Brendan Nyhan

My friend and former Spinsanity co-editor Ben Fritz, who reports for Variety, has a great story about a press conference gone wrong on his personal blog:

This morning I’m at a press conference about a new anti-piracy study and task force featuring L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and various other government and business officials. As at most events decrying the evils of piracy, there’s a wide array of pirated goods seized by law enforcement on display such as bootleg DVDs and CDs, counterfeit purses, shoes, watches, etc. They’re out there for the cameras because, hey, the evening news needs a good visual.

The event was held right outside of Staples Center, which, for those of you not familiar with L.A. geography, is a big pedestrian area in the middle of downtown. So the Mayor or somebody else is talking about how awful piracy is, how it harms the Los Angeles economy and costs jobs and tax revenue, etc., etc., when I see a group of about a dozen tourists walk by. They’re definitely Asian, probably Japanese.

They look at the goings-on for a minute, clearly unsure what’s happening. Then they walk up to the counterfeit goods on the tables and start perusing… like they’re SHOPPING. I seem to be the only one noticing this because everyone else’s eyes are on the speakers in the press conference. The Japanese tourists look around, clearly expecting that somebody is going to tell them what the beautiful fake Chanel purse, or the DVD of “Norbit,” costs. After a couple of minutes, they realize nobody is going to help them, and they walk away, obviously thinking that this is a poorly run counterfeit merchandise store.

Brilliant.

Editor & Publisher reports that the Washington Times finally corrected the bogus quote Frank Gaffney attributed to Abraham Lincoln:

More than two days after an inflammatory quote used by a regular Washington Times columnist was shown to be fabricated — it was attributed to Abraham Lincoln, no less — the newspaper still had not removed it from the article, nor carried a correction. Finally, on Friday fternoon, it pulled the entire Frank Gaffney, Jr. column.

Then, on Saturday, it ran this correction: “Frank Gaffney’s column in the Tuesday Commentary pages of The Washington Times included a quote erroneously attributed to Abraham Lincoln.”

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan is asserting that Rep. Don Young repeated the phony quote knowing it was false, a charge for which we have no evidence:

It says everything you need to know about the state of the Republican Party: that they would knowingly lie about the words of the greatest Republican president in American history.

Sullivan’s claim appears to be based on this post that he linked to from TPM’s Greg Sargent, who asked (again without evidence) whether Young knew the quote was bogus:

Given that the discrediting of this quote has been all over the internet for over six months, we have to ask: Did Rep. Young know that the quote was bogus, but recycle it anyway? We’ll never know. He certainly seemed to think what he was saying was very profound.

Does anyone think Don Young reads Factcheck.org? I don’t know why we would assume he knew the quote was phony. I co-edited Spinsanity for four years and follow politics very closely, and I had never heard of it before.

Finally, it’s worth noting the bizarre creation story of the myth. The writer J. Michael Waller sent an email to Factcheck.org that tells you all you need to know about the kind of journalism practiced by the now-defunct Insight magazine:

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to correct this important issue. The supposed quote in question is not a quote at all, and I never intended it to be construed as one. It was my lead sentence in the article that a copy editor mistakenly turned into a quote by incorrectly inserting quotation marks.

Additionally, I filed my story with the lead sentence ending in the words “Civil War,” which my southern editor switched to “War Between the States.”

Oddly, you are the first to question me about this. I’m surprised it has been repeated as often as you say. My editors at the time didn’t think it was necessary to run a correction in the following issue of the magazine, and to my knowledge we received no public comment. The magazine is no longer being published.

Factcheck.org continues:

We followed up by contacting Insight’s former managing editor Scott Stanley. He denied putting quote marks in Waller’s copy, but said such a thing might have been done by one of six “formatting editors” at the publication, who sometimes “took liberties” with the copy. “I know Waller well enough to know that if Waller said it, he did,” Stanley said. He said Waller might have put the phrase in italics, and that a formatting editor might have changed it to a direct quote by mistake, following an Insight policy of not opening a story with italicized quotes. “My guess is that somewhere along the line, somebody played with it thinking they were doing the right thing,” Stanley said.

