Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick is the latest Democrat to suggest that opponents of President Obama may be committing sedition:
Patrick said that even "on my worst day, when I’m most frustrated about folks who seem to rooting for failure," he doesn't face anything like the opposition faced by the president.
"It seems like child’s play compared to what is going on in Washington, where it is almost at the level of sedition, it feels to like me,” Patrick said.
Merriam-Webster.com, the dictionary site, defines sedition as "incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority.''
With his sweeping language about "what is going on Washington" as "almost at the level of sedition," Patrick implicitly suggested that Congressional Republicans and their allies were engaging in treasonous behavior by criticizing Obama harshly and opposing his agenda.
Patrick later tried to walk back his statement:
After the forum, Patrick explained his remarks.
“I think that the number of people in the Grand Old Party who seem to be absolutely committed to saying ‘no,' whenever he says ‘yes,’ no matter what it is, even if it’s an idea that they came up with, is just extraordinary,” the governor told reporters after the forum.
Patrick's language particularly echoes Klein, who described a statement by Senator Tom Coburn as "borderline sedition," said some Fox News programming "borders on sedition," and called statements by Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and others "right up close to being seditious."
I've added Patrick's comments to my timeline of attacks on dissent against President Obama.
As I've written before, the Washington Post Style section helped create the snark-filled, mind-reading style of narrative writing that has infected political journalism. One of its stars is Robin Givhan,
who, to take just one example, wrote an entire article about Hillary Clinton's cleavage.
Givhan's latest contribution to American democracy is a 1000+ word analysis of Elena Kagan's clothes and body language. Characteristically, Givhan takes a superficial observation -- the idea that Kagan doesn't cross her legs -- as a pretext for psychologizing about the Supreme Court nominee's preference for comfort (my emphasis):
In the photographs of Kagan sitting and chatting in various Capitol Hill offices, she doesn't appear to ever cross her legs. Her posture stands out because for so many women, when they sit, they cross. People tend to mimic each other's body language during a conversation, especially if they're trying to connect with one another. But even when Kagan sits across from Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who has her legs crossed at the knees, Kagan keeps both feet planted firmly on the ground. Her body language will not be bullied into conformity.
She does not cross her legs at the ankles either, the way so many older women do. Instead, Kagan sits, in her sensible skirts, with her legs slightly apart, hands draped in her lap. The woman and her attire seem utterly at odds. She is intent on being comfortable. No matter what the clothes demand. No matter the camera angle.
The only problem, as Media Matters shows, is that Kagan was repeatedly photographed with her legs crossed during meetings with senators:
It's a great illustration of how little empirical support is needed when writers like Givhan are piecing together their desired narrative. And yes, she won a Pulitzer in 2006. Who needs Woodward and Bernstein anyway?
[T]he Post's own internal stylebook says that "references to personal appearance—blond, diminutive, blue-eyed—should generally be omitted unless clearly relevant to the story." It cautions to "avoid condescension and stereotypes." Yeah, this is a fashion story—we know. But still kinda funny, right?
CJR's Liz Cox Barrett also rounds up pictures of Kagan with her legs crossed.
From my Twitter feed:
-AP's attention to fact-checking is generally laudable, but (a) the popularity of those articles is probably driven by opposing partisans and (b) AP's work (like Factcheck.org and Politifact) often suffers from forcing ambiguous issues into the fact-checking frame
-Video of Gallup event presentation by Temple's Christopher Wlezien on forecasting midterm election outcomes
-Given Rand Paul's belief in the mythical NAFTA superhighway, has anyone asked him about related misperceptions like a global currency, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, etc.?
-Sarah Palin says Rachel Maddow was "prejudiced" in her Rand Paul interview -- a classic example of reversing civil rights jargon
-Politico analysis of primary results: "old structures that protected incumbent power are weakening" -- not implausible, but the change seems to be concentrated in primaries (also, it's not clear that defeat of party-switching Specter is proof of anything)
-Democrats hire framing guru Drew Westen in another misguided effort to use spin to solve structural problems
Third party hype is back! In a Washington Post op-ed, pollster Mark Penn predicts "new movements and even parties that shake up the political system" in the US:
Thursday's elections in Britain could be a harbinger of what is likely to come to America in the not-too-distant future: new movements and even parties that shake up the political system...
