Brendan Nyhan

In honor of Ramesh Ponnuru’s The Party of Death, I’d like announce a contest for aspiring Regnery editors out there: What’s the title of the next conservative blockbuster? We already have Liberal Fascism from Jonah Goldberg; Treason, Slander, and High Crimes and Misdemeanors from Ann Coulter; Persecution and Absolute Power by David Limbaugh, and The Party of Death right off the top of my head. And a quick perusal of the Regnery catalog yields even more gems, including Bias, Betrayal, The Abolition of Marriage, Dereliction of Duty, Shakedown, Unfit for Command, and Unhinged. So what other pejorative terms or criminal charges can be applied to Democrats/liberals/the left? Step up now and maybe you can replace Ben Domenech at Regnery…

Durham’s Herald Sun newspaper includes a few new tidbits in today’s article on the Duke lacrosse case.

First, the New Black Panther Party is getting involved:

An official with the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense said the black nationalist organization is providing security for the woman who has accused Duke lacrosse players of raping her.

Second, the father has “given apparently conflicting statements to different news organizations about whether his daughter is willing to testify”:

The father has also given apparently conflicting statements to different news organizations about whether his daughter is willing to testify.

He told Fox News she is having doubts about taking the stand. “Not right now, I don’t think she would,” the accuser’s father said. “She wouldn’t want to.”
According to ESPN, he told MSNBC that while “she has talked about” wanting to drop the case because “she couldn’t take it,” she has decided at least for now to go forward.

But the father told The Herald-Sun on Wednesday evening that he hasn’t discussed with his daughter whether she is willing to testify.

May 15 is going to be a mess:

In other lacrosse case developments, May 15 is evolving as a potentially pivotal day. That is Nifong’s next opportunity to take the name of a third assailant to a grand jury for indictment. Although there’s also a grand jury meeting Monday, Nifong faces a Democratic primary on Tuesday and has said he wouldn’t seek and indictment the day before because it would appear to be politically motivated.

May 15 is also the day that a second round of DNA tests is expected back from a private laboratory. It is also the date for the next scheduled preliminary court hearing in the case.

And the identification process of the alleged third attacker appears to have gone awry:

Also Wednesday, attorney sources said the accuser was only 90 percent sure about her identification of one of three men she said attacked her, and she tripped up over a mustache.

Looking at a photo lineup, the dancer told police the man in question “looks just like him without the mustache,” the lawyers said, citing a written investigative report.

But the alleged third rapist had no mustache on the relevant night, if he ever had one, according to attorneys. They said photographs and eyewitnesses would prove their point.

Democrats are the only hope for instituting a substantial gas tax hike and offsetting income tax cut, a combination that former Bush economist Greg Mankiw said “may be the closest thing to a free lunch that economics has to offer.” But, sadly, they are giving into election-year pressures to demagogue the gas price issue, and saying things that will make it almost impossible to raise the gas tax appropriately in the near future.

In an email to supporters of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (PDF), Anne Lewis is the latest Democrat to demagogue the issue:

Is anyone else feeling burned by the skyrocketing price of gas? I know it cost me almost $50 to fill up the family minivan this weekend. That’s just outrageous.

As far as I’m concerned, there are only two groups of people who love high gas prices: Big Oil executives collecting record profits and the Republican Senators who collect their campaign contributions.

The latest FEC reports show that Republican Senators Rick Santorum (Pennsylvania) and Conrad Burns (Montana) have both collected more than $400,000 from Big Oil throughout their careers. Senators Jon Kyl (Arizona) and Jim Talent (Missouri) have each collected more than $200,000.

These Republicans incumbents are all up for re-election this year. In each race, the DSCC and the Democratic candidates have a simple strategy that will help pave the way to victory. We’re going to ask the voters who they trust to lower prices at the pump.

It’s as pathetic as Bush’s decision to open the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and investigate “price gouging.” As Brad DeLong writes, “Democrats are (because of the environmentalist wing of the party) generally in favor of higher gasoline taxes and higher gasoline prices–except when gasoline prices are high. Republicans are in favor of letting oil markets “work”–except when gasoline prices are high.”

President Bush’s decision to bring in Tony Snow as the White House spokesperson is being hailed by some as a rare admission of error. But it’s not. Instead, it’s indicative of the President’s leadership style, which treats failures of substance as failures of public relations. Every time things have gone wrong in this administration — from Iraq to the Medicare prescription drug bill to Social Security privatization — the White House decides it needs to revamp its message rather than asking why it might be getting such bad press.

Tony Snow is just another step in this process. Bush’s whole presidency has gone off the rails, so they bring in an outsider to the comically outside-the-loop job of White House spokesperson and it’s supposed to be a new approach.

This quote sums up the attitude I’m talking about:

When asked about Mr. Snow’s more critical comments, the administration official said, “What better way to pop the bubble that people think there is here.”

