Brendan Nyhan

If you don’t follow Massachusetts politics, you may not have heard of Christy Mihos, an independent candidate for governor, but the ad he released a couple of weeks ago is destined for political immortality:

If you watch it, you’ll see why it’s called “Heads Up.” Hilarious and effective.

After weakly fact-checking President Bush’s straw man rhetoric yesterday, the Washington Post’s Peter Baker did a much better job today:

“One hundred and seventy-seven of the opposition party said, ‘You know, we don’t think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists,’ ” Bush said at a fundraiser for Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) before heading to Colorado for gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez.

Asked about the president’s statement, White House aides could not name any Democrat who has said that the government should not listen in on terrorists. Democrats who voted against the legislation had complained that it would hand too much power to the president and had said that they wanted more checks in the bill to protect civil liberties.

Every time the Post or any other newspaper quotes one of these statements, it should immediately clarify that Bush’s claim is misleading.

In an editorial this morning denouncing GOP elites for feeding the Mark Foley scandal, the Wall Street Journal refers to the controversy as the “Foley wilding”:

And so with an election weeks away and its troops already at the edge of the cliff, the Republican elites decided to jump into the sea over Mr. Foley.

We doubt that Messrs. Boehner, Wildmon, Perkins, Bauer and Weyrich will feel as politically cleansed as they seem to be this week if they wake up November 8 to a House run by Ms. Pelosi and Messrs. Rangel, Murtha, Dingell, Waxman, Obey and Frank. And if the pundits are right, the Foley wilding may even give them a Harry Reid Senate.

In case you’re not familiar with the term “wilding,” it was popularized in 1989 to refer to the alleged gang rape of a jogger in Central Park by a group of teens from Harlem (whose convictions were vacated in 2002). One blogger quotes this definition from the Oxford English Dictionary: “The action or practice by a gang of youths of going on a protracted and violent rampage in a street, park, or other public place, attacking or mugging people at random along the way; also, an instance of this.”

Bipartisan outrage over the failure to prevent a Congressman from engaging in inappropriate contact with minors, or the equivalent of a violent rampage by a gang of youths — you be the judge!

Oops. The New York Times was forced to issue an embarassing correction to a story published yesterday on the Foley scandal:

An article yesterday about more revelations in the scandal involving Mark Foley, who resigned from the House of Representatives after being confronted with sexually explicit e-mail he had sent to Congressional pages, misstated the action taken by President Bill Clinton on behalf of former Representative Mel Reynolds, who also was involved in a sex scandal while in Congress. Mr. Clinton commuted Mr. Reynolds’s sentence for bank fraud; he did not pardon him for corruption and having sex with an underage campaign worker.

In writing my post about President Bush’s latest straw man rhetoric this morning, I was struck by an interesting similarity in the way that he dismisses criticism of his two signature initiatives — the tax cuts and the war in Iraq. In both cases, he manipulates the standard by which the policy is to be judged.

On tax cuts, for instance, the relevant question with respect to their effect on the deficit is how much higher revenue would have been had we not passed the tax cuts. President Bush repeatedly asserts that the tax cuts increase revenues, citing recent surges in funds coming in to the Treasury, and thereby shifts the standard of judgment to whether revenue is higher now than it was at some previous time. However, even if revenue does increase year-on-year, the evidence is overwhelming that tax cuts reduce revenue relative to what otherwise would have happened — even administration economists agree. (In Bush’s case, the recent increases in revenue followed a massive decline in previous years — see the latest analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.)

Bush also habitually manipulates counterfactuals on Iraq, as WashingtonPost.com’s Dan Froomkin points out, quoting this statement from Bush:

We weren’t in Iraq when we got attacked on September the 11th. We weren’t in Iraq, and thousands of fighters were trained in terror camps inside your country, Mr. President. We weren’t in Iraq when they first attacked the World Trade Center in 1993. We weren’t in Iraq when they bombed the Cole. We weren’t in Iraq when they blew up our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

But as Froomkin argues, the relevant question is not whether a terrorist threat existed before Iraq; it’s whether “invading Iraq has made the threat of terrorism since then worse than it otherwise would have been”:

No one is suggesting that the invasion of Iraq was responsible for terrorist act that predate that invasion! The argument is that invading Iraq has made the threat of terrorism since then worse than it otherwise would have been. Reciting past terrorist acts is almost laughably nonresponsive. And yet it’s a staple of Bush’s argument.

By dodging the relevant counterfactual, Bush avoids the obvious conclusion that was reached in the National Intelligence Estimate — the war has increased the terrorist threat. But the really tricky counterfactual is this: what would have happened if the press corps had actually explained how Bush keeps shifting the goalposts on his key policy initiatives?

It’s sad how easily Americans will believe that 9/11 was some sort of government or neoconservative conspiracy. A recent Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll found that “Thirty-six percent of respondents overall said it is ‘very likely’ or ‘somewhat likely’ that federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them ‘because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.’” And conspiracy theories have proliferated so widely that Popular Mechanics devoted an entire book to debunking them.

