Brendan Nyhan

My weekly political science department basketball game is in the news:

A central figure behind President Bush’s new victory-in-Iraq strategy is a charismatic conservative sprung from Duke University’s left-leaning political science department.

Peter D. Feaver, 43, is open-minded but a tough debate foe, his colleagues say. Students pack his classes. His international policy lectures earned him the university’s top teaching award four years ago.

Then, there’s the man on the basketball court: a pickup player who doesn’t pass, questions every out-of-bounds call and happily hurls up bricks that clang off the rim.

“He’s a darn gunner,” said Michael Munger, chairman of Duke’s political science department and Feaver’s occasional teammate.

Munger could just as well be describing the political scientist’s approach to his work.

To elaborate, Feaver works for the National Security Council and is using his research into the factors determining popular support for wars to help shape the White House’s PR strategy. Apparently, he’s now pretty famous. Why else would reporters care about Feaver basketball stories? Another sign that he matters: the looney lefties are after him. My prediction is that Feaver going to succeed Paul Wolfowitz as the person in the administration who leftists think is an evil puppetmaster. Let me assure you, however, that he’s a very nice guy. As for his research, I haven’t read enough of it to comment.

(In case anyone cares, I also took a class from Feaver’s co-author, Chris Gelpi, and his other co-author on the research in question, Jason Reifler, is a former fellow graduate student who I’m currently collaborating with on other research.)

Slate’s John Dickerson exposes two misleading quotations in the RNC’s demagogic “white flag” web video:

It goes almost without saying that some of the quotes from Democrats are taken out of context in a way that completely distorts their meanings. In the statement excerpted in the video, Kerry was not accusing U.S. soldiers of war crimes in Iraq. He was saying local police and military — not American forces — should be doing the difficult work of going into Iraqi homes in the dead of night, which is also the president’s wish. This is the sentence Kerry uttered after the one the RNC uses: “Whether you like it or not, Iraqis should be doing that.” Kerry likes to make his own selective criticisms of the president, but this libel is especially vicious in light of the insinuations that Kerry made unjustified accusations about American atrocities in Vietnam.

The video’s treatment of Barbara Boxer is just bizarre. “So there’s no specific time frame,” they quote her as saying, “but I would say the withdrawal ought to start now, right after the elections December 15th.” The liberal California senator has surely said something more incendiary somewhere, but that quote is simply stating administration policy. Here’s what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said two weeks before Boxer’s remarks, when he answered a question on Face the Nation about whether troops would withdraw: “No question. I mean, we went up for the referendum in October 15th and we went from 138,000 to 160,000. We’re now at 159,000. We’re going to stay that size roughly through the December 15th election. We’re clearly going to go back down to 138,000 after the election.”

Dickerson also exposes a shot in the ad showing a soldier watching the Democratic soundbites as manipulated stock footage of a soldier watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas! Here’s a picture of the original:

As Dan Froomkin noted a couple of weeks ago, President Bush has spoken exclusively to heavily screened audiences for months, and almost never answers questions from other citizens.

So the news that he took questions yesterday after his speech to the World Affairs Council about Iraq was somewhat shocking — I shared the audience’s reaction to Bush’s joke, as recorded in the official White House transcript of the event:

I thought I might answer some questions. (Laughter.)

Unfortunately, Bush generally received easy questions and stuck to his talking points, so nothing really happened, though this exchange was noteworthy:

Q I would like to know why you and others in your administration invoke
9/11 as justification for the invasion of Iraq —

THE PRESIDENT: Yes —

Q — when no respected journalists or other Middle Eastern experts
confirm that such a link existed.

THE PRESIDENT: I appreciate that. 9/11 changed my look on foreign policy.
I mean, it said that oceans no longer protect us, that we can’t take
threats for granted; that if we see a threat, we’ve got to deal with it.
It doesn’t have to be militarily, necessarily, but we got to deal with it.
We can’t — can’t just hope for the best anymore.

