Brendan Nyhan

The John McCain press infatuation has got to stop. Check out this “straight talk,” which was reported breathlessly by the New York Observer:

For all the national attention surrounding John McCain’s two highly anticipated, protest-ridden commencement speeches in New York last week, the Senator actually saved some of his best material for the crowd that gathered on Friday behind closed doors in the back of the Regency Hotel.
 

In a small, mirror-paneled room guarded by a Secret Service agent and packed with some of the city’s wealthiest and most influential political donors, Mr. McCain got right to the point.
 

“One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit,’” said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, an invitee, and two other guests.

So honest! So bold! What an innovative diplomatic concept! If only John McCain were president, we’d have peace in Iraq!

Blech.

Update 5/24 3:33 PM: Among the many links to this post, Shakespeare’s Sister definitely gets off the best line:

I have the best informants in all of the blogosphere, and one of them has gotten me a copy of McCain’s entire plan. If you thought “Phase One: Stop the Bullshit” was outstanding, wait until you get a load of “Phase Two: No, Seriously — I Mean It.”

Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong turned over a mountain of evidence to the accused lacrosse players’ defense team, and they promptly began leaking it to the media. Here’s a roundup of the major claims that are being circulated, which should be interpreted cautiously given their source:

(1) The accuser allegedly claimed the other dancer witnessed the alleged attack, which the other dancer denies:

The defense sources also said Tuesday that, according to the records Nifong handed over last week, the woman at one point said that a second dancer also was in the bathroom where the incident allegedly occurred. But the sources said that when asked about this, the second dancer replied, “That’s a crock.”

(2) The accuser allegedly stated that no condoms were used, which makes the lack of DNA evidence more damning:

In other new information, the accuser told police her alleged attackers did not use condoms, the defense sources said.

Again, Nifong had no comment.

The question of whether the alleged rapists used condoms is an issue because the use of condoms could account for the lack of any DNA evidence linking the suspects to the accuser.

(3) The medical exam allegedly found no tearing or bleeding:

[T]hree defense sources, who asked not to be identified, said a forensic examination of the alleged victim found no tearing, bleeding or other injury associated with a sexual assault. Instead, the exam detected only swelling in the accuser’s vagina and tenderness in her breasts and lower right body, the sources said.

However, a police search-warrant affidavit said the hospital exam had determined the woman suffered “injuries consistent with being raped and sexually assaulted vaginally and anally.”

(4) The accuser may not have been tested for drugs or alcohol:

Medical records of the alleged victim in the Duke lacrosse rape case suggest she might not have been tested for drugs or alcohol, according to a defense filing Monday.

Several people described the accuser as being severely impaired the night of the alleged attack, with one of the first police officers to see her describing her a “passed out drunk.” But some have suggested that she may have been given a so-called “date rape drug,” and Newsweek magazine said District Attorney Mike Nifong had hinted at such a possibility.

Authorities have said a doctor and a specially trained nurse performed a physical exam on the accuser that found her condition to be consistent with having been sexually assaulted. But the nurse who filled out a report on that exam indicated no toxicology tests were performed, according to a defense motion filed Monday.

Several attorneys not connected with the case said Monday they were surprised by the apparent lack of a toxicology report.

If such data showed the exotic dancer was intoxicated on the night in question, it could be highly beneficial to the defense, lawyer Mark Edwards said.

“Either way — whether it was a date-rape drug or voluntary intoxication — it would affect the reliability of her identification,” Edwards added. “It goes to the question of her credibility.”

On the other hand, evidence of a date-rape drug in the dancer’s body could have helped the prosecution by showing evil intentions on the part of someone, Edwards said.

“It would help to explain the apparent intoxication when police encountered this woman later,” he said. “It also would show that there was likely a sexual assault or at least a plan to commit a sexual assault.”

