Brendan Nyhan

You read it here first.

Back on February 15, I flagged Paul Weyrich’s article claiming that “if Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is Speaker of the House come next year George W. Bush will be impeached.” Matthew Yglesias picked up the post on Tapped, and the impeachment meme started to go mainstream. Yesterday, as I noted, the Wall Street Journal editorial page claimed that a Democratic House majority would be likely to impeach Bush.

Today, David Kirkpatrick, one of the conservative “beat” reporters for the New York Times, picks up the story starting with Weyrich:

Republicans, worried that their conservative base lacks motivation to turn out for the fall elections, have found a new rallying cry in the dreams of liberals about censuring or impeaching President Bush.

The proposal this week by Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, to censure Mr. Bush over his domestic eavesdropping program cheered the left. But it also dovetailed with conservatives’ plans to harness such attacks to their own ends.

With the Republican base demoralized by continued growth in government spending, undiminished violence in Iraq and intramural disputes over immigration, some conservative leaders had already begun rallying their supporters with speculation about a Democratic rebuke to the president even before Mr. Feingold made his proposal.

“Impeachment, coming your way if there are changes in who controls the House eight months from now,” Paul Weyrich, a veteran conservative organizer, declared last month in an e-mail newsletter.

The threat of impeachment, Mr. Weyrich suggested, was one of the only factors that could inspire the Republican Party’s demoralized base to go to the polls. With “impeachment on the horizon,” he wrote, “maybe, just maybe, conservatives would not stay at home after all.”

Wisconsin Democratic senator Russ Feingold’s introduction of a motion to censure President Bush for his illegal domestic wiretapping program has drawn a number of unfair attacks.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist responded that “the signal that it sends that there is in any way a lack of support for our commander in chief, who is leading us with a bold vision, in a way that we know is making our homeland safer, is wrong. And it sends a perception around the world.”

Does Frist really think the world believes Bush is popular? The three recent polls showing a mid-30s approval rating would seem to make it pretty obvious to the world there is “a lack of support” for President Bush.

Frist later attacked Feingold again, stating, “This is a political stunt, a political stunt that is addressed at attacking the president of the United States of America when we’re at war.” The implication, of course, is that it’s illegitimate to criticize the president during wartime – a dangerous and anti-democratic notion.

Other attacks on dissent came from Speaker Dennis Hastert’s spokesman, Ron Bonjean, and Vice President Cheney. Bonjean asked the rhetorical question, “Just who is the enemy to the Democrats, the president of the United States or the terrorists working to destroy our way of life?” And Cheney said in a speech that “Some Democrats in Congress have decided the president is the enemy.” By this pseudo-logic, which Republicans have used repeatedly since 9/11, criticism of the President means that Democrats aren’t serious about fighting the terrorist enemy.

Republican chairman Ken Mehlman also used this approach in an email to supporters (PDF), stating that “Democrat leaders never miss an opportunity to put politics before our nation’s security. And now, they would rather censure the President for doing his job than actually fight the War on Terror.” Again, the implication is that Democrats are weakening national security and choosing not to fight the war on terror.

Another tactic was to attack absurd straw men. White House spokesperson Scott McClellan said, “I think it does raise the question of how do you fight and win the war on terrorism, and if Democrats want to argue that we shouldn’t be listening to al Qaeda communications, that’s their right. And we welcome the debate.”

This claim, which Republicans have repeated before, bears no resemblance to reality. No major Democrat has said that “we shouldn’t be listening to al Qaeda communications,” and censuring the President for breaking the law governing wiretaps certainly doesn’t indicate opposition to such wiretaps. Yet Cheney claimed that Democrats want to “protect our enemies’ ability to communicate,” stating, “The outrageous proposition that we ought to protect our enemies’ ability to communicate as it plots against America poses a key test of our Democratic leaders.”

Finally, the Wall Street Journal editorial page follows the approach of Paul Weyrich, warning Republicans of a secret Democratic impeachment plot:

Republicans are denouncing Senator Russ Feingold’s proposal to “censure” President Bush for his warrantless wiretaps on al Qaeda, but we’d like to congratulate the Wisconsin Democrat on his candor. He’s had the courage to put on the table what Democrats are all but certain to do if they win either the House or Senate in November.

In fact, our guess is that censure would be the least of it. The real debate in Democratic circles would be whether to pass articles of impeachment. Whether such an inevitable attempt succeeds would depend on Mr. Bush’s approval rating, and especially on whether Democrats could use their subpoena power as committee chairs to conjure up something they could flog to a receptive media as an “impeachable” offense. But everyone should understand that censure and impeachment are important–and so far the only–parts of the left’s agenda for the next Congress.

…In other words, everything that Mr. Bush has been accused of during the last five years, no matter how Orwellian or thoroughly refuted, will be trotted out again and used as impeachment fodder. And lest you think this could never happen, Judiciary is the House committee through which any formal impeachment resolution would be introduced and proceed. As the country heads toward 2008 and a Democratic nomination fight, John Kerry and Hillary Rodham Clinton would be hard-pressed to avoid going along with Mr. Feingold, Al Gore, and others feeding the bile of the censure/impeach brigades.