Today, about 40 percent of Americans are political nomads, wandering from party to party in search of a permanent home...
There is also a structural problem -- socially liberal and fiscally conservative voters believe, especially after what happened with health care, that they have no clear choice: They must sign on with the religious right or the economic left. It is just a matter of time before they demand their own movement or party.
Similarly, AP writer and third-party hypester Ron Fournier claimed a few weeks ago that Florida governor Charlie Crist's decision to run for the Senate as an independent foreshadows a third party surge:
Charlie Crist's departure from the Republican Party is not just a Florida story; it's an American story — a tale of two parties driven by their ideologues, squeezing out moderate candidates, alienating independent voters and isolating the place in U.S. politics where most things get done: the middle...
Record numbers of people tell pollsters they are independents. The public's approval of both parties is at an all-time low. Will more politicians follow voters out of the major parties?
But as I've argued many times before, third parties and third party candidates are highly unlikely to succeed in the US due to the structure of the American political system. Here's TNR's Jon Chait demolishing Penn's analysis:
What's missing from this explanation is the structure of the political system itself, where the combination of first-past-the-post voting and the electoral college makes third-party campaigns extraordinarily difficult. Under the right conditions, a third-party challenger might have a chance once in a while, but over time the structural forces favoring the two-party system will invariably reassert themselves. This is political science 101 stuff...
[P]ollsters and public opinion experts -- a group that apparently excludes Penn -- understand that independent self-identification largely reflects a desire not to be seen as a closed-minded, automatic vote. It does not, however, reflect actual voting independence. Most self-identified independents are at least as partisan in their voting behavior as self-identified Democrats or Republicans. It's largely a class phenomenon, with wealthier and more educated voters being more likely to call themselves independent, but not more likely to go astray in the voting both. The rise of independent self-identification has little to do with voters moving toward the center or the parties moving toward the extremes.
As such, while third party movements or candidacies may occasionally succeed, the major parties are exceptionally difficult to dislodge in the absence of a major issue (like race) that divides them internally. As such, it's far more likely that the parties will head off any threat, especially as the economy improves. Don't believe the hype.
In a post on National Review's blog The Corner, Jonah Goldberg complains about a double standard in media coverage of partisan misperceptions (suggesting, without any evidence, that liberals think 9/11 conspiracy theorists are "quirky and no big deal"):
"Birtherism" is dangerous and paranoid and "Trutherism" is quirky and no big deal, according to liberals.
Here's theNew York Times on the Truthers (if you can't get through the firewall, here's the Newsbusters synopsis). The Times called them "a society of skeptics and scientists who believe the government was complicit in the terrorist attacks." Skeptics and scientists! No wonder even the Truthers hailed it as favorable coverage.
And here is the latest on the Birthers from last Friday's New York Times. In fairness, the Times doesn't call them racists or dangerous — I guess they leave that to Frank Rich & Co. — but it is quite fed up with them. The piece is all about how the Birthers have become an outright nuisance to state officials in Hawaii. Here's the opening:
HONOLULU — The conspiracy theorists who cling to the false belief that President Obama was born outside the United States outrage many Democrats and embarrass many Republicans. But to a group of Hawaii state workers who toil away in a long building across from the Capitol, they represent something else: a headache and a waste of time.
If only the Times could have been this dismissive of the Truthers. I guess they never created any bureaucratic-paperwork hassles for government officials, so they're okay.
There's no question that the 2006 Times article which Goldberg quotes is irresponsible in its generally respectful treatment of the 9/11 conspiracists. In fairness, though, the author eventually notes that the claims that the WTC was brought down by explosives is "directly contradicted by the 10,000-page investigation by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology" and that "the 9/11 Truthers are dogged, at home and in the office, by friends and family who suspect that they may, in fact, be completely nuts."
In addition, Goldberg is wrong to suggest that the Times was not dismissive of the Truthers. An article published in September 2006 (and easily accessible via Google) is headlined "2 U.S. Reports Seek to Counter Conspiracy Theories About 9/11." It describes the movement's members as "an angry minority" of "an assortment of radio hosts, academics, amateur filmmakers and others" who believe in "a shadowy and sprawling plot" that is "utterly implausible" according to government officials and faces "enormous obstacles to its practicality."
