Brendan Nyhan

Compare and contrast (via Real Climate by way of DeLong):

• Search results for “global warming” for the Whitehouse.gov site in Google: 438.
• Search results for “global warming” in the Whitehouse.gov search engine: 1.

White House spokesman Tony Snow is hard at work smearing the anti-“surge” resolutions as potentially encouraging another 9/11 (and thereby setting up a future narrative blaming any future attack on current opposition to the war):

The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, said Mr. Bush “will continue to exercise his responsibilities as commander in chief” even if the Senate — with House action expected to follow — approved a resolution opposing the buildup. He reiterated the administration view that a clear split between Congress and the president on Iraq could embolden the nation’s enemies.

“Osama bin Laden thought that a lack of American resolve was a key reason why he could inspire people to come after us on September 11th,” he said. “I am not accusing members of the Senate of inviting carnage on the United States of America. I’m simply saying you think about what impact it may have.”

In other words: I’m not saying he beats his wife, but I’m encouraging you to think about the possibility that he might.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, Ari Fleischer’s testimony in the Scooter Libby case is hilarious.

As context, start with Jonathan Chait’s classic account of Fleischer’s tactics:

[W]hat Fleischer does, for the most part, is not really spin. It’s a system of disinformation–blunter, more aggressive, and, in its own way, more impressive than spin. Much of the time Fleischer does not engage with the logic of a question at all. He simply denies its premises–or refuses to answer it on the grounds that it conflicts with a Byzantine set of rules governing what questions he deems appropriate. Fleischer has broken new ground in the dark art of flackdom: Rather than respond tendentiously to questions, he negates them altogether.

And then behold how Fleischer adapts those tactics to the legal setting, refusing to even concede basic facts about dates and times. Dana Milbank’s account in the Washington Post is priceless:

It’s been almost four years since Ari Fleischer stepped down from the podium, but he has lost nothing off the old curveball.

Questioning the former White House press secretary in the Scooter Libby trial yesterday, defense lawyer William Jeffress Jr. asked if Fleischer had read a document Jeffress placed in front of him. “In a generic sense,” Fleischer said.

Did President Bush visit Entebbe, Uganda? “I’m not sure of the spelling.”

Did he work for White House communications director Dan Bartlett? “Nominally,” Fleischer replied. “On paper, Mr. Bartlett had a box above me. . . . I wouldn’t put it that way.”

Thus did Libby’s defense team learn what any reporter could have told them: The longer you question Fleischer, the less knowledge you take away from the experience. And Fleischer, protecting his own role in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, was determined not to give even a kernel of fact to Libby’s defense.

Jeffress asked when Fleischer’s lawyers approached prosecutors seeking an immunity deal. “The only way I would know that is from any discussions I had with my lawyers,” Fleischer answered.

Did the dispute over the outing of Plame cause tensions between the CIA and the White House? “In the context of the controversy of the week it was hard to tell what was attributable to one problem we had,” Fleischer replied.

The responses evidently flustered Jeffress, who at one point stated that Iraq was “seeking Africa in Niger” when he apparently meant “uranium.” The court reporter looked up quizzically. “What did I say?” Jeffress asked. Libby played with his pen.

With Fleischer avoiding answers, Jeffress had to strike deals with the prosecution to get basic facts into the record. This led the judge to instruct the jury that “the parties have agreed July 6 was a Sunday.” A similar deal led to the judge’s announcement that “Uganda is seven hours ahead of Eastern daylight time.”

In lieu of cooperation, Fleischer addressed the jury as if it were a civics class, offering long and extraneous accounts of what it’s like “when you’re the press secretary and you deal with the press.” In one instance, Fleischer lamented: “I remember after September 11 and I said we were attacked by al-Qaeda, one reporter said, ‘Prove it.’

…Fleischer, trailed by superlawyer Bob Barnett, entered the courtroom at noon with a little less hair on top and a more expensive suit than he had when he departed the briefing room four years ago. In four hours on the stand, he talked his way out of several factual jams.

