Brendan Nyhan

Today Eric Alterman presents “‘How I Spent the Last Six Years,’ A brief list that might easily have been written by George W. Bush,” which includes these charming items under the heading “Regarding Iraq”:

-Killed more than 3,000 Americans.
-Wounded nearly 30,000 Americans.
-Killed and wounded untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

Stay classy, Eric.

Something I just came across in an old post — the Wall Street Journal flogging the impeachment boogeyman back in 2006:

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.

All these predictions are, of course, right on the money.

Like the Wall Street Journal editorial board, I condemned the MoveOn.org ad that called General Petraeus “General Betray Us.” But the WSJ is crying crocodile tears when it bemoans the state of debate in this country:

Can this really be the new standard of political rhetoric across the Democratic Party? There was a time when the party’s institutional elites, such as the Times, would have pulled it back from reducing politics to all or nothing. They would have blown the whistle on such accusations. Now they are leading the charge.

Under these new terms, public policy is no longer subject to debate, discussion and disagreement over competing views and interpretations. Instead, the opposition is reduced to the status of liar. Now the opposition is not merely wrong, but lacks legitimacy and political standing. The goal here is not to debate, but to destroy.

It is indeed wrong to portray your opposition as lacking “legitimacy and political standing” and to try to “destroy” them. I’m sure that the WSJ will therefore join me in condemning these nasty attacks suggesting that war critics and journalists are treasonous:

“Amnesty [International] has given the concept of ‘aid and comfort’ to the enemy an all-too-literal meaning” (here).

The New York Times “has as a major goal not winning the war on terror but obstructing it” (here).

“Bush critics seek war-powers loopholes to benefit terrorists” (here).

“[V]oters won’t want to reward Democrats who sound like they’re cheerleading for America to fail” (here).

Oh, wait…

Shankar Vedantam of the Washington Post wrote a fascinating article last week about psychological research showing that attempts to correct myths can actually end up strengthening them:

The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

…The research also highlights the disturbing reality that once an idea has been implanted in people’s minds, it can be difficult to dislodge. Denials inherently require repeating the bad information, which may be one reason they can paradoxically reinforce it.

Indeed, repetition seems to be a key culprit. Things that are repeated often become more accessible in memory, and one of the brain’s subconscious rules of thumb is that easily recalled things are true.

So what are the implications for fact-checking? My take is that efforts should be targeted at elites to try to stop the spread of myths and misinformation before they become pervasive (as we did at Spinsanity). Once a myth spreads widely, this research suggests it will be extremely difficult to correct.

However, the studies Vendatam discusses typically did not consider myths where people have strong ideological reasons to hold their beliefs. My co-author Jason Reifler sent him our draft paper (PDF) on correcting political misperceptions and he was kind enough to bring it up during an interview on NPR’s On the Media (MP3):

BOB GARFIELD (host): The studies you’re talking about suggest that these effects take place irrespective of the bias of the listener, but there’s another study that suggests that if you are in fact predisposed to have a certain worldview, that misinformation sticks still more. Can you describe it?

VENDATAM: There’s a new study that’s just been completed by Jason Reifler at Georgia State University where he actually looks at questions such as why it is that large numbers of people continue to believe that weapons of mass destruction were present in Iraq before the invasion or even found in Iraq after the invasion. And what Jason and his colleagues did was try and give people the correct information. And what he found, ironically, is that partisans who wanted to believe that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq when told about the correct information ended up believing ever more fervently that they were right and that the correct information was wrong.

GARFIELD: And this would explain, for example, why throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds more than half the population seems to believe the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were the work of [the] US government or Israel.

VENDATAM: I think that’s right. What’s especially disturbing is that the number of people who believe that is actually growing over time. In the study I mentioned, 59% of Turks and Egyptians, 65% of Indonesians, 53% of Jordanians, even 56% of British Muslims do not believe that Arabs were behind the 9/11 attacks. Presenting them with the correct information, which by the way is our government’s strategy of combating myths and disinformation, does not seem to be a very effective approach.

For a classic example of how people can reject information they don’t want to believe, consider that Robert Draper’s Dead Certain reports that President Bush still thought Iraq had WMD before the war as late as 2006 (via TPM):

Though it was not the sort of thing one could say publicly anymore, the president still believed that Saddam had possessed weapons of mass destruction. He repeated this conviction to Andy Card all the way up until Card’s departure in April 2006, almost exactly three years after the Coalition had begun its fruitless search for WMDs.

Having plugged the TNR excerpt from Jon Chait’s The Big Con, I want to recommend the discussion about the book that has started on the TPM Book Club, which currently features excellent contributions from Ross Douthat and Ezra Klein, two of the best young pundits out there. Both of them make important points.