More generally, Goldberg should be ashamed of himself for soft-pedaling birtherism ("the basic allegation isn't that crazy, at least in the abstract") and using the occasion of a Times article that is appropriately critical of birthers to complain about truther coverage from 2006. It's yet another example of the reflexive way in which bias critics spew lazy claims of media double standards. Shouldn't he be more outraged that people are making false accusations about the legitimacy of the president of the United States?
Update 5/17 4:40 PM: See also Jonathan Chait, who notes that the June 2006 NYT article Goldberg criticizes calls truthers "conspiracy buffs" and points out that birthers have received more coverage as a result of "gaining at least soft support" from numerous Republican elected officials (unlike truthers, who were widely shunned by Democratic politicians).
From my Twitter feed:
-Jacob Weisberg is starting to collect "Palinisms" on Slate, but these are likely to have all the same flaws as "Bushisms" and "Kerryisms"
-New Scientist special report on "Living in denial" -- why people resist scientific and factual evidence they don't like
-Outgoing SEIU president Andy Stern compares union dissidents to terrorists -- classy!
-Yet another high-level birther emerges (South Dakota Secretary of State, GOP candidate for Congress)
For those who missed it, the ABC News/Washington Post poll (PDF) released last week included a question about the misperception that President Obama was not born in this country. They found that 20% of Americans think Obama was not born in this country, including 31% of Republicans:
What's striking is that the results are almost identical to the CBS News/New York Times poll released last month, which found that 20% of Americans think Obama was born elsewhere, including 30% of Tea Party supporters:
In short, this myth isn't going away any time soon. For more, see my previous posts on the birther myth and my research with Jason Reifler on the persistence of political misperceptions.
From my Twitter feed:
-Matt Steinglass at The Economist blogs on my misperceptions research, writing that "Nyhan is right" on need to pressure elites to be more responsible, but he is "not optimistic" about strategies for doing so
-Blogger quantifies number and accuracy of rumors about Bush and Obama on Snopes (validity depends on Snopes methods)
-Conservative postmodernism alert -- Washington Examiner columnist answers a factual claim with a poll (for past entries, see here)
-Taegan Goddard at Political Wire suggests Obama's approval ratings with independents have received a "health care bump," but that upturn may be a result of improved economic perceptions (see also Mark Blumenthal). Even if the increase is the result of health care, it's probably less a "bump" than a reduction in bad press that was depressing Obama's approval ratings.
The NYT's Ross Douthat flags a very important article by Kevin Williamson in National Review debunking the myth that tax cuts increase revenue, an article of faith among George W. Bush and other prominent Republicans that even Bush's own economists didn't believe. Williamson describes this point of view as "magical thinking":
What does Representative Gohmert [a Texas Republican] think about taxes? After 9/11, he argues, the United States was headed for a serious recession, even a depression, but tax cuts saved the day — and increased government revenues in the process. “With a tax cut, then another tax cut, we stimulated the economy, and record revenue like never before in American history flowed into the United States Treasury,” he said in a speech before the House. “As it turned out, the tax cuts helped create more revenue for the Treasury, not destroy revenue for the Treasury.” That last bit is fantasy. There is no evidence that the tax cuts on net produced more revenue than the Treasury would have realized without them. That claim could be true — if we were to credit most or all of the economic growth during the period in question to tax cuts, but that is an awfully big claim, one that no serious economist would be likely to entertain. It’s a just-so story, a bedtime fairy tale Republicans tell themselves to shake off fear of the deficit bogeyman. It’s whistling past the fiscal graveyard. But this kind of talk is distressingly unremarkable in Republican political circles.
And such magical thinking is not the exclusive domain of back-benchers from the hinterlands. The exaggeration of supply-side effects — the belief that tax-rate cuts pay for themselves or more than pay for themselves over some measurable period — is more an article of faith than an economic fact. But it’s a widespread faith: George W. Bush argued that tax cuts would serve to increase tax revenues. So did John McCain. Rush Limbaugh talks this way. Even Steve Forbes has stepped into this rhetorical stinker from time to time....
It is true that tax cuts can promote growth, and that the growth they promote can help generate tax revenue that offsets some of the losses from the cuts. When the Reagan tax cuts were being designed, the original supply-side crew thought that subsequent growth might offset 30 percent of the revenue losses. That’s on the high side of the current consensus, but it’s not preposterous. There is, however, a world of difference between tax cuts that only lose only 70 cents on the dollar and tax cuts that pay back 100 cents on the dollar and then some.