Yesterday, RNC chairman Ken Mehlman sent an email to supporters (PDF) with the subject line “The Democrat Plan: $3.98 Gas, $955 More Per Year at the Pump.” The email refers repeatedly to what “Democrats offer,” “the Democrat’s (sic) energy proposals,” “how much more Democrats want you to pay at the pump,” “how much more Democrats (sic) plan would cost you,” “what a Democrat-controlled Congress would cost you,” and “the Democrat plan for higher energy prices.” The email features links to a website with a scare video and a “gas prices calculator” for the supposed Democratic plan.

But if you actually read the “research” supporting the GOP’s claims, you’ll discover that the Democratic “plan” consists of votes to increase the gas tax and create a BTU tax in 1993, plus their support of the Kyoto Treaty. That means the “plan” was cobbled together by RNC opposition researchers using two votes from 13 years ago. Even by DC standards, that’s unconvincing. (To be sure, I support a much higher gas tax combined with an offsetting tax cut that would be administered by an independent agency. But unfortunately the recent increase in the price of gas has scared most Democrats away from this position.)

More importantly, our Constitution has a little feature called the separation of powers. In theory, at least, President Bush can veto bills passed by Congress. There’s no way a Democratic Congress could pass a huge gas tax increase or get the Kyoto Treaty approved while he’s in office.

A friend reports that All the President’s Spin was recently the “deal of the day” at the Barnes & Noble sales annex. They’re selling it as a bargain book for $5 new, which is a good deal for a copy from a major seller (Amazon is currently selling the book for $10.78 new, and the third party sellers on the site have it for $.30 used or $1 for copies described as being in new condition).

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, White House aide Peter Wehner attacks a series of “antiwar myths” about the war in Iraq, many of which are straw men that he pummels ritualistically.

For instance, in a supposed refutation of the claim that the Bush administration promoted false intelligence about Iraq, he writes:

[N]o serious person would justify a war based on information he knows to be false and which would be shown to be false within months after the war concluded. It is not as if the WMD stockpile question was one that wasn’t going to be answered for a century to come.

I agree. But there are few serious people in the highest ranks of the Bush administration. To take just one example, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and other officials repeatedly asserted that truck trailers found in Iraq were mobile biological weapons units despite numerous intelligence analyses to the contrary. The aluminum tubes story is similar. (And let’s not forget all the other claims the Bush administration made after they were proven to be false.)

At another point, Wehner attacks the claim that “promoting democracy in the Middle East is a postwar rationalization”:

“The president now says that the war is really about the spread of democracy in the Middle East. This effort at after-the-fact justification was only made necessary because the primary rationale was so sadly lacking in fact,” according to Nancy Pelosi.

In fact, President Bush argued for democracy taking root in Iraq before the war began.

The key word here is “primary.” The primary rationale was, of course, the supposed intersection of weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda, neither of which were substantiated. The fact that President Bush “argued for democracy” before the war does not make it his primary rationale. What Pelosi said is perfectly accurate. The primary rationale for the war shifted to democracy after the initial (primary) rationale collapsed.

Wehner concludes his opus by suggesting that critics of the war are soft on Saddam Hussein:

These, then, are the urban legends we must counter, else falsehoods become conventional wisdom. And what a strange world it is: For many antiwar critics, the president is faulted for the war, and he, not the former dictator of Iraq, inspires rage. The liberator rather than the oppressor provokes hatred. It is as if we have stepped through the political looking glass, into a world turned upside down and inside out.

This loathsome tactic has become all too common in the debate over Iraq since 2002.

There are other, highly arguable claims in Wehner’s piece, but the intent is clear — to gloss over the Bush administration’s failings and smear its critics at a time when the war in Iraq has become increasingly unpopular. Wehner is, after all, the director of the White House’s Office of Strategic Initiatives.

Robert Pear’s dissection of the Bush administration’s abuse of statistics about the Medicare prescription drug bill takes me back to the old days:

In trying to shape public perceptions, the Bush administration has manipulated enrollment figures.

