Brendan Nyhan

It’s great to see members of Congress helping with our public diplomacy efforts in the Muslim world (via John Pitney):

New York Rep. Peter King, a prominent House Republican, said there are “too many mosques in this country” in a recent interview with Politico.

“There are too many people sympathetic to radical Islam,” King said. “We should be looking at them more carefully and finding out how we can infiltrate them.”

King is the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee. And as an outspoken advocate of strong anti-terror measures, he has been unafraid to ruffle some feathers in his drive to protect the homeland.

When asked to clarify his statement, King did not revise his answer, saying “I think there has been a lack of full cooperation from too many people in the Muslim community.”

After King claimed his statement had been taken out of context, Politico posted the video (it wasn’t):

Sadly, even King’s comment isn’t as bad as Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) saying that if a nuclear attack on the US was “the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites.”

Shouldn’t the public diplomacy staff in the administration be publicly denouncing these sorts of comments in forums like Al Jazeera? It seems more important than, say, naming Cal Ripken as a public diplomacy envoy.

Believe it or not: the AP has released a piece by Ron Fournier titled “Analysis: Is Edwards Real or a Phony?”

Talk about parroting Republican talking points! Can we expect an equivalent approach to covering the GOP candidates? (“Giuliani: Sane or Crazy?”)

Also, there’s an obvious epistemological problem here — Fournier can’t resolve whether Edwards is “real” or a “phony,” nor can anyone else. And this sort of character-focused coverage diverts attention from issues that Fournier can effectively address such as, well, policy.

Finally, what the hell happened to Ron Fournier? Since returning from the Hotsoup.com boondoggle, the former lead reporter for the AP is now writing terrible op-eds as “analysis.” It’s reminiscent of the record producers who get sick of other people getting the credit and decide they want to be the star.

Update 9/19 8:16 PM: On reflection, the most absurd part of the article might be this passage, which reads like a parody of the “objective” approach to news reporting:

Is the Democratic presidential candidate a man of the people, as he says, or the fake his rivals call him?

It may be that Edwards is not quite either caricature — that the answer, like much in politics, is less black and white than gray, and discerning voters in Iowa and New Hampshire will give Edwards his ultimate gut check.

The truth is always somewhere in the middle, so Edwards must be at least partly phony! That’s what’s so pathological about “he said,” “she said” news coverage. (As Paul Krugman put it, “if President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, ‘Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth.’”) See All the President’s Spin for much more on the problems with focusing on balance in news reporting.

Update 9/20 5:30 PM: CJR’s Liz Cox Barrett has more on Fournier violating his own advice to AP reporters.

Time for some intellectual garbage pickup, as Brad DeLong calls it.

Mark Thoma flags President Bush’s latest claim that tax cuts increase revenue, which he made during an interview with Fox News:

I would also argue that cutting taxes made a significant difference, not only in dealing with a recession and an attack on our country, but it also made a significant difference in dealing with the deficit because the growing economy yielded more tax revenues, which allowed us to shrink the deficit.

Bush and other administration officials have made similar statements over and over since 2001 even though virtually no economists believe such a claim is plausible, including Bush’s own economists. (But remember, Megan McArdle thinks supply-siders are “rather thin on the ground lately”!)

In a related Wall Street Journal op-ed, Dick Cheney credits President Bush’s tax cuts for the fact that the US has “added more than eight million new jobs since August 2003 — more than all other major industrialized nations combined.” The problem, however, is that President Bush passed his first tax cut in 2001. Cheney, like the Bush Treasury Department, is skipping over the decline in jobs from 2001 to 2003.

Finally, TNR’s Jon Chait eviscerates the latest batch of dishonest arguments from tax cut advocates:

[T]he conservative argument fundamentally depends upon denying the 1990s. There is a two-step process here. The first step is deviously brilliant: Insist that undoing the Bush tax cuts would be some radical new left-wing experiment that’s never been tried before in this country. When Hillary Clinton proposed to restore the top tax rate to where it stood before 2001, Lawrence Kudlow fulminated, “This is France before Sarzoky stuff.” Mitt Romney said, “I don’t think that her platform would get her elected president of France, let alone president of this country.” (This was in keeping with the line of attack a Romney strategy document neatly summarized as “Hillary=France.”) Now, you might think that, if any comparison could be drawn from a plan to bring tax rates in the United States back to where they were in the ’90s, it would be to … the United States in the ’90s. But conservatives understand that this would not be sufficiently frightening, so they’ve decided that France is the more apt parallel.

Having successfully severed the ’90s from the administration that presided over them, the second step is to suture those years onto the Republican record. Numerous conservatives, most prominently Kudlow, have begun speaking of the “twenty-five-year Reagan boom.” (Note that conservatives like Kudlow are able to assert this while simultaneously asserting that, if we reinstated the policies that held sway during the most prosperous stretch of that 25-year boom, we would be just like France.)

A related trick is to find ever more statistically creative ways of giving George W. Bush credit for the ’90s. Earlier this year, Republican Senator Judd Gregg asked the Congressional Budget Office to calculate how low-income families with children fared since 1991. Why since 1991? That way it would lump together eight years of low-wage growth with the four years of low-wage decline that followed. Sure enough, the study found those families enjoyed sharply higher income through the ’90s and then have seen their income drop ever since. The Wall Street Journal editorial page seized upon this finding to declare that “the poor have been getting less poor.”

Earlier this summer, visiting American Enterprise Institute scholar Arthur C. Brooks pulled the same trick. He triumphantly noted that poor- and middle-income workers have seen their incomes rise “between 1993 and 2003”–yes, eight of those ten years took place on Clinton’s watch, before incomes for the poor started to drop–then proceeded to flay liberals for being obsessed with inequality. This elementary-level statistical legerdemain was considered so insightful that both City Journal and the Journal editorial page decided to print it. Perhaps those esteemed right-wing publications will also be interested to learn that Barry Bonds and I have combined to hit 762 home runs, which surely qualifies me as the greatest baseball player of all time.