And so the first decision I made, as you know, was to — was to deal with
the Taliban in Afghanistan because they were harboring terrorists. This is
where the terrorists planned and plotted. And the second decision, —
which was a very difficult decision for me, by the way, and it’s one that I
— I didn’t take lightly — was that Saddam Hussein was a threat. He is a
declared enemy of the United States; he had used weapons of mass
destruction; the entire world thought he had weapons of mass destruction.
The United Nations had declared in more than 10 — I can’t remember the
exact number of resolutions — that disclose, or disarm, or face serious
consequences. I mean, there was a serious international effort to say to
Saddam Hussein, you’re a threat. And the 9/11 attacks extenuated that
threat, as far as I — concerned.

And so we gave Saddam Hussein the chance to disclose or disarm, and he
refused. And I made a tough decision. And knowing what I know today, I’d
make the decision again. Removing Saddam Hussein makes this world a better
place and America a safer country.

This, again, is unintentionally funny. “Extenuate” is the wrong word — it means “to lessen the strength or effect of.” Bush apparently meant “exacerbate.”

More generally, Bush uses standard doubletalk avoid engaging the question, while adding a vague reaffirmation of the 9/11 linkage. His answer begs the question, however: why did 9/11 exacerbate the threat from Saddam Hussein? If anything, it made the likelihood of US retaliation for any potential attack all the more certain. (For many examples of the administration’s misleading claims linking 9/11, Al Qaeda and Iraq, see All the President’s Spin.)

Yesterday, the anti-Bush “World Can’t Wait” group ran an ad in the New York Times with the usual list of lefty petition signers. But one stood out: Wavy Gravy. Amused by the idea that I would care what Wavy Gravy thinks, I went to the group’s website and found this drivel:

Your government is moving each day closer to a theocracy, where a narrow and hateful brand of Christian fundamentalism will rule…

People look at all this and think of Hitler — and they are right to
do so. The Bush regime is setting out to radically remake society very
quickly, in a fascist way, and for generations to come. We must act
now; the future is in the balance.

“People look at all this and think of Hitler — and they are right to
do so.” Um, I think Wavy Gravy et al have lost their minds. There is no debate about whether the Bush administration is comparable to Hitler. None. It’s both factually inaccurate and insanely inflammatory.

For those of you are wondering, the group’s goal is to hold a huge protest on November 2 that will somehow force Bush to resign by creating “society-wide resistance.” Sure.

In case you still aren’t sure these people are crackpots, the top post on the “World Can’t Wait” blog suggests Samuel Alito might be a “Nazi”:

Alito:The Masking of a Conservative or The Showboating of a Nazi?

Who is Alito and why does the outcome of his nomination have repercussions for decades to come? Hear fascists and religious fanatics declare support for Alito in their own words. Check out leaders of the Democratic Party telling us to seek common ground with Christian Fascists in their own words. Click below for why and how we must resist this nomination as part of a major step towards a fascist theocracy.

And the organization’s FAQ includes a detailed argument that we’re on a “fascist trajectory”:

Q: I just don’t know. There’s too much tradition in this country, too many good people, too many safeguards, for fascism to get established. I just think that it can’t happen here.

A: I wonder what the good German people in 1932 thought about fascism, and then I look at what it meant to be a good German by 1935. A good German in 1935 kept his mouth shut and didn’t dare say a word against the Nazi Regime. They closed their eyes as Jews, Communists, and homosexuals where dragged of to concentration camps. Are we there yet? No, but we’re moving in that direction quickly and quietly. What has changed over the past five years that indicates a fascist trajectory?

• We have a president that was selected rather than elected.
• We are aggressively waging war on a country based on lies.
• We are ignoring international laws and torturing people who may be guilty of nothing more than defending themselves.
• The president select has given himself the right to detain anyone, on the merest suspicion, with no right to due process.
• The president select uses medieval religious fundamentalism to determine policies on birth control, abortion, and basic rights of gays and lesbians.
• A mouthpiece of Bush, David Horowitz, has spies in Universities across the country shutting down progressive teaching in the classrooms.
• A mouthpiece of Bush, William Bennett, makes racist public statements that “crime would decrease if we aborted all black babies” and Bush only stated that the comment was “inappropriate.”
• Replacing a day of rescue after Katrina with a day of prayer, as the military hijacked all the rescue buses to “secure the territory.”
• Replacing AIDS education and condoms with prayer and abstanence only programs which is nothing less than genocide.