Jeffress seemed to have Fleischer cornered with grand jury testimony in which Fleischer appeared to say, falsely, that a confidential report on Joseph Wilson’s trip to Niger for the CIA mentioned Wilson by name. But Fleischer rallied, providing the jury with not one but four explanations: (1) “I haven’t read the entire document.” (2) “If I read it and it doesn’t include his name the context is clearly Ambassador Wilson’s report.” (3) “Unless it’s in the blacked out area I cannot see.” And (4) “It may not have his name verbatim.”

Jeffress asked Fleischer if Bartlett had been talking to him when he said, aboard Air Force One, that Plame was the one who sent Wilson on the trip to Niger.

“He said it out loud,” Fleischer answered.

“He was talking to you?”

“He said it out loud and I heard him,” Fleischer repeated.

Why didn’t Fleischer react to Bartlett’s statement? “I was sitting in my chair trying to read a document.”

When Jeffress expressed some skepticism on this point, Fleischer explained: “You can get interrupted by so many things at the White House.”

Under the prosecutor’s questioning, Fleischer delivered a damning account of Libby’s actions, saying how the former aide to Vice President Cheney disclosed Plame’s identity, along with an intimation that “this was kind of newsy.” When Fleischer mentioned that Plame was “covert,” Jeffress shouted an objection.

“Whatever her status was, that was totally irrelevant,” the judge told the jury. A minute later, Fleischer repeated the allegation the judge had just disallowed.

Jeffress knew it would be a challenge to undo the damage Fleischer did to his client, particularly because, as he put it, Fleischer has “had a lot of practice” under hostile questioning.

Fleischer did not disappoint. Jeffress tried to get him to say which reporter questioned national security adviser Condoleezza Rice at a briefing. “I wouldn’t know,” Fleischer said. Jeffress asked why Rice was unaware of Wilson’s trip even after it was reported in the press. “There was something in the air that spring,” Fleischer explained.

Finally, Jeffress entered into the record a kind note Libby wrote to Fleischer on the press secretary’s last day. Libby smiled as Fleischer read it. But Fleischer just stared straight ahead. “This is one of 20 to 40 letters I received on my last day in a big bound book,” he said.

Shorter New America Foundation event: “Will A New Right-Left Synthesis Transform American Politics?”. Answer: No.

In related news, conservative direct mail guru Richard Viguerie is hyping a third party challenge to Rudy Giuliani if he is the Republican nominee, though Viguerie warns that voting for a third-party candidate would tip the election to the Democrats. Here’s the email:

It’s late in 2008, and you’re in the voting booth. Rudy Giuliani—yes, pro-abortion choice, pro-gay rights, pro-gun control Rudy Giuliani, that Rudy Giuliani—has won the nomination of a Republican Party desperate for a “hero” candidate who can lead it out of the political wilderness. He never even had the decency to make it easier for you to vote for him by pretending to have a pro-life “conversion” experience, like Mitt Romney, or pretending that he’s been conservative all along, like Senator McCain. (Granted, that would have been quite a stretch for Rudy.)

BUT…opposite him at the top of the ballot as the Democratic Party’s nominee is the name that sends shivers down a conservative’s spine…CLINTON! Yes, a double-spectre guaranteed to produce nightmares: Hillary in the Oval Office, Bill messin’ around somewhere else in the White House.

What do you do?

Oh, there’s a great conservative running on a third-party ticket, telling you all the things you want to hear, promising to do all the things you want done, but the most likely result of a sizeable vote for him is to tip the election over to Hillary.
So, what do you do?

You tell us.

Come to www.ConservativesBetrayed.com and tell us what you would do, given that choice. And see how your fellow conservatives are voting.

During the debate over President Bush’s plan to send more troops to Iraq, two Republican senators are the latest members of their party to suggest that dissent encourages the enemy and hurts the troops. John Cornyn said, “To offer nonbinding resolutions which encourage our enemies and undermine our allies and deflate the morale of our troops is, to me, the worst of all possible worlds.” And Jon Kyl stated, that “[t]he worst thing would be for the Senate by 60 votes to express disapproval of a mission we are sending people to lay down their lives for.” I’ve added their statements to my timeline of GOP attacks on dissent since 9/11, which is below the fold.