See also my post on a David Brooks column based on the CBO report mentioned above.

A useful Reuters story points out that civility in campaigns may actually be harmful — conflict sharpens choices for voters and helps hold those in power responsible for their actions. Along those lines, it’s good to see that the lame debate among the Democratic candidates may finally be heating up. Voters deserve a choice on issues, not just a referendum on Hillary’s persona.

Last week, Rudy Giuliani attacked Hillary Clinton and MoveOn.org for their criticism of General Petraeus and suggested that such attacks “should not be allowed”:

This is being done purely for political campaign strategy. It’s a calculated political campaign strategy. You should not be allowed to malign someone’s reputation unfairly just because you think it’s good for your campaign.

Here’s the audio (it’s 9:30 into the clip):

Click to play

Now, John McCain has stated that “MoveOn.org ought to be thrown out of this country” for their nasty ad smearing Petraeus as “Betray Us”:

[The MoveOn.org ad] is disgraceful, it’s got to be retracted and condemned by the Democrats and MoveOn.org ought to be thrown out of this country, my friends.

Here’s the video from CBS News:

McCain’s campaign later backtracked on his rhetoric, telling CBS News that McCain “expressed his outrage in words that did not convey his intended meaning. What he meant to say was that MoveOn’s smear of General Petraeus’ character should have no place in the American political debate.” No such retraction has been forthcoming from the Giuliani campaign.

These dual attacks on dissent mirror Giuliani and McCain’s joint conversions in March to the phony supply-side claim that tax cuts increase revenue.

I’ve updated my timeline of GOP attacks on dissent since 9/11, which is below the fold, to include both attacks.

(more…)

TNR’s John B. Judis speculates that “when the Republicans meet in Minneapolis-St. Paul in September 2008 to choose their nominee, they might be looking at a brokered convention.” The reason he thinks this election might be different is the front-loaded primary schedule. But as he acknowledges, “dire prognostications of brokered conventions are made nearly every election” (just like third party speculation) — and they are always wrong. The reason is simple: voters and especially elites tend to align behind the candidate that emerges as the front-runner after early primaries. There’s no reason to think that same dynamic won’t sort out the GOP field. It’ll probably just happen faster than usual.

When I was at Swarthmore College as an undergrad, our football team didn’t win a single game until my senior year — our 28-game losing streak was the longest in the country, and we only broke it by flying in Oberlin, which had the second longest losing streak. (The College canceled the program the next year.) Then I came to Duke in 2003. Since then, the team here has gone 7-41 and was mired in a 22-game losing streak, again the longest in the country, before finally winning at Northwestern last week. The university that hires me next year better hope that the Nyhan curse is over…

In a reversal of his previous reversal, UC-Irvine chancellor Michael V. Drake has hired Duke Law’s Erwin Chemerinsky as the dean of its new law school for the second time:

UC Irvine Chancellor Michael V. Drake and Erwin Chemerinsky have reached an agreement that will return the liberal legal scholar to the dean’s post at the university’s law school, sources told The Times this morning.

With the deal — which is expected to be formally announced by 10:30 a.m. — they hope to end the controversy that erupted when Chemerinsky was dropped as the first dean of the Donald Bren School of Law.

The New York Times story on the nomination of Michael B. Mukasey as Attorney General included this unfair passage regarding conservatives’ reactions to his nomination:

But Mr. Mukasey is not viewed as a political partisan, which has troubled conservatives, many of whom were hoping the president would select Theodore B. Olson, the former solicitor general, as his nominee.

The implication is that conservatives wanted a “political partisan.” That may be true, but supporting Olson over Mukasey is not proof of such a desire. The support for Olson seemed to be founded in large part on his well-known commitment to conservatism. In fact, many conservatives did not support Alberto Gonzales, a political partisan, as a candidate for Attorney General because of his lack of commitment to conservatism.

Meanwhile, Josh Marshall, who previously claimed that Gonzales was “irreplaceable because “the Democratic Senate is never going to give the president another Gonzales,” now writes the following:

If the Bush(Cheney) White House is willing to put Judge Michael Mukasey between them and a clutch of felony indictments I come into the discussion more than a little skeptical of the guy. But Glenn Greenwald notes that as Chief Judge for the Southern District of New York, the very conservative Mukasey repeatedly sided with the rule of law over the Bush White House in the Padilla case. Worth a read.

Note how Marshall’s predispositions are still coloring his reading of the evidence. If the Attorney General really is holding back “a clutch of felony indictments,” wouldn’t Bush have kept Gonzales or at least nominated a more obviously partisan candidate as his replacement?

Update 9/17 11:44 AM: More speculation about a secret deal from Marshall:

Does Michael Mukasey have some kind of deal with the president? As Paul Kiel notes here, Sen. Leahy (D-VT) says that before the Judiciary Committee goes anywhere with Mukasey’s nomination, they want the information and documentation about the US Attorney firings that Alberto Gonzales had kept bottled up for months. Does he comply? Or is this where the fight is going to be?

A New York Times article about the increased stature of USA Today features an exceptionally mundane headline from the old days:

Several former reporters and editors remember a 1983 headline as emblematic: “Men, Women: We’re Still Different.”

Indeed, it could have been a contender against the selections from Michael Kinsley’s 1986 boring headline contest at The New Republic, which included these classics:

Trade, A Two-Way Street
Beyond the News, Larger Issues
University of Rochester Decides to Keep Name
Surprises Unlikely in Indiana
Prevent Burglary by Locking House, Detectives Urge
Debate Goes on Over the Nature of Reality