This is clearly a new direction and it’s moving quickly. Hitler’s fascism was based on nationalism and “racial purity” Bush’s fascism is based on biblical law and obedience. Even Catherine Crier, a former republican Judge in Texas, states in her book exposing the religious elements in government, “Be afraid, be very afraid.” Theocrats are infiltrating some of the highest positions in government, generally through appointments made by Bush. Those in positions of power that aren’t theocrats are doing nothing to stop this trajectory.

(Note: Bennett actually said 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” before denouncing the idea as offensive. The WCW just made up another quote.)

And, of course, the Communists are a part of WCW – it’s all too predictable:

Q: But aren’t there communists in World Can’t Wait?

A: Yeah, there are. Supporters of the Revolutionary Communist Party
helped initiate it. They’re in it because they think it’s absolutely
urgent to get rid of this regime, that it would both lift a huge burden
from the world and would also give people a sense of their own
potential power, and they think all that would open up avenues to get
to the society they want. Same as a whole lot of other people in World
Can’t Wait — which, by the way, includes Greens, Christians,
Republicans, anarchists, Muslims, Jews, feminists, Democrats,
pacifists, and people who claim no affiliation — who also think it’s
urgent to drive out the Bush Regime and who also think it can help lead
to bigger changes that they want in society, coming from their own
viewpoints.

What a joke.

Matthew Yglesias makes an important point on Tapped:

I read Newsweek’s story on Bush in a bubble with interest, and so should you. The basic storyline is something we’ve read before at occasional rough spots for the president, but this article adds some new details. To me, though, the most interesting thing is that this is also a storyline we’ve heard at the high points of the Bush years. Except when Bush is riding high, the stories don’t talk about a “bubble”; they talk about “decisive leadership,” “moral clarity” and so forth.

That’s ultimately why I don’t think these stories should be taken too seriously. In essence, they reflect top-tier political reporters’ aversion to writing or thinking about policy. Each president has his own personality and management style that, especially with the help of a little exaggeration, can be turned into a vivid explanation of why the president is so great or why he’s so terrible. When he was popular, Bush’s idiosyncrasies were a positive factor, and now that he’s unpopular, they’re seen as negative. At the end of the day, though, to understand what’s wrong with the White House you need to understand the policies the White House is pursuing — they’re bad ones, characterized by a commitment to an unrealistic vision of the Middle East and an economic policy driven entirely by the economic interests of the Republican Party’s major donors. Chit-chatting with a wider circle of people wouldn’t change that, especially since the vast majority of conservatives don’t seem to have a real problem with either of those things. (my bold)

This is the same phenomenon that led to reporters explaining the 2004 election as reflecting John Kerry’s lack of authenticity rather than more systematic factors such as a post-9/11 effect in which voters prioritized the war on terror. Like the Marxists who tried to use class to explain everything, reporters will gamely seek to explain almost any political outcome as resulting from politicians’ personalities, the one subject on which they are unquestioned experts and cannot be proven wrong.

On Wednesday, I denounced a New York Post editorial which attacked Howard Dean for saying “The idea that we’re going to win this war is an idea that unfortunately is just plain wrong.” The Post editorial not only got Dean’s quote wrong by omitting the exculpatory word “unfortunately” (as Michael Koplow pointed out in a comment on the post), but engaged in one of the most vicious attacks on dissent since 9/11, directly accusing Dean of seeking to aid terrorists and rooting for America’s defeat in Iraq:

Not all the surrender monkeys live in France.

Take Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean — the sedition-mongering former governor of Vermont who once presumed to the presidency and who now is working overtime for a terrorist victory in Iraq.