Disclosure: I used to blog with Greg Sargent at The American Prospect’s Horse’s Mouth blog before resigning in protest.

Correction 2/17 9:19 PM: Greg Sargent did not directly “speculate” that Don Young knew the Lincoln quote was bogus, as this post previously stated. Apologies for the error, which is corrected above.

If you haven’t heard Rep. Todd Akin’s bizarre statement opposing the Democratic anti-“surge” resolution yet, well, you need to go watch it.

Here’s the quote:

Could you picture Davy Crockett at the Alamo looking at his Blackberry getting a message from Congress? “Davy Crockett, we support you. The only thing is we are not going to send any troops.” I’m sure that would really be impressive to Davy Crockett.

As Jon Stewart put it:

If Congress hadn’t supported Davy Crockett at the Alamo, my god, who knows what would have happened there. Maybe everyone would have been killed twice. Actually, I have to think if Davy Crockett had received a message on his Blackberry from anybody, it would have been very impressive.

A Think Progress commenter also notes that the Alamo took place in 1836, a time when Texas wasn’t part of the United States (it was annexed by the United States in 1845). Has Akin been taking history lessons from Don Young?

TPM’s Greg Sargent points out that Rep. Don Young (R-AK) repeated the phony anti-dissent quote falsely attributed to Abraham Lincoln on the House floor yesterday — here’s the video:

Yes, it’s the same quote Frank Gaffney cited in his Washington Times column Tuesday, which suggested that dissent should be a “hanging offense.”

In a laudable debunking of the Lincoln myth today, the Washington Post reports that Young drew the quote from Gaffney’s column:

During floor debate on the Iraq war yesterday, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) quoted Abraham Lincoln as advocating the hanging of lawmakers who undermine military morale during wartime.

“Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged,” Young declared.

One problem: Lincoln never said such a thing.

Conservative scholar J. Michael Waller did, in an article for Insight magazine in December 2003. Waller later told Annenberg Political Fact Check that the supposed quote “is not a quote at all” but that a copy editor mistakenly put quotation marks around his words, making them appear to be Lincoln’s.

Annenberg has counted 18,000 references to the Lincoln “quote” by those who typically support President Bush’s war policy.

After he left the House floor yesterday, Young found out that — whoops — he had mistakenly put words in Abe’s mouth. His spokeswoman, Meredith Kenny, says the congressman took the quote from an article he read in the Washington Times on Tuesday.

However, Kenny tries to have it both ways in the final passage of the article, stating that Young “continues to totally agree with the message of the statement” but that he is “not advocating the hanging of Democrats”:

“Now that he’s been informed these are not the actual words of Lincoln, he will discontinue attributing the words to Lincoln. However, he continues to totally agree with the message of the statement,” Kenny said. “Americans, especially America’s elected leaders, should not take actions during a time of war that damage the morale of our soldiers and military — and that is exactly what this nonbinding resolution does.”

And no, Kenny said, Young was “not advocating the hanging of Democrats.”

Well, what is he advocating? Arrest? Exile? The quote only offers three options.

A new article by Aaron Chatterji, a professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, and UC-Berkeley grad student Siona Listokin makes a convincing argument that the progressive focus on corporate social responsibility is at least partially misdirected (free registration required):

A generation of activists has been raised on the idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR)–that large corporations can be cajoled into paying employees better, being more environmentally responsible, improving labor conditions in developing countries, retaining more American workers, embracing diversity, and donating money to fix inner-city schools. Where firms cannot be enticed, the strategy goes, they can be bullied. In the late 1970s, Nestl learned this first-hand when a massive boycott was launched to protest its overly aggressive marketing of infant formula. In 1999, a series of protests convinced Home Depot to sell more lumber from sustainable logging operations. More recently, campaigns against the fast-food industry have included a full barrage of boycotts, lawsuits, movies, and books to pressure companies like McDonald’s and Wendy’s to stop advertising to children and to serve healthier food.