The latest incident comes via Wonkette, which notes that a speech by Bill Kristol at the University of Texas at Austin was disrupted by nutcases brandishing this “evidence” that the Project for a New American Century masterminded 9/11:

“9/11 is your Pearl Harbor,” said one student protestor, referring to a pre-Sept. 11 statement released by the Project for a New American Century, a conservative think tank Kristol chairs.

In a Sept. 2000 report titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses, ” the group wrote, “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”

Some of the student protestors are members of the new UT student organization, Project for the New American Citizen, but the group did not officially organize the protest, said founder Matt Dayton. The nonpartisan, anti-imperialism group encourages people to seek out truthful information regarding the U.S. government’s policies and actions, said Dayton, an art studio and radio-television-film junior. The group’s name is a counter to Kristol’s neoconservative think tank.

Dayton said students from his organization protested Kristol because he refuses to address what was said in the Sept. 2000 report.

“They openly needed a new Pearl Harbor in order to enact their new foreign policy,” Dayton said. “It’s either use it or lose it with your freedom of speech,” he said.

With reasoning skills like that, he’s sure to graduate with honors!

Update 10/5 8:51 AM: Meanwhile, protestors at Columbia shut down a speech by the founder of the Minuteman Project in another disturbing incident:

Students stormed the stage at Columbia University’s Roone auditorium yesterday, knocking over chairs and tables and attacking Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minutemen, a group that patrols the border between America and Mexico.

Mr. Gilchrist and Marvin Stewart, another member of his group, were in the process of giving a speech at the invitation of the Columbia College Republicans. They were escorted off the stage unharmed and exited the auditorium by a back door.

Having wreaked havoc onstage, the students unrolled a banner that read, in both Arabic and English, “No one is ever illegal.” As security guards closed the curtains and began escorting people from the auditorium, the students jumped from the stage, pumping their fists, chanting victoriously, “Si se pudo, si se pudo,” Spanish for “Yes we could!”

However, I’m also troubled by the description of the event on Power Line, where I first saw it. The author, Scott Johnson, titled the post “The zoo at Morningside heights” and writes that “Public discourse at Columbia is for now in the hands of intellectual savages” — language that is at the least in very poor taste given the racial and ethnic composition of Columbia in general and the protestors specifically.

The Daily Howler’s Bob Somerby makes a very important point about journalistic psychologizing in a recent column. The subject is this passage from Bob Woodward’s new book State of Denial:

Cheney had suggested Rumsfeld to Bush in late December 2000. Rumsfeld was so impressive, Bush told Card at the time. He had had the job in the Ford administration a quarter-century before, and it was as if he were now saying, “I think I’ve got some things I’d like to finish.”

But there was another dynamic that Bush and Card discussed. Rumsfeld and Bush’s father, the former president, couldn’t stand each other. Bush senior didn’t trust Rumsfeld and thought he was arrogant, self-important, too sure of himself and Machiavellian. Rumsfeld had also made nasty private remarks that the elder Bush was a lightweight.

Card could see that overcoming the former president’s skepticism about Rumsfeld added to the president-elect’s excitement. It was a chance to prove his father wrong.

Quoting a post by the liberal blogger Digby, Somerby points out that liberals are falling into the same kind of mind-reading and pop psychology that they used to hate during the Clinton years:

According to Digby, this part of Woodward’s book shows “Junior’s adolescent need to reject his father.” But does this passage really show that? If we come to that conclusion, we are making two assumptions: 1) Card knew how to read Bush’s mind, and 2) Woodward recorded Card’s statements correctly. We have little confidence in either proposition. By the way, many Bush insiders are now saying the things the mainstream press wants to hear, hoping to curry favor with the press for their future career interests. If Card said this, was he being sincere? We can’t imagine why a critic of this Admin would automatically think so.

In our view, we liberals become like kooky-cons (or worse, like Maureen Dowd) when we accept mind-reading, psychiatrizing work like this just because we find it pleasing — just because the psychiatrization of the moment happens to cut in our favor. This kind of journalistic “reasoning” has been relentlessly used, in the past fifteen years, to do massive damage to major Dem candidates. In the long run, we’d guess that we would be better off in we rejected all such piffle from intellectual midgets like Woodward and Dowd.

In many ways, Woodward has become a Dowdian clown. We’d guess that libs would be better off if we rejected all such work — if we skipped the picking-and-choosing about the corps’ mind-reading sessions. In this press corps, the doctor is constantly IN. The bad news? This doctor’s a quack.

Newsweek’s Howard Fineman reports that Republicans are desperately scrambling to find a page scandal they can throw back at Democrats:

It’s going to get uglier from here. The GOP will respond by unearthing old stories of sexual misconduct on Capitol Hill. I know that the search is on for complaints, however old, about unnamed Democrats who might have come on too strong to male or female pages.