On April 20, the administration issued a news release saying, “30 Million Medicare Beneficiaries Now Receiving Prescription Drug Coverage.” On May 10, it announced, “37 Million Medicare Beneficiaries Now Receiving Prescription Drug Coverage.”

Only one million people had signed up in the three-week interval between those dates. Most of the apparent increase resulted from the administration’s decision to include six million people who had not signed up for the Medicare drug benefit but had coverage from other sources.

Likewise, on May 10, the White House said, “Of the more than 42 million people eligible for Medicare, more than 31 million people with Medicare now have Part D-related prescription drug coverage.”

But more than 10 percent of the people — 3.5 million of the 31 million beneficiaries — were getting drug coverage from programs unrelated to Medicare: the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program and Tricare, the military health care plan.

I’m glad he ran the story, but why wasn’t this news back when it happened?

Also, Pear’s lede is an annoying example of “he said,” “she said”:

Republicans tend to overstate enrollment, which is widely viewed as a measure of the popularity and success of the program, known as Part D of Medicare.

Democrats stretch the facts, too. They suggest that hardly anyone is benefiting from the program, which they call costly, confusing and corrupt.

But the Times reporter provides no specific example of Democratic deception that is comparable to the misleading White House statistics quoted above.

The big Al Gore profile in New York magazine, which touts him as a 2008 candidate, features this blind quote which perfectly summarizes the state of play in the party right now:

[T]he Gore boomlet is also being driven by another force: the creeping sense of foreboding about the prospect of Hillary Clinton’s march to her party’s nomination. “Every conversation in Democratic politics right now has the same three sentences,” observes a senior party player. “One: ‘She is the presumptive front-runner.’ Two: ‘I don’t much like her, but I don’t want to cross her, for God’s sake!’ And three: ‘If she’s our nominee, we’re going to get killed.’ It’s like some Japanese epic film where everyone sees the disaster coming in the third reel but no one can figure out what to do about it.”

The second sentence is the key. If party elites are too scared to coordinate against Hillary, she will probably win the nomination. That’s the lesson of research on the modern primary process being done by a team out of UCLA (PDF).

For all of Gore’s weaknesses, which center on the media’s hatred of him, I agree with the GOP strategist quoted in the article, who says “Gore has liabilities of his own,” but “there’s just no question that hers are much deeper than his.”

Still, both Gore and Clinton have terrible favorability profiles even after years of positive press since 2000. Fox News puts Clinton at 50 percent favorable, 42 percent unfavorable and Gore at 41 percent favorable, 45 percent unfavorable. Those are awful numbers for a presidential race because it is much harder to move someone with an unfavorable opinion into the other column than to shape the perceptions of undecided voters. For those who missed it, here’s my take on that problem:

Negative stereotypes of Hillary have deep roots, and many voters are likely to revert to them once she comes under serious attack. I worked for a Nevada Senate candidate in 2000 (Ed Bernstein) who had similar image problems to Hillary. He was well-known to most Nevadans and had a highly defined, polarizing personality. Over the course of the campaign, we built up his favorable/unfavorable ratings from 21/33 in late 1999 to 44/36 in Sept. 2000, and pulled within four points of our opponent in a DSCC poll. But when the Republicans unloaded a million dollars in negative ads on us, all that went out the window. Voters snapped back to their initial perceptions of Bernstein, his unfavorables spiked over 50 percent, the DSCC dropped us, and the race was over. Hillary is a better politician than Bernstein, but I think the dynamics are likely to be similar. As I’ve said before, a bad economy could put her over the top, but the combination of a polarizing persona and a liberal track record is likely to be devastating to her chances.

I’m back from vacation and surprised anyone believed the alleged scoop about Karl Rove’s indictment, which was posted on the left-wing website Truthout.org by disgraced journalist Jason Leopold. Predictably, it’s been retracted, though Truthout’s “partial apology” is a mishmash of cant:

On Saturday afternoon, May 13, 2006, TruthOut ran a story titled, “Karl Rove Indicted on Charges of Perjury, Lying to Investigators.” The story stated in part that top Bush aide Karl Rove had earlier that day been indicted on the charges set forth in the story’s title.