In pursuit of similar success, enormous resources have been directed away from lobbying for regulatory regimes and toward recruiting powerful corporations into voluntary battle against a variety of injustices. Yet CSR campaigns have had limited success in actually changing corporate behavior in a meaningful way. More often than not, CSR crusades result in companies allocating a relatively small portion of their profits for public affairs advertising, community donations, and token changes–from signing on to “industry codes” to hiring CSR-focused senior executives or consultants. At the root of the problem is an inconvenient but implacable fact: Corporations care about profits. Corporations will not–and their shareholders do not expect them to–engage in behaviors that do not maximize profit. Indeed, shareholders would punish them if they did. In concept and in practice, therefore, CSR is at best a partial solution to solving social injustices and correcting for market externalities. After years of relative futility and millions of dollars spent, progressives who are concerned about market failures and their impact on the common good need to do the responsible thing and end their fixation on corporate social responsibility. It is time to recognize that most market failures can only be solved by governments and multilateral agreements, and progressives need to redirect activist pressure appropriately.

As the authors argue, CSR usually fails to change corporate behavior when activists are asking corporations to directly forego profits (for instance, asking Wal-Mart to pay its workers more). And in other cases, I believe that the demands of CSR activists are misguided or counterproductive (for example, the savings Wal-Mart provides to low-income Americans vastly outweigh the negative effects of the chain’s operations).

However, Chatterji and Listokin seem to give short shrift to two indirect effects of the CSR movement that seem like powerful motivators of good corporate behavior:

Encouraging win-win solutions: It seems that there are potentially many more win-win instances of CSR — so-called “strategic CSR” — than the authors acknowledge. See, for instance, the recent New Yorker profile of the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Amory Lovins, who argues that businesses are neglecting a range of profit-maximizing environmental practices. At any given moment, the business model and corporate practices of most large firms are stuck in organizational inertia. The opportunities — and threats — created by CSR provide incentives for firms to break out of those equilibria and adopt the kind of win-win approaches that Lovins describes. A recent example is Wal-Mart’s massive new effort to sell 100 million fluorescent light bulbs, which could appreciably reduce the carbon footprint of the US and make money at the same time. It is hard to imagine Wal-Mart making such a commitment if it wasn’t under fire from the left.

Raising the costs of scandal: The norms promoted by the CSR movement have raised the costs of being caught in a devastating corporate incident or norm-violating scandal (think of Exxon Valdez or Enron). CSR therefore provides further motivation for profit-maximizing corporations to preemptively prevent public relations disasters that have negative social consequences.

What do you think?

[Disclosure: I met Chatterji this past fall after he joined Duke’s faculty.]

I just came across a new attack on my American Prospect Online piece from August 2002 on Democrats’ need for a new internationalist doctrine. I think it still holds up pretty well:

In recent weeks, it has become increasingly clear that there is a void at the heart of the Democratic Party.

At the outset of our first great debate over post-September 11 foreign policy — what to do about Saddam Hussein and Iraq — the Democrats are sitting it out, worried about taking on a popular wartime president and preferring to focus on domestic issues. In the latest issue of The Prospect, Harold Meyerson calls this an abdication of leadership on the most important issue facing this country. And as a result, the task of criticizing the President’s plans for Iraq has been left to internationalist Republicans and nervous European and Middle Eastern leaders.

But politics isn’t the only or the most fundamental reason for the Democrats’ silence. As Peter Beinart pointed out recently in The New Republic, the Dems can’t articulate a serious critique of President Bush’s plans to invade Iraq because they don’t have an overarching theory of how America should deal with the new threats to our security…

It’s time for Democrats to think big. Really big. What we need is a muscular new internationalist doctrine that addresses post-September 11 threats in Iraq and around the world — something along the lines laid out by Michael Hirsh in the September-October issue of Foreign Affairs.