…”[The] idea that we’re going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong,” he said Monday. “Bring the 80,000 National Guard and Reserve troops home immediately. They don’t belong in a conflict like this anyway.”

Dean doesn’t know what he’s talking about, on several levels.

The National Guard and Reserves have been an integral part of the Army’s “total force” for a generation — there’s no bringing them home without collapsing the entire effort in Iraq.

Such an outcome, of course, would be much to Dr. Dean’s liking — because, again, it “is just plain wrong” to think “we’re going to win the war in Iraq.”

…For what Dean did was send an unambiguous message of encouragement to America’s mortal enemies both in Iraq and elsewhere around the world.

Hang tough, Dean was telling al Qaeda: You may not be able to defeat the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, but we’re doing your work for you right here at home.

Yesterday, the Post went even further in a second editorial, which directly accused Dean of “sedition”:

Who are you going to believe: Howard Dean or your own ears?

Dean, the chairman of the Demo cratic National Committee, is backpedaling from the incendiary assertion he made Monday: “The idea we’re going to win this war [in Iraq] is an idea that unfortunately is just plain wrong.”

The comments have sent Democrats fleeing, and have provided grist for a new GOP ad showing footage of Dean, Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry (all calling for some version of retreat) with a white flag waving in front of them and urging that, “Retreat and defeat is not an option.”

So now Dean’s claiming he was misunderstood.

Dean’s meaning seemed plain enough: Hang in there, terrorists! Time’s on your side — the Democrats are seeing to that.

It concludes:

All of this would be comical — if it wasn’t encouraging the enemy.

There’s an ugly word for that.

Sedition.

This is not idle rhetoric — it is quite literally an accusation that Dean has committed treason against the United States. Merriam-Webster Online defines “sedition” as “incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority.”

In the long series of attacks on dissent since Sept. 11, the Post joins the New York Sun (which advocated treason prosecutions of protestors against war with Iraq) in a loathsome group: news organizations that have directly attacked Americans’ free speech rights.

These are ugly times.

Today, the NYT’s Edmund Andrews further devastates the Treasury Department’s junk chart claiming President Bush’s tax cuts stimulated impressive job growth, which I debunked last week:

THE Bush administration has begun an aggressive campaign to reassure Americans that the economy is doing well. It is highlighting the jobs numbers, which have shown steady gains since hitting a low in May 2003.

The chart shown with this article is part of that campaign. Released by the Treasury Department after the November employment report, the Treasury public relations office said that the chart “illustrates the strong job growth and falling unemployment rate since the president’s economic policies have come into effect.”

It added that “the American economy has created 4.4 million new jobs and the unemployment rate has fallen to 5.0 percent – well below the historical average – since the president signed the jobs and growth bill into law in May of 2003″…

By invoking historical averages, President Bush may have invited comparisons that do not make the recovery look so good. In terms of job creation, the recovery from the 2001 recession has been one of the slowest since World War II.

Four years after the recession ended, the unemployment rate is 5 percent, which is lower than at a similar point after all but one previous recession. But the decline has been slower than in most recoveries, and the rate remains well above the 4.2 percent rate in January 2001, when Mr. Bush took office.

In terms of economic growth, this recovery ranks eighth for the four-year period after the official end of a recession, as measured by the National Bureau of Economic Research. It is just better than the period after the previous recession, under the first President Bush, ended in 1991, and considerably better than the period after the first recession in the Eisenhower administration. Then, a new recession began three years and three months after the first one ended.

The recovery that began in 1991 became the longest period of uninterrupted economic growth in American history, an indication that there is nothing wrong with a slow start. But the current recovery so far is far from impressive.

Consider jobs, the focus of the Treasury chart. A unique aspect is that the job count continued to fall for 18 months after the 2001 recession ended. The number of jobs in November was up 3.4 percent from the job low 30 months earlier.

That measurement, which is the way the Bush administration chose to look at the data, ranks eighth among the 10 postwar recessions, a fraction ahead of the recovery after the 1990-91 recession, and better than the period after the recession that ended in July 1980, when another recession followed a year later.