Ah, the desperate search for moral equivalence. But set aside the cynicism of this maneuver. From a practical perspective, it’s not going to work. At this point, the issue is the response of the House GOP leadership, not Foley. That means Republicans need to find a Democratic member who behaved inappropriately with a page and show that Democrats failed to deal with that member’s behavior. And more than two decades later, Gerry Studds doesn’t count.

Update 10/4: That was fast — Drudge is featuring a link to Human Events’ list
of the “Top 10 Democrat Sex Scandals in Congress,” which goes back to the 1970s.

The Washington Post quotes the latest absurd straw man argument from President Bush, which he made during a speech in California yesterday:

“Time and time again, the Democrats want to have it both ways,” he told donors here. “They talk tough on terror, but when the votes are counted, their softer side comes out.”

He added: “If you don’t think we should be listening in on the terrorist, then you ought to vote for the Democrats. If you want your government to continue listening in when al-Qaeda planners are making phone calls into the United States, then you vote Republican.”

Bush’s tough talk Tuesday came after he suggested at a Monday night fundraiser in Nevada that Democrats were content to sit back until terrorists strike again. “It sounds like they think the best way to protect the American people is wait until we’re attacked again,” he said.

Unfortunately, even though this is a well-documented pattern (see here, here, here, here, here and here), the Post waited until almost the end of the story to explain in tepid language that Bush’s characterizations were inaccurate:

Bush’s language, though, characterizes Democratic positions through his own prism. Critics of the surveillance program have not argued against listening to terrorist phone calls but say the government should get warrants from a secret intelligence court. Likewise, many critics of the tribunal measure did not oppose interrogating prisoners generally, as Bush said, but specific provisions of the bill, such as denying the right of habeas corpus or giving the president freedom to authorize what they consider torture.

“[T]hrough his own prism?” Bush’s assertions are flatly misleading, and the Post fails to note that it’s flatly untrue that Democrats “think the best way to protect the American people is wait until we’re attacked again.” This country needs better journalists.

Kevin Drum offers a typically sharp take on the proper civilian-military balance in government:

Andrew Bacevich makes a point today about the military brass that’s been nagging at me for a long time:

In determining the conduct of the Bush administration’s global war on terror, the civilians in the office of the secretary of Defense call the shots. Apart from being trotted out on ceremonial occasions, the Joint Chiefs have become all but invisible. Certainly, on questions related to basic national security policy, they have become irrelevant.

Some of this qualifies as payback. During the 1990s, in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, the Joint Chiefs were riding high and used their clout to show their civilian “masters” who was really boss. During the largely contrived controversy over gays in the military, the Joint Chiefs publicly humiliated the newly elected president, Bill Clinton.

….When Rumsfeld took office in 2001, he was intent on shoring up the principle of civilian control. He has done that — although Rumsfeld’s idea of control amounts to emasculation. He has bludgeoned generals into submission, marginalized or gotten rid of those inclined to be obstreperous and selected pliable replacements such as [Marine Gen. Peter] Pace.

When it comes to the debacle in Iraq, it’s right that the focus be kept squarely on the civilian leadership: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice. But there’s a downside to this, namely that it lets the military leadership off the hook too easily.

We should expect our top military leaders to treat the civilian chain of command with respect and obedience. We should also expect them to provide sound military advice regardless of the consequences and to accept responsibility for failure. In the Clinton administration they failed to do the former and in the Bush administration they’ve failed to do the latter. They’ve allowed Rumsfeld to cow them into silence, they’ve declined to implement the root-and-branch commitment to counterinsurgency that’s needed to succeed in Iraq, and they’ve consistently misled the American public about how much progress we’re making against the Iraqi insurgents.

This is exactly right. The military serves the president, not the other way around, but we have to hold its leaders accountable for their failures.

The problem is that both sides tend to venerate the military when it serves their political purposes at the expense of undermining the principle of civilian control. When the military undercut the Clinton administration on gays in the military, for instance, Republicans cheered. But they brook no dissent now that their party controls the presidency.

On the flip side, as an increasing number of retired officers have gone public with their critiques of the Bush administration, Democrats have uncritically touted their endorsements as some sort of military stamp of approval. John Kerry practically made a fetish of invoking the fact that he was supported by Gen. John Shalikashvili and other flag officers during the 2004 campaign, even mentioning it during the first and second presidential debates. The military should not be a political constituency in a democracy. And by touting his military support, Kerry only encouraged Republicans to point to their far greater number of military supporters (the armed forces are increasingly dominated by Republicans).

Going forward, the political climate will make any effort to bring the civil-military relationship back into balance and hold officers accountable difficult to impossible. In particular, imagine what will happen if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2008. Even a serious, non-political attempt to overhaul the military leadership and come to terms what has happened in Iraq would probably draw savage attacks from Republicans, further politicizing the armed forces. I’m not optimistic.