There is considerable debate among economists and federal legume-quantifiers about how large supply-side revenue effects are. The Congressional Budget Office did a study in 2005 of the effects of a theoretical 10 percent cut in income-tax rates. It ran a couple of different versions of the study, under different sets of economic assumptions. The conclusion the CBO came to was that the growth effects of such a tax cut could be expected to offset between 1 percent and 22 percent of the revenue loss in the first five years. In the second five years, the CBO calculated, feedback effects of tax-rate reductions might actually add 5 percent to the revenue loss — or offset as much as 32 percent of it. That’s a big deal, and something that conservative budget engineers should keep in mind. But the question of whether the CBO accounts for tax cuts at 100 cents on the dollar, 99 cents on the dollar, or 68 cents on the dollar is hardly the stuff that a broad-based political movement is going to put at the center of its campaigns.
Read the whole article for more, including an extended critique of the specific claim that recent capital gains tax cuts increased revenue. Williamson and National Review deserve credit for publishing this important article -- let's hope it has wide influence within the movement.
[Note: Williamson does make one significant mistake. In this statement, he wrongly suggests federal spending almost doubled under Reagan using figures that are not adjusted for inflation: "In 1980 federal spending was $590 billion and in 1989 it was $1.14 trillion." However, using constant (FY 2000) dollars, spending actually rose from $1.175 trillion to $1.499 trillion between 1980 and 1989 -- a more modest increase of 28%. Outlays were also flat as a percentage of GDP during this period (21.7% in 1980, 21.2% in 1989). See Tables 1.2 and 1.3 in the historical tables from the President's budget.]
For those who are interested, I did an in-depth interview about political misperceptions with Robert Pollie of The 7th Avenue Project (KUSP Santa Cruz) that aired on Sunday. It's now available online as a podcast or via this Flash player:
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
[D]espite protests against Arizona’s stringent new immigration enforcement law, a majority of Americans support it, even though they say it may lead to racial profiling...
[T]the respondents broadly agreed that the Arizona law would result in racial profiling...
However, as a reader noted, the poll question featured in a sidebar to the article doesn't ask about racial profiling, which is typically defined as targeting individuals solely based on their racial or ethnic background. Instead, CBS and the Times asked the following:
How likely do you think it is that the new law in Arizona will lead to police officers detaining people of certain racial or ethnic groups more frequently than other racial or ethnic groups? Do you think that is very likely to happen, somewhat likely, not too likely or not at all likely to happen?
Given the composition of the illegal immigrant population, Latinos will almost certainly be detained more frequently than other racial or ethnic groups under any enforcement regime in Arizona or any other state (particularly in comparison with their representation in the population). The relevant policy issue is whether the Arizona law will lead to detentions of Latinos based solely on their ethnic background. The Times article vaguely notes that "the Arizona Legislature and Gov. Jan Brewer made changes to the law on Friday that they say explicitly ban the police from racial profiling," but doesn't specify that the changes bar consideration of race or ethnicity in enforcement "except to the extent permitted by the United States or Arizona Constitution" by removing the word "solely" from the following provision:
A law enforcement official or agency of this state or a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state may not solely consider race, color or national origin in implementing the requirements of this subsection except to the extent permitted by the United States or Arizona Constitution.
The poll question should have asked if people believe that this provision will be upheld in practice -- that's the question in dispute right now.
Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit busts Klein for his repeated use of "sedition" rhetoric against conservative critics of the Obama administration, as in this clip from the Chris Matthews Show a couple of weeks ago:
MATTHEWS: Well, making your point, we just watched Sarah Palin
and she said un-American ["All of this makes us more beholden to foreign countries. It makes us less secure. It makes us less free. And I'm not calling anyone un-American, but the unintended consequences of these actions, the results are un-American."]. Now, she said it was just his policies, not him, but those words are license words. They're permission words, you know?
KLEIN: I did a little bit of research just before the show on this little napkin here and I looked at the definition of "sedition," which is conduct or language inciting rebellion against authority of the state. And a lot of these statements -- especially the ones coming from people like Glenn Beck and to a certain extent Sarah Palin -- were right next -- right up close to being seditious.