Which brings us back to Mr. Feingold’s public service in floating his “censure” gambit now. He’s doing voters a favor by telling them before November’s election just how Democrats intend to treat a wartime President if they take power.

Not only do they want to block his policies, they also plan to rebuke and embarrass him in front of the world and America’s enemies. And they want to do so not because there is a smidgen of evidence that he’s abused his office or lied under oath, but because they think he’s been too energetic in using his powers to defend America. By all means, let’s have this impeachment debate before the election, so voters can know what’s really at stake.

This is just speculation, of course, and the legal analysis from the editorial is even worse:

As a legal matter, Mr. Feingold’s censure proposal is preposterous. The National Security Agency wiretaps were disclosed to Congressional leaders, including Democrats, from the start. The lead FISA court judges were also informed, and the Attorney General and Justice lawyers have monitored the wiretaps all along. Despite a media drumbeat about “illegal domestic eavesdropping,” Mr. Bush’s spirited defense of the program since news of it leaked has swung public opinion in support.

Disclosing the program to a handful of Democrats and informing “lead FISA court judges” is not the same as following the rules and procedures created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The WSJ presents these actions as if they are somehow exculpatory in a legal sense, hoping that ill-informed readers will believe these steps were sufficient under the law.

As a political matter, Feingold’s resolution was a poor tactical choice. Bush is extremely unpopular; dividing Senate Democrats, turning the conversation back to the war on terror, and raising the specter of impeachment does not serve his party well. But the spin barrage that the GOP has unleashed deserves nothing but scorn.

Update 3/15: Media Matters reports that “Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, called Sen. Russ Feingold’s introduction of a resolution to censure President Bush ‘borderline treasonous behavior’” — yet another anti-democratic attack on dissent.

It’s striking that the media narrative is finally shifting to acknowledge the fact that Bush is a very unpopular president. Here’s a brutal but accurate excerpt from the Washington Post:

Bush’s problems go beyond the fatigue factor [among his staff]. An unpopular foreign war, high energy prices and the nation’s worst natural disaster in decades have dragged his poll ratings down to the lowest level of any second-term president, other than Richard M. Nixon, in the last half-century.

And remember, these poll numbers are consistent with the little appreciated fact that Bush’s reelection was the narrowest since Woodrow Wilson…

America’s most influential liberal columnist tries to get the anti-McCain backlash going:

It’s time for some straight talk about John McCain. He isn’t a moderate. He’s much less of a maverick than you’d think. And he isn’t the straight talker he claims to be.

No more bipartisan love for you!

In a fundraising letter for Southern Poverty Law Center (JPEG), Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison pushes the myth that conservative pundit Bill Bennett advocated the abortion of black babies to reduce crime.

She writes:

With former Secretary of Education William Bennett talking about the abortion of black babies to curb crime and with hurricane Katrina exposing extreme racial bias, we must act quickly to confront intolerance and injustice.

As Brad DeLong wrote, however, while “Bill Bennett is a hypocrite, a loathsome fungus on the tree of American politics,” he “is not afflicted with genocidal fantasies about ethnically cleansing African-Americans. The claim that he is is completely, totally wrong.” The reality is that Bennett was attempting a reductio ad absurdum argument (which, as DeLong notes, is a bad idea on live radio), not advocating ethnic cleansing:

CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security, and I was curious, and I’ve read articles in recent months here, that the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn’t — never touches this at all.

BENNETT: Assuming they’re all productive citizens?

CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it would be an enormous amount of revenue.

BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don’t know what the costs would be, too. I think as — abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No.

CALLER: I don’t know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.

BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don’t know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don’t know. I mean, it cuts both — you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well —

CALLER: Well, I don’t think that statistic is accurate.

BENNETT: Well, I don’t think it is either, I don’t think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don’t know. But I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.

Anyone know why I would be deleted from Google? All of a sudden, hundreds of posts are no longer indexed. In fact, as far as Google is concerned, this site doesn’t exist at all. The only reason I can think of is that they didn’t like a slight search hack I had running in the sidebar, but is that enough reason to trash me? It’s costing me hundreds of visitors per day.

It’s sad how easily the press gets taken in by biographical spin. Time describes President Bush as a “Texas rancher” dispensing homespun wisdom in an article this week:

White House
officials contend that Bush quickly realized the ports affair was a
fiasco. “I know a prairie fire when I see one,” the Texas rancher
told an aide.

Bush is not, and was never, a Texas rancher. He bought the property in 1999 when he was running for president, and he does not raise animals on it (the word ranch means “a large farm for raising horses, beef cattle, or sheep” or some other kind of animal). Mostly, he clears brush for the television cameras. (Has Bush ever actually seen a prairie fire?)

To illustrate how ridiculous this is, let me offer a comparison. Ted Turner owns 14 ranches across the United States and actually raises livestock (bison) to sell for commercial use. Yet no one calls Turner a “rancher.” He’s a media mogul who owns some ranches, just like George W. Bush is a politician who owns a property in Texas.