(more…)

According to Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff, former Clinton strategist turned professional Clinton hater Dick Morris, who is working on an anti-Hillary documentary, is already making bizarre claims about what she’ll do as president:

Morris believes that Hillary’s presidency will be dominated by a left-wing social and domestic agenda, and a Nixon-like assault on her political enemies [it wouldn’t surprise me].

Maybe she’s running cocaine out of Arkansas too!

Media Matters has a nice piece up tracking the dissemination of the Obama madrassa smear. As we showed at Spinsanity with our coverage of the the Ken Lay/Lincoln Bedroom myth and the NEA/9-11 myth, these things are hard to stop once they start spreading.

PS You know a hit piece on a black liberal is weak when the Washington Times and its racist editors are running away from it:

The Washington Times, which is also owned by the Unification Church, but operates separately from the Web site, quickly disavowed the article. Its national editor sent an e-mail message to staff members under the heading “Insight Strikes Again” telling them to “make sure that no mention of any Insight story” appeared in the paper, and another e-mail message to its Congressional correspondent instructing him to clarify to Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama that The Washington Times had nothing to do with the article on the Web site.

“Some of the editors here get annoyed when Insight is identified as a publication of The Washington Times,” said Wesley Pruden, editor in chief of The Washington Times.

Last week, I complained about a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Prof. Arthur C. Brooks of Syracuse University (subscription required) that framed social and economic mobility as a “he said”/”she said” issue rather than considering any empirical evidence. Here’s the key passage from his piece:

Consider the evidence. While 92% of conservatives believe that hard work and perseverance can help a person overcome disadvantage, only 65% of liberals think so…

Naturally, well-to-do liberals must be amazed at the gullibility of the millions of poorer conservatives who still cling to the idea of America’s promise of a better future through hard work and perseverance. Sunny conservatives of all economic classes may very well prefer to see things their way about America. Are conservatives naïve, or are liberals unjustifiably dour? Reasonable people disagree on this question.

But as Joel Wiles, a former Duke student, pointed out to me, the poll question says something different. Brooks makes the position of 35% of liberals sound unreasonable — of course “hard work and perseverance can help a person overcome disadvantage” (my italics). However, the actual question used in the survey, which was conducted by the public affairs school at Syracuse where Brooks teaches, adds a crucial qualifier — the word usually:

Would you agree or disagree with the following: While people may begin with different opportunities, hard work and perseverance can usually overcome those disadvantages.

The word “usually” shifts the meaning of the question from the possibility of overcoming disadvantage to the probability of doing so. And as I said before, the probability of moving upward in the United States today is far too low.

(For those who are interested, the data are here. I replicated the 65%/92% figures using the 2005 data, but the file also includes data from 2004 and 2006.)

Here’s one of the more vile statements I’ve seen recently. Atrios flags conservative pundit Mike Gallagher — the sixth most popular radio host in the country — wishing for another 9/11 in order to silence left-wing dissent:

Seeing Jane Fonda Saturday was enough to make me wish the unthinkable: it will take another terror attack on American soil in order to render these left-leaning crazies irrelevant again. Remember how quiet they were after 9/11? No one dared take them seriously. It was the United States against the terrorist world, just like it should be.

It’s time to stand tall, speak loudly and defend America against these enemies like Hanoi Jane.

She’s back. Are we going to let her get away with it….again????

Bob Somerby still hasn’t corrected his mistaken post from yesterday claiming Hillary Clinton “has been ahead of McCain for months.” Here’s more evidence he’s wrong.

Charles Franklin has compiled the data on McCain-Clinton trial heats. The story is clear — McCain, not Hillary, has been leading for months, though the gap has recently closed (McCain is in red, Hillary in blue):

Unfortunately, like Time Magazine, Somerby is hyping an outlier.