Klein subsequently defended this statement in a post on Time's Swampland blog:
On the Chris Mathews Show Sunday, I said that some of the right-wing infotainment gasbags--people like Glenn Beck etc.--were nudging up close to the edge of sedition. This has caused a bit of a self-righteous ruckus on the right. Let me be clear: dissent isn't sedition. Questioning an Administration's policies isn't sedition. But questioning an Administration's legitimacy in a manner intended to undermine or overthrow it certainly is. A rally like this yesterday in South Carolina is a good example of seditious speech. It's not illegal--unless actions are taken to overthrow the government in question--but it is disgraceful and the precise opposite of patriotism in a democracy.
Note the sleight of hand in Klein's language. He fails to specify what specific statements constitute sedition on the part of mainstream figures like Beck or Palin, but suggests that statements "questioning an Administration's legitimacy in a manner intended to undermine or overthrow it certainly is." The problem is that "undermin[ing]" an administration is precisely what the opposition does in a democracy. Some conservatives have made baseless and inflammatory attacks on the Obama administration's legitimacy (for instance, the birthers), but Klein's statement sweeps in a range of more innocuous criticisms as potentially seditious.
In December, Klein made a similar charge against Senator Tom Coburn, calling a statement by Coburn "borderline sedition" (via Verum Serum):
Senator Tom Coburn from Oklahoma--who, with James Inhofe, constitute the most extreme Senate delegation from any state--prayed for the incapacitation or death of a Democratic Senator so that health care would be blocked. But that wasn't all. He also offered this:
"The crisis of confidence in this country is now at an apex that has not seen in over 150 years, and that lack of confidence undermines the ability of legitimate governance," he said. "There's a lot of people out there today who...will say, 'I give up on my government,' and rightly so."
This is borderline sedition. Coburn--who had a friendly relationship with Senator Barack Obama--is saying that giving up on the U.S. government is justified. This helps stoke the hatred of those extremists who see Barack Obama's presidency as illegitimate. It also comes dangerously close to incitement to violence. It certainly deletes Coburn from the list of those who can be considered loyal to the most important American ideals. He should clarify what he means by these statements--and apologize for his hate speech, immediately.
And as I previously noted, Klein also suggested some Fox News programming "borders on sedition" back in October:
Let me be precise here: Fox News peddles a fair amount of hateful crap. Some of it borders on sedition. Much of it is flat out untrue.
With these statements, Klein joins Salon's Joan Walsh, Obama counterterrorism official John Brennan (here and here), New York Times columnist Frank Rich, and Fox News host Geraldo Rivera in equating harsh criticism of the Obama administration with treason -- an almost precise inversion of the pattern under the Bush administration after 9/11. I would not defend many of the statements made by Beck, Palin, or Coburn or the coverage offered by Fox -- indeed, I've frequently criticized each of them -- but sedition is a term that must be reserved for direct efforts to foment an insurrection against the government of this country. Using it as a blanket description of harsh or misleading attacks on the Obama administration is an anti-democratic tactic that threatens to suppress and stigmatize dissent.
What's sad about this is that Klein wrote very harsh things about the Bush administration -- the sort of statements that were repeatedly described as seditious in the post-9/11 period. Indeed, were the situation reversed, Klein's 2007 statement that "it is increasingly difficult to imagine yet another two years of slow bleed with a leader so clearly unfit to lead" might meet his own definition of sedition ("questioning an Administration's legitimacy in a manner intended to undermine... it").
In fact, Klein even praised Montana governor Brian Schweitzer a couple of years ago for pardoning state residents who were prosecuted for sedition during World War I:
[A]fter the Montana state legislature passed the resolution opposing the Patriot Act, Governor Schweitzer decided to put some icing on the cake by pardoning 78 Montanans who had been convicted of sedition during World War I--a far more egregious case of the government trampling civil liberties than the Patriot Act is. "Most of them were German immigrants," Schweitzer told me. "Some of them were arrested for speaking German in public, others for refusing to buy war bonds. We had a big ceremony, and family members from 31 states came to honor their ancestors. It got pretty emotional."
To be clear, Klein hasn't advocated prosecution of any of the public figures he's suggested have committed sedition. But shouldn't he be more aware of the silencing effects that such rhetoric can have?
(Note: I've added Klein's statements to my timeline of attacks on dissent against President Obama.)