Were job growth instead to be measured from the end of the recession, this recovery is the slowest ever, with the job count up 2.6 percent in four years. The previous low was a 4 percent gain in the four years after the 1953-54 downturn.

Any analysis of the recovery after the 2001 recession must ask why huge tax cuts that began in 2001 had so little – and so long delayed – effect. That is not a discussion the Bush administration embarked upon this week.

For more, click here to see the useful graphic that accompanies the story (it’s too large to display here). Yes, this is one of the weakest recoveries since World War, but you wouldn’t know it from reading the conservative press. The number of hits on the phrase “Bush boom” on nationalreview.com? Thousands.

Via fellow grad student Jacob Montgomery, this Durham Herald-Sun story takes “dog bites man” stories to a whole new level:

Rabid beaver chases couple

BY ROB SHAPARD : The Herald-Sun
[email protected]
Dec 7, 2005 : 9:36 pm ET

CHAPEL HILL — A local couple got a little closer to nature than they wanted when a beaver that turned out to have rabies went after them at Umstead Park in Chapel Hill.

It’s the 22nd confirmed case of rabies among animals in Orange County for the year. But it’s the first rabid beaver. And state veterinarian Carl Williams said it was the first positive rabies test for a beaver in North Carolina since early 2002.

Michelle Oliver said she was crossing Bolin Creek at the popular park off Umstead Drive Sunday when her husband shouted to her from several yards away that a beaver was in the creek. The beaver came toward her, and she gave him a little fake, but the beaver didn’t go for it and kept coming, Oliver said Wednesday.

With a burst of speed she didn’t know she had, Oliver bolted out of the creek bed, with the beaver in pursuit.

Her husband, Billy, then grabbed a large stick, climbed on top of a picnic table near the creek and tried to keep the beaver occupied.

The beaver was hissing at her husband and biting the stick, Oliver said.

Today, Mickey Kaus asks, “Is antiwar sentiment in the Democratic primaries going to be so great that maybe Hillary would be well-advised to run for president as an independent?”

Answer: No. It’s almost impossible for independents to win the presidency.

Not long ago, I tried to explain this to Kaus when he hyped a McCain independent candidacy. The forces of party loyalty, strategic voting, and the role the House of Representatives in resolving an Electoral College deadlock mean that major party nominees will win the presidency in almost every conceivable circumstance. And that’s why McCain is running around praising Trent Lott and endorsing George Wallace, Jr., rather than positioning himself to run as an independent. No matter how difficult the party primaries may be, they’re the only viable route to the presidency.

Via Brad DeLong, Reason’s Jacob Sullum shares Robert Bork’s horrifying definition of censorship as freedom (reminder: this man was almost a member of the Supreme Court):

The December 19 issue of National Review, marking the magazine’s 50th anniversary, includes a feature in which 10 people offer suggestions on “How to Increase Liberty in America,” to which I contributed a few paragraphs about ending the war on drugs. Sandwiched between Clint Bolick on school choice and Ward Connerly on colorblindness is Robert Bork on censorship. Just to be clear: He is for it.

“Liberty in America can be enhanced by reinstating, legislatively, restraints upon the direction of our culture and morality,” writes the former appeals court judge, now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “Censorship as an enhancement of liberty may seem paradoxical. Yet it should be obvious, to all but dogmatic First Amendment absolutists, that people forced to live in an increasingly brutalized culture are, in a very real sense, not wholly free.” Bork goes on to complain that “relations between the sexes are debased by pornography”; that “large parts of television are unwatchable”; that “motion pictures rely upon sex, gore, and pyrotechnics for the edification of the target audience of 14-year-olds”; and that “popular music hardly deserves the name of music.”

Treating speech as a kind of assault and redefining freedom so that it requires its opposite are familiar tricks of the left that National Review usually is quick to mock. How are they any more respectable when deployed by a man who has elevated fuddy-duddyness to a political principle?