Douthat:

I should start out by saying something nice about Jonathan Chait’s book, so I’ll say this: It’s a book that every conservative should read. It demolishes a theory that too many right-wingers take seriously – namely, the notion that cutting taxes raises government revenue in the short run – and it demonstrates that by embracing this theory the small-government movement has enmeshed itself in contradiction. The contemporary Right simultaneously believes that cutting taxes will shrink government by “starving the beast,” and that cutting taxes will produce more government revenue, not less.

In fact, neither seems to be the case… Too often, as Chait’s analysis makes clear, supply-side theory has been a way for conservatives to downplay the difficult side of their “lower taxes, less government” message – the side that requires, well, actually cutting spending – and pretend that there’s such a thing as a free lunch. There isn’t…

Now I’ll say something rather more negative: The most attention-catching aspect of Chait’s thesis – his argument, restated in his first post, that the best way to understand the contemporary conservative movement is by treating it as a conspiracy to practice class warfare on behalf of the rich – strikes me as little better than name-calling…

There are good points on both sides of this debate, but the point is that it’s a debate… And this is what I find so unfortunate about Chait’s argument: Having zeroed in, justly, on a bogus conservative talking point and torn it to shreds, he feels comfortable glossing over every other argument to his right, all the while imputing the worst of motives to his opponents…

Klein:

Ross is correct that there are more cautious, subtle arguments supporting certain types of tax cuts. But Jon’s laser-like focus on the Supply-Siders serves an actual purpose: Their claims are useful not because they’re empirically true, but because they’re politically attractive. Whatever the beliefs of more thoughtful conservatives, Republicans have, as Chait shows, continually sold these policies based on the idea that they will pay for themselves…

Indeed, I took Jon’s argument as more of an attack on the general lies that are used to sell tax cuts… There may, as Ross says, be smart and nuanced arguments in favor of lower taxes. But that’s not what we’re hearing. We’re not even getting pure supply-siderism. Instead, we’re getting tax cuts in every situation, as the answer to any problem, and at any cost. It’s hard, given the wobbliness and mendacity of these rationales, to not conclude that the point of the cuts is their singular constant: a preference for upward redistribution…

So here’s a possible deal: I will only take issue with the strongest arguments for the tax cuts when they are the ones proponents use… We can have a policy debate or we can have a political argument, and that decision is made by those who start the conversation. And that ain’t Jon.

Cognitive dissonance, anyone?

When you fill out this National Republican Senatorial Committee survey, it takes you to a page asking for donations that features these two talking points:

* Will a Republican Congress working with a Republican President work together to cut wasteful spending and take steps to reduce our country’s debt or will a Democrat Congress and Democrat President spend our way into further debt?

* Will President Bush’s historic tax cuts be made permanent or will Democrats raise our taxes?

Republicans want to reduce the debt and keep the tax cuts. The only way these talking points don’t conflict, of course, is if you believe (falsely) that tax cuts increase revenue. But no one important thinks that!

Mitt Romney is reaching across religious boundaries with a Rosh Hashanah email to Jewish supporters:

As we approach the Jewish New Year, Ann and I wish you and your family a happy and healthy Rosh Hashanah. We hope with this new year that encouraging new strides are made to reach lasting peace and security for all Americans, as well as comfort for Jewish communities around the world…

L’Shanah Tovah Tikatevu,
Mitt

You have to love how he drops the Hebrew — very nice.

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) has posted an “interactive film” titled “Carried Interest Adventure” that appears to have been made with a handhold camcorder by his interns. It’s a bizarre choose-your-own-adventure video opposing a proposed tax increase on hedge fund salaries. Maybe they ran out of copies to make?

John McCain and Joe Lieberman engage in the same bogus rhetoric about Al Qaeda in Iraq as President Bush in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today:

Whatever the shortcomings of our friends in Iraq, they are no excuse for us to retreat from our enemies like al Qaeda and Iran, who pose a mortal threat to our vital national interests. We must understand that today in Iraq we are fighting and defeating the same terrorist network that attacked on 9/11.

In fact, however, Al Qaeda in Iraq is only loosely connected to Al Qaeda, the group that struck us on 9/11, and represents a tiny portion of the Sunni insurgency.

A reader points out that MoveOn.org, which was recently smeared by the pro-war group Freedom’s Watch, is now itself smearing General Petraeus as “General Betray Us” — here’s the ad (see also MoveOn’s documentation):

There are, of course, serious questions about the case Petraeus is going to make before Congress this week, but that’s no excuse for suggesting he’s going to “betray us” — an extremely loaded term to use in the context of a debate over war.