Under such a doctrine, territorial sovereignty would become somewhat less sacrosanct: If a rogue state violates international law or norms by harboring terrorists or seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction, the international community — led by the US — would have a range of options culminating in the possibility of military action. These options would be pursued forcefully, but Bush-style preemption would be ruled out because it undermines the system and could lead to globally destabilizing aggressions (for example, an Indian attack against Pakistan).

But writing on the Guardian Online, Brendan O’Neill criticizes me and other TAP writers for supporting an interventionist approach to foreign policy:

The notion that Bush’s interventionist policies did not go far enough was a recurring theme in American Prospect’s coverage of Iraq in 2002 and 2003. In August 2002, contributor Brendan Nyhan responded to a suggestion in New Republic magazine that America should adopt a policy of “pre-emption plus”, where war in Iraq would be followed by a “political intervention – ie nation-building”, by arguing that “even this vision is too narrow”.

“It’s time for Democrats to think big. Really big,” said Nyhan. “What we need is a muscular new internationalist doctrine that address post-September 11 threats in Iraq and around the world … Under such a doctrine, territorial sovereignty would become somewhat less sacrosanct: if a rogue state violates international law or norms by harbouring terrorists or seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction, the international community – led by the US – would have a range of options culminating in the possibility of military action.”

We might call this “pre-emption plus plus”, where America would effectively head up a global police force which would threaten or actually pursue military action against any country found to be a “rogue state” – that favoured phrase of all American interventionists. Nyhan was critical of the idea that America should go ahead and bomb Iraq unilaterally; instead, he said, it “should build a new consensus for action grounded in the international system”. So, not so much an anti-war position as a pro-better-wars-than-the-ones-Bush-is-proposing position.

…It is worth recalling that some liberal commentators were even more gung-ho than the Bush administration back then. Very often they demanded a more systematic form of interventionism that would spread the liberal worldview and gallantly “liberate” the oppressed and toiling masses of the Third World.

Often, their main criticism of Bush and Co was that their war in Iraq was in pursuit of narrow “national interests” – such as security for America – rather than pursuing global values of justice and liberty. This shows that there is nothing more dangerous than a liberal imperialist. Where Bush’s war moves are at least, in some part, anchored by the national interest, liberal interventionism can be more sweeping, more unforgiving, more all-encompassing.

Looking back at 2002 and 2003, we can see that some liberal commentators not only gave the green light to war in Iraq but also proposed a new framework for western liberal imperialism which would have been even worse, if you can imagine it, than what the Bushies have pursued.

If you’re interested, I actually wrote ten freelance articles for TAP Online back in 2001-2002. [Disclosure: I criticized the Prospect after resigning from my guest blogger position in 2006.]

Glenn Greenwald, who is now blogging at Salon, has exposed the latest conservative pundit to suggest that dissent is treasonus.

In a Washington Times column, national security commentator Frank Gaffney begins by citing a quote calling for the arrest, exile or hanging of dissenting members of Congress, which he attributes to Abraham Lincoln:

Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged.
— President Abraham Lincoln

But as Greenwald points out, the quotation has been debunked as false. Lincoln never said it.

Gaffney continues by suggesting we should reconsider whether dissent should be a “hanging offense:

It is, of course, unimaginable that the penalties proposed by one of our most admired presidents for the crime of dividing America in the face of the enemy would be contemplated — let alone applied — today.

Still, as the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate engage in interminable debate about resolutions whose effects can only be to “damage morale and undermine the military” while emboldening our enemies, it is time to reflect on what constitutes inappropriate behavior in time of war.

Scarcely anyone seems to consider the conduct of the Congress inappropriate, to say nothing of a hanging offense. As various sitting members, whose day jobs increasingly are those of presidential candidates, jockey to outbid one another in their defeatism, the talk is not about whether such behavior is appropriate in time of war — or consistent with the national interest.