(Also, note the origins of Bush’s alleged statement: a aide provided it to Time. That means it was strategically chosen at a minimum. Less generously, Bush may never have said it. But who cares if it gives you a juicy-sounding insider quote?)

As predicted, John McCain is starting to realize that his party’s activist base doesn’t like him:

Facing a loss at a 2008 straw poll event this weekend, Senator John McCain of Arizona told his supporters to write in President Bush [?] as a sign of support, leaving many sputtering.

“For the next three years, with our country at war, he’s our president and the only one who needs our support,” McCain told nearly 2,000 party activists from 26 states gathered in Memphis.

McCain, realizing the national political media had descended on the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, moved to discredit the straw poll by asking delegates to vote for Bush, insiders claim.

Instead of stopping the momentum of Majority Leader Bill Frist – widely anticipated to win the straw poll – the move seemed to expose the McCain camp’s insincerity about its position with the base.

One activist said, “McCain voted against all the Bush tax cuts… maybe he should have voted for the president then, instead of waiting for a political stunt to try and distract.”

To win a presidential nomination in the modern (primary) era, you need elite activist support. That’s why McCain is sucking up to the base so desperately. But despite his popularity with the pundit class, it doesn’t seem like the new schtick is working.

My question: when will the futures market adjust? Here’s a chart of the price of the Tradesports contract that pays $10 if McCain wins the GOP nomination, which has been tracking upward since September:

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has published the definitive case against the claim that tax cuts pay for themselves. Here are the key findings from the report:

-Despite recent statements by the President, Vice President, and certain Congressional leaders that tax cuts pay for themselves by stimulating economic growth, revenues over the past three years were a combined $316 billion below the levels that the Administration projected before enactment of the 2003 tax cuts.

-During the current recovery, both revenues and economic growth have been weaker than in the typical post-World War II recovery. Revenues over the economic recovery so far have fallen at an annual rate of 0.6 percent, after adjusting for inflation and population growth. During the average post-World War II recovery, revenues grew at an annual real per-person rate of 2.7 percent.

-Revenues grew much more quickly in the 1990s, when taxes were raised, than in the 1980s, when taxes were cut. Revenues in the current decade, with its tax cuts, are also expected to grow slowly. Based on the Administration’s own projections of revenue growth through the end of the decade, revenues in the current decade will grow at only about one fifth their growth rate in the 1990s.

-Economists from across the political spectrum, including the Administration’s own former chief economist, strongly reject the notion that tax cuts pay for themselves.

I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but Andrew Sullivan seems to be on a crusade (no pun intended) to popularize the term “Christianist.” He’s used it on his blog more than twenty times over the last three years, especially during the last few months.

The goal, it seems, is to draw an analogy with radical Islam. Indeed, Sullivan made this comparison explicit in a June 1, 2003 post coining the term:

I propose a new term for those on the fringes of the religious right who have used the Gospels to perpetuate their own aspirations for power, control and oppression: Christianists. They are as anathema to true Christians as the Islamists are to true Islam. And they have to be fought just as vigilantly.

I went back and took a quick look at the history of the term in mass media usage. The first major newspaper/magazine usage in the US came from Hendrick Hertzberg in the New Yorker in Sept. 2004, who referred to “what might be called the Christianists.” In November of that year, syndicated columnist Ted Rall decried “militant Christianist Republicans.”

In April 2005, Hertzberg again referred to Terri Schiavo’s “Christianist ‘supporters’” in the New Yorker. This time, people started to notice. A National Review Online reader, in a published email to Jay Nordlinger, wrote to inquire out about “the word ‘Christianist,’ which is not one I’ve seen used before. Did Hertzberg coin this himself…? The word is clearly formed on the model of ‘Islamist,’ and is as pretty a piece of moral equivalence as I’ve ever found.” Hertzberg then used the term again in a second column later in the month, calling Tom DeLay a “hard-right Christianist crusader.”

In May 2005, Hertzberg’s repetitions drew the attention of William Safire in the New York Times Magazine and Ruth Walker on the Christian Science Monitor blog (Safire noted Sullivan’s 2003 coinage quoted above).

Since then, Hertzberg has used the term three more times in New Yorker columns and bloggers like Sullivan have also continued to invoke it. Currently, Technorati has 486 hits in a search for the term, while Google Blog Search has more than 300.

The problem, of course, is that the people are using the term “Christianist” to smear the religious right by associating it with the most extreme Muslim fundamentalists. Do extreme Christian fundamentalists exist for whom such comparisons might be appropriate? Yes. But the linguistic function of these labeling terms is to erase the some/all distinction by suggesting that all so-called “Christianists” (basically any socially conservative Christian Republican as Sullivan uses the term) are analogous to radical Islamist fundamentalists. And that’s just wrong.

Update 3/11: Ted Rall emails to point out that his June 8, 2004 column used the term “Christianist.”