Brendan Nyhan

In a comment on my last post about nasty liberal rhetoric, Jon Henke of Q&O points out that the well-known blogger Digby has suggested that Rush Limbaugh solicited underage prostitutes during his recent trip to the Dominican Republic:

I know that a good establishment liberal would refrain from even discussing the fact that Rush Limbaugh likes to go to one of the underage sex capitals of the world with a bottle of Viagra in one hand and God knows what in the other…

Rush should be urged to share his story with America. Here’s [sic] he is, an impotent, thrice divorced, ex-drug addict, conservative, parolee who went on a sex tour in the Caribbean and found himself rudely embarrassed for carrying recreational prescription drugs in his doctor’s name. Who can’t relate to that?

This kind of rhetoric borders on libel. Returning from the Dominican Republic with Viagra in his luggage does not prove Limbaugh was “on a sex tour,” nor that he was soliciting underage sex — a serious accusation that should not be tossed around lightly.

Update 6/29 10:19 AM: Henke has a post about this on Q&O.

I hate it when liberals slur conservatives as less than human by calling them Neanderthals or, in this case, “simian,” which American Prospect editor Mike Tomasky used to describe a Republican Senate candidate:

Note that on the flag-burning amendment, Robert Byrd voted against.

Even though he’s from red West Virginia. Even though Jay Rockefeller voted yea. Even though he’s involved in a potentially tough reelection campaign against a simian blowhard from my hometown named John Raese who will demagogue this to death.

Here’s Merriam-Webster Online’s definition of simian: “of, relating to, or resembling monkeys or apes.”

Do you think Tomasky would like it if someone used that word to refer to African Americans? So why is it ok to describe conservatives as “resembling monkeys or apes”?

Newsweek’s new article on Daily Kos includes a useful discussion of how liberal blogs like Kos could actually hurt Democrats:

[S]ome Dems fear that Moulitsas’s popularity will pull the party so far to the left that it won’t be able to win the general election in 2008. “It’s a little bit like ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ with these guys,” said an aide to a Democratic presidential candidate who asked not to be identified while the boss was angling for Moulitsas’s support. “You like what they’re saying when they’re coming in, but you don’t know what they’re going to do once you let them into your house.” Newt Gingrich, who wins points even from liberal bloggers for his political acumen, marvels at the Democrats’ embrace of the blogosphere: “Candidates out there run a risk of resembling the people they’re trying to appeal to,” he tells NEWSWEEK. “I think the Republican Party has few allies more effective than the Daily Kos.”

Online liberal activists like Kos often compare the function of their blogs to the way Republicans use talk radio: to inspire the troops, do rapid reaction, spread an ideological message, etc. But there’s a key difference that the two quotes above highlight perfectly.

Talk radio largely exists in a media vacuum. Reporters ignore it and few transcripts are made of what is said (for instance, Spinsanity basically had a monopoly on the Rush Limbaugh beat until Media Matters was founded). So Republicans can push a more extreme, base-inspiring message to their supporters through talk radio, while appearing relatively moderate to the general public. And they rarely get punished for what their talk radio supporters say on the air.

By contrast, blogs live forever in Google and are read by journalists, so Democratic politicians can’t push a more extreme message effectively. In addition, the transparency of blogs means that bloggers’ extremist statements are frequently made into political issues. This forces Democratic politicians into a dilemma: repudiate their blog supporters (as John Kerry did when Kos attacked the military contractors who were killed in Fallujah), or stand behind the blog and look like an extremist. That’s what the Democratic aide is referring to when he says that “you don’t know what they’re going to do once you let them into your house.”

The model that underlies this argument is spatial voting, which portrays voters as choosing the candidate who is closest to them ideologically. As political scientists have made such models more complex, they have explored how politicians might present different ideological locations to different audiences, suggesting that they are more extreme to activists and more moderate to the general public. But this tactic only works if the general public does not find out about what the politicians say to the activist audience. Otherwise, the candidate may be punished for deception or extremism. Similarly, if the politician associates with extremist activists, the public may view the politician herself as more extreme.