After denouncing various allegations of intelligence politicization, which he warns will have a “chilling effect,” Gaffney concludes that such allegations “really should be a hanging offense”:

The Journal has properly warned that Senator Ahab’s [Senator Carl Levin, D-MI] misbehavior is likely to have implications far beyond the immediate disservice it does to Mr. Feith and those who labored so ably under him. It will likely also have a severely chilling effect on the willingness of policymakers rigorously to challenge, and thereby to improve, the quality of the intelligence they are getting about tomorrow’s threats.

If there’s one thing that really should be a hanging offense, it is behavior that results in our being even less equipped to deal with such threats than we were before this phase of the War for the Free World began on September 11, 2001

Add this to the long list of attacks on dissent since 9/11…

[Disclosure: Spinsanity was featured on Salon in 2002.]

Via Michael Crowley at TNR’s The Plank, Dana Milbank mocks the incoherence of GOP talking points on the Democrats’ anti-“surge” resolution:

There was good reason for this anxiety. As head of the House Republican Conference, the 32-year-old redhead [Rep. Adam Putnam, R-FL] is leading his caucus into a public-opinion meat grinder: supporting President Bush’s increase of U.S. troops in Iraq, against the wishes of more than 60 percent of Americans. Worse, he is leading them with a pair of somewhat contradictory arguments: (a) that the Democrats’ resolution opposing Bush’s Iraq buildup is a meaningless gesture, and (b) that the Democrats’ resolution will cause the end of civilization as we know it.

“This is a rather toothless 97 words,” Putnam began in his floor speech, calling the proposal “a narrow nonbinding resolution that misses the bigger picture.” Minutes later, he changed his view. “The majority would have us consider a resolution that puts us one day closer to handing militant Islamists a safe haven the size of California.”

So which one is it: toothless or catastrophic?

Minority Leader John Boehner (Ohio) wasn’t sure. In his floor speech, he called the resolution “nonbinding” six times, labeling the resolution “a political charade lacking both the seriousness and the gravity of the issue that it’s meant to represent.” And yet, he also thought the resolution “is the first step toward abandoning Iraq by cutting off funding for our troops that are in harm’s way.”

Neither had Minority Whip Roy Blunt (Mo.) found harmony between the competing talking points. “This resolution just says enough not to say anything at all,” he judged. In another breath, however, he called it a “first step to cutting off funding for the dangerous mission our troops face” and a debate that “bolsters those radical terrorists whose sole goal is to destroy America.”

The Republican complaints brought to mind the Woody Allen joke about two old ladies at a Catskills resort. “One of ’em says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know, and such small portions.’ “

With all the anti-vaccine hysteria, you’d think that health care providers would be doing everything possible to maximize compliance rates. But no! I was shocked to discover that our family’s insurance provider charged us coinsurance for vaccinating our son. Not only is that bad for society, but it doesn’t even make sense from a cost-benefit perspective. Will those few dollars make up for the costs to the insurance company if we don’t vaccinate him and he gets sick?

I can’t stand to watch it, but Bob Somerby routinely suffers through the inanity of MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews.” Check out the five questions Matthews recently asked New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, who is running for president, during an interview:

QUESTION 1: Welcome back to Hardball. Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico is a Democratic candidate for president. Governor Richardson, how do you break into top ranks of the guys and the woman, Hillary, fighting for the Democratic nomination?

QUESTION 2: Why are you better than Hillary?…OK—here is your chance. Why are you better than Hillary?

QUESTION 3: Hillary said a couple of days ago, a week or two ago, that she is equipped to deal with bad and evil men because of her dealings as first lady. What do you make of that assessment and that claim?

QUESTION 4: You mean—you really think that she was talking about Republicans on the other side of the health care debate, not her husband? I mean, that wasn’t a joke, it wouldn’t be a joke—there’s nothing funny about saying you had to go up against Republicans. There’s something funny about having to deal with a husband who has caused you pain. And I thought that’s what she was joking about. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been funny among all those women, would it have been? Would that have been a joke, to say “I had to fight with Tom DeLay?” That’s not funny!

QUESTION 5: OK. How do we—then I’ll let you go positive, Governor. How do we get out of Iraq?

It’s good to see Matthews is still focused on what’s really important!