The time has now come, however, to issue a partial apology to our readership for this story. While we paid very careful attention to the sourcing on this story, we erred in getting too far out in front of the news-cycle. In moving as quickly as we did, we caused more confusion than clarity. And that was a disservice to our readership and we regret it.

As such, we will be taking the wait-and-see approach for the time being. We will keep you posted.

Marc Ash, Executive Director – t r u t h o u t

Here’s a hint to all you Rove indictment watchers out there: When someone posts claims that would be huge national news on a website that specializes in reprinting other publications’ articles under the guise of “fair use,” it means they’re likely to be bogus.

But the whole fiasco did provide an occasion for Robert Luskin, Karl Rove’s attorney, to get off a good line to the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz at Leopold’s expense (via Opinion Journal’s Best of the Web):

Robert Luskin, Karl Rove’s lawyer, says he spent most of the day on May 12 taking his cat to the veterinarian and having a technician fix his computer at home.

He was stunned, therefore, when journalists started calling to ask about an online report that he had spent half the day at his law office, negotiating with Patrick Fitzgerald — and that the special prosecutor had secretly obtained an indictment of Rove.

The cat’s medical tests, Luskin says, found that “the stools were free of harmful parasites, which is more than I can say for this case.”

Franklin Foer, the editor of The New Republic, was genuinely moved by Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth:

I hope this doesn’t sound too Arianna-like. But last night, I went to a screening of the Al Gore movie. And I found myself walking out in a strange mood. I had just seen a movie featuring a politician … and there wasn’t a trace of snark or cynicism coursing through my body. The film has genuine rhetorical power. It builds an incredibly frightening case without hints of fear-mongering or over-wrought moments. Because Gore is truly self-deprecating, the movie doesn’t ever feel like an ego-trip–although it does occasionally look like a giant product placement for Apple. At any rate, I walked out of the movie and decided to sell my car and begin otherwise preparing for our planet’s impending doom. I know this praise isn’t so unexpected coming from TNR. But I think the movie has the potential to become a seminal political document–a cinematic Silent Spring. It will certainly change elite opinion.

And Ben Fritz, my friend and former Spinsanity co-editor, reports that everyone he knows who has seen it has said it is excellent.

Here’s the film’s website, which includes a list of cities where it will be playing. Go see it!

From the News & Observer:

A grand jury indicted Duke lacrosse player Dave Forker Evans, a senior and team captain from Bethesda, Md., for first degree rape, first degree sexual offense and kidnapping today.

His lawyer, Joseph B. Cheshire V, said he expected Evans to turn himself in at the jail at 2 p.m.

Evans, a co-captain, is one of three lacrosse players who lived at the house at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. An exotic dancer has charged that she was gang raped at the house at a party on March 13.

Earlier today, District Attorney Mike Nifong had harsh words for lawyers representing the team players.

In a private conversation that could be heard across the 6th floor, Nifong told lawyer Kerry Sutton that he was unhappy with a Friday press conference in which defense attorneys said a second round of DNA tests could not conclusively link any player to the March 13 incident.

We’ll soon have the documents supporting the indictment, which should clarify how Nifong links Evans to the alleged crime.

Update 5/15 4:58 PM EST: Evans held a press conference to deny the charges before surrendering to police. In addition, Evans’ lawyer is already hammering the mustache angle:

Evans’ attorney, Joe Cheshire, also said Monday that the alleged victim identified Evans in a photo lineup with “90 percent certainty,” but that she was not 100 percent sure because he did not have a mustache.

“Mr. Nifong knows David Evans has never had a mustache,” Cheshire said. “We have pictures of David Evans the day before, the day after and almost every other day, along with scores and scores of people’s testimony that he never had a mustache.”