Unlike talk radio, blogs don’t allow Democrats to push two separate messages effectively, and they make it easy for Republicans and journalists to make Democrats look extreme. In short, they’re too transparent to be an effective political weapon. That’s why Newt Gingrich likes Daily Kos. How long until Democratic politicians figure this out?

The New York Times reports that the Bush administration launched an offensive against the newspaper yesterday for its decision to reveal a financial monitoring program used to track terrorists:

President Bush on Monday condemned as “disgraceful” the disclosure last week by The New York Times and other newspapers of a secret program to investigate and track terrorists that relies on a vast international database that includes Americans’ banking transactions.

The remarks were the first in public by Mr. Bush on the issue, and they came as the administration intensified its attacks on newspapers’ handling of it. In a speech in Nebraska on Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney repeatedly criticized The Times by name, while Treasury Secretary John W. Snow dismissed as “incorrect and offensive” the rationale offered by the newspaper’s executive editor for the decision to publish.

“Congress was briefed,” Mr. Bush said. “And what we did was fully authorized under the law. And the disclosure of this program is disgraceful. We’re at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it, does great harm to the United States of America.”

But the damage done by the decision to publish the story isn’t altogether clear:

Administration officials had argued strongly that in reporting on the financial tracking operation, The Times would endanger national security by prompting the Belgian banking consortium that maintains the financial data to withdraw from the program. On Sunday, Mr. Keller, the paper’s executive editor, posted a letter on The New York Times Web site saying that the newspaper “found this argument puzzling,” partly because the banking consortium is compelled by subpoena to comply.

Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records from the cooperative, known as Swift.

Mr. Keller said in the letter that the administration had made a “secondary argument” that publication of the article would lead terrorists to change tactics, but he said that argument had been made “in a halfhearted way.”

Mr. Snow, the Treasury secretary, challenged that view in strong terms in a letter to Mr. Keller, saying, “Nothing could be further from the truth.” Mr. Snow said that he and other high-level officials, including Democrats, had made “repeated pleas” in an effort to dissuade The Times from publication. The letter was made public by the Treasury in a news release on Monday evening.

It’s hard to imagine that Al Qaeda thought their financial transactions weren’t being monitored. So why is the administration demonizing the Times so explicitly? (Cheney, for instance, did not name the other newspapers that published the story.) Could it be the fact that conservatives hate the Times and are demoralized going into the 2006 election? Karl Rove may be pioneering a new base-rallying strategy. Call it God, gays, and Gotham journalists. Or how about terrorists, taxes, and the Times?

Rep. Pete Hoekstra and Senator Rick Santorum have written a Wall Street Journal op-ed that expands on their misleading claims that we found WMDs in Iraq:

On Wednesday, at our request, the director of national intelligence declassified six “key points” from a National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) report on the recovery of chemical munitions in Iraq. The summary was only a small snapshot of the entire report, but even so, it brings new information to the American people. “Since 2003,” the summary states, “Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent,” which remains “hazardous and potentially lethal.” So there are WMDs in Iraq, and they could kill Americans there or all over the world.

Note how Hoekstra and Santorum insinuate something they cannot prove. First, they say “So there are WMDs in Iraq,” which is apparently designed to counter those people who said we did not find WMDs in Iraq. But, of course, we didn’t find operational WMDs under the control of Saddam Hussein. Finding degraded 1980s shells does not count as “finding WMDs.” The invasion was not premised on recovering rotting weapons from the Iran-Iraq war.

Hoekstra and Santorum then write that the shells “could kill Americans there or all over the world” as if the degraded shells are comparable to fully operational chemical weapons. That is simply not the case. While the shells could reportedly be used in roadside bombs in Iraq, they are unlikely to cause the “mass destruction” that makes WMDs such a unique and dangerous threat. The odds of terrorists exporting them from Iraq to attack Americans “all over the world” are laughably small.

