive to make the effort to take part if persons B-Z are going to decide not to join up, causing the organization to fail. And when the prospects for the party or website are slim, people rationally decide not to invest their time.