Even the Bush administration isn’t supporting their absurd claims. Shouldn’t that tell you something?

More evidence from the Duke lacrosse case has been made public, and — like the last batch — it is absolutely damning to the prosecution:

Hours after a March 13 Duke University lacrosse team party, the woman who said players raped her that night told police changing stories.

An officer at Duke Hospital wrote in a report released Friday that the accuser said she was one of four women who danced at the party; every other account of that night says only two women danced.

The woman said that night that five men sexually assaulted her; District Attorney Mike Nifong and investigators have said there were three.

Durham police officer G.D. Sutton noted that the woman also said at one point that she had not been raped. “While being interviewed at Duke, her story changed several times,” the officer wrote in a report.

…The woman has given, by Cheshire’s count, at least a half-dozen different accounts to police, doctors and nurses. The woman first said she was raped to someone at a mental health facility where police took her for detoxification. At Duke Hospital, her story changed several times:

* She told police she was dancing at a party with three other women when she was pulled into a bathroom and raped by five men.

* She told another police officer that she had been groped by some men in front of the house at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. but had not been raped.

* She told a doctor that three men had assaulted her vaginally.

* She told a nurse that three men had assaulted her vaginally, anally and orally.

* She told the same nurse that two men had assaulted her.

Even Nifong’s allies are bailing out:

“Unless he has a player from the team who is going to testify that this rape occurred, there is no way he will win this case and there is no way this case should have ever been brought,” said Mark Edwards, a Durham criminal defense lawyer. Edwards appeared in an advertisement on Nifong’s behalf during the prosecutor’s successful campaign in the Democratic primary for district attorney.

And neutral observers are pointing out that Nifong’s prosecution is highly unusual given the flimsy, contradictory evidence:

“Victims in these cases often may very well say something somewhat inconsistent immediately afterward and might still be telling the absolute truth,” said Stan Goldman, a Loyola Law School professor and former Los Angeles County public defender.

“But … I’ve never seen a case go to trial with this many inconsistencies in the victim’s sequence of events,” he said.

Meanwhile, two candidates are seeking to get on the ballot to oppose Nifong. I’m going to turn in my signature on a petition to get one of them on the ballot on Monday. We need to make an example out of Nifong.

In an article titled “Jim Crow GOP” on TomPaine.com, Air America producer Steve Rosenfeld alleges that “it was Jim Crow tactics… which gave George W. Bush his Ohio victory in 2004.”

But, Rosenfeld claims, the conspiracy cannot be acknowledged by Democrats, who presumably would have the most to gain from backing Rosenfeld’s accusations if they were true:

Of course, the Democratic Party and their allies will never admit they should have known better and acted to stop these tactics. But you can read between the lines of the DNC’s 2005 report on Ohio that said 2 percent of Ohio’s 5.8 million voters who intended to vote were stopped from doing so. That’s 116,000 voters in a state where George W. Bush’s margin of victory was 118,775 votes.

If the Democrats are alleging that 116,000 people were prevented from voting in a state — not all of whom supported John Kerry — then there is no possible way that those voters could have changed the outcome of an election that Bush won by 118,775 votes.

Indeed, Walter Mebane Jr., a respected political scientists at Cornell who served on the DNC task force, disavowed these allegations:

Walter R. Mebane Jr., a professor of government at Cornell University and member of the task force, said Ohio suffered from a “gross administrative failure” on Election Day. But he later said there was no “support whatsoever for the claim that there was a large-scale misallocation of vote from [Democratic nominee John F.] Kerry to [President] Bush in Ohio” and said it is highly unlikely Kerry would have won the state in any case.

…Mebane stopped short of charging that Republicans had deliberately set out to frustrate Democratic voters. He said the scope of the study could not determine whether there was any partisan intent and noted that local election boards, which determine the distribution of voting machines, are bipartisan.

But to Rosenfeld, it’s a Republican conspiracy analogous to Jim Crow. Obviously.

Media Matters documents the inevitable accusation that Democrats who support withdrawal are aiding the enemy, which came, bizarrely, from Geraldo on Fox News:

I’ve known John Kerry for over 35 years. Unlike me, he is a combat veteran, so he gets some props. But in the last 35 years, I’ve seen a hell of a lot more combat than John Kerry. And for a smart man like that in a political ploy to set a date certain only aids and abets the enemy, and the Democrats are at their own self-destructive behavior once again.

Meanwhile, Kerry sent his supporters an email touting the 13 votes he got for his withdrawal resolution (PDF). 13 votes! What a victory!

Update 6/24 6:59 PM The RNC used the same line:

Republican National Committee spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt offered a harsher appraisal, saying that the Democratic divisions add up to “surrender to the terrorists.”

Via Josh Marshall, it looks like Republicans are still promoting the misperception that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq (PDF). Here’s what Rep. Pete Hoekstra and Senator Rick Santorum said yesterday according to the Washington Post:

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) told reporters yesterday that weapons of mass destruction had in fact been found in Iraq, despite acknowledgments by the White House and the insistence of the intelligence community that no such weapons had been discovered.

“We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons,” Santorum said.

The lawmakers pointed to an unclassified summary from a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center regarding 500 chemical munitions shells that had been buried near the Iranian border, and then long forgotten, by Iraqi troops during their eight-year war with Iran, which ended in 1988.

The U.S. military announced in 2004 in Iraq that several crates of the old shells had been uncovered and that they contained a blister agent that was no longer active. Neither the military nor the White House nor the CIA considered the shells to be evidence of what was alleged by the Bush administration to be a current Iraqi program to make chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

Last night, intelligence officials reaffirmed that the shells were old and were not the suspected weapons of mass destruction sought in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.

More than three years after the invasion, two prominent members of the United States Congress, including the chair of the House intelligence committee, are trying to pass off buried chemical shells from the 1980s as proof that Saddam had WMDs. Unbelievable.

Update 6/22 8:07 AM: Sadly, the reports on Hoekstra and Santorum from FoxNews.com (“Report: Hundreds of WMDs Found in Iraq”)
and the Washington Times (“Chemical arms found in Iraq, report reveals”) hype their claims and downplay the details. It’s not hard to see how this could fuel further misperceptions among the public.

Update 6/22 3:24 PM: Drudge’s headlines today are even more misleading out of context:

Report: ‘Hundreds of WMDs Found in Iraq’…

Chemical weapons…

And some National Review writers at The Corner are arguing that the “discovery” is important. Sigh.

Update 6/24 5:36 PM: Media Matters documents Fox News and other conservatives continuing to hype the misleading WMD claims of Hoekstra and Santorum.

Back in 2004, Markos Zuniga of Daily Kos denounced “he said, she said” journalism:

If more of the mainstream media took a page out of the Daily Show playbook, and contrasted Bush’s ridiculous statements and accusations with reality, we’d be a much better country. Fact check the shit out of both candidates, instead of this “he said, she said, we won’t call bullshit when we hear it” crap.

The media owes it to the American people.

But according to The New Republic’s Jason Zengerle, Kos asked elite liberal bloggers to ignore the story for a while and thereby prevent any “he said, she said” stories about it:

My request to you guys is that you ignore this for now. It would make my life easier if we can confine the story. Then, once Jerome can speak and defend himself, then I’ll go on the offensive (which is when I would file any lawsuits) and anyone can pile on. If any of us blog on this right now, we fuel the story. Let’s starve it of oxygen. And
without the “he said, she said” element to the story, you know political journalists are paralyzed into inaction.

Hmm. His PR strategy capitalizes on the media’s “he said, she said” reporting style. Sound like anyone you know?