Senior administration officials consider Mr. Snow to be just the sort of outsider for whom some of their concerned Republican allies have been calling.

Rather than bringing in a grand old man of the party to shake up the White House on substance, they’re hiring a Fox News apparatchik to improve administration propaganda. It’s all too typical.

Update 4/27 12:21 PM: This quote from the Washington Post sums up the White House perspective perfectly:

A variety of Bush advisers suggested that the president is not interested in altering his major decisions or philosophy, but that he recognizes he needs to do a better job communicating in Washington and beyond.

In Washington these days, everything is a communication problem. If only people understood (X), they would love the President.

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point and Blink, makes a good point about the identifications by the accuser in the Duke lacrosse case:

[T]he Duke case is an example of another, even more problematic aspect of eyewitness identifications, and that is that we aren’t particular good at making them across races.   There is a huge amount of psychological research in their area, pioneered by Roy Malpass at the University of Texas at El Paso.   A few years ago, John Brigham and Christian Meissner did a big meta-analysis of all of the cross-racial identification studies and concluded that given the task of picking someone out of a lineup, the average person is something like 1.4 times more likely to correctly identify an own-race face than a different-race face, and 1.6 times more likely to incorrectly identify a different race face.   These are not trivial error rates. Clearly we need to treat cross-racial identifications with a special level of caution.  (Here’s the link to the UTEP eyewitness laboratory:   eyewitness.utep.edu/race.html)

The problem seems to be that when we encounter someone from a different group we process them at the group level.   We code the face in our memory under the category black or white, and not under the category of someone with, say, an oval face and brown eyes and a prominent chin.   Race, in other words, trumps other visual features that would be more helpful in distinguishing one person from another.   Why do we do this?   One idea is simply that it’s a result of lack of familiarity:   that the more we “know” a racial type, the more sophisticated our encoding becomes. Another idea is that it’s a manifestation of in-group/out-group bias.   The thing about coding by group and not by facial feature is that it’s a lot faster.   And from an evolutionary standpoint, you’d want to use quicker processing methodologies in dealing with those who come from unfamiliar—and potentially unfriendly—groups.   The bottom line is that the adage that “all blacks look the same” to whites (and all whites look the same blacks) has some real foundation.

This has been a huge issue for years in white identifications of black suspects. I would venture to guess that there are thousands of African Americans in prison right now for crimes they didn’t commit, largely because whites have far too much faith in their ability to tell one black face from another.   Now, in the Duke case, we have a black identification of white suspects.   The shoe is on the other foot. It will be interesting to see whether the legal system is any more willing to acknowledge the real limitations of eye-witness identifications when it is suspects from the racial majority who are on the receiving end of the bias, not the other way around.

Ramesh Ponnuru is a nice guy, but I have to agree with Andrew Sullivan about Ponnuru’s new book The Party of Death:

I haven’t yet read Ramesh Ponnuru’s book, “The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life.” Ponnuru is a highly intelligent and reasonable writer, although his
religious fundamentalism alarms me, and I’ve no doubt he has some interesting things to say. I may even agree with some of it. But this much I can say: the title of the book is reprehensible. To call half the country “a party of death” and to assign that label to one’s partisan political opponents is not, whatever else it is, an invitation to dialogue. It’s demagoguic abuse. It’s worthy of Ann Coulter (who, tellingly, has a blurb on the cover). It is one thing to argue that you are pro-life, to use the positive aspects of language to persuade. It is another to assert that people who differ from you are somehow “pro-death,” (especially when they may merely be differing with you on the moral status of a zygote or the intricacies of end-of-life care). To smear an entire political party, and equate only one party with something as fundamental as life, is a new low in the descent of intellectual conservatism from Russell Kirk to Sean Hannity.

I’ve already received two disturbing emails promoting it from Regnery Publishing and the Human Events Book Service. (PDFs).

Here’s what Regnery’s email says:

Are Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean leading a “Party of Death”? National Review Senior Editor Ramesh Ponnuru warns Red State America that the 2006 elections could empower the “Party of Death.”

“The Democratic Party used to try to protect the weak. But too many of today’s Democrats have become part of a ‘party of death,’” charges Ponnuru in his revealing new book, The Party of Death.

While these same liberal Democrats demand the protection of the rights of criminals, terrorists, animals, and even the trees in the rain forest, they have simultaneously created a subgroup of “human unpersons” with no rights whatsoever.

And here’s Human Events going even further:

They celebrate abortion on demand as a fundamental human right. They advocate euthanasia, and work energetically for embryo-killing research. They explicitly deny that all human beings are equal in having a right to life, and unblushingly propose the creation of a category of “human non-persons” who can be treated as expendable. In line with that, some of them have already begun calling for the killing of sick infants — for their own good, of course. They are the party of death, and they are becoming increasingly powerful in America today, as well as in the world at large. Now, in The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life, National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru provides an unflinching exposé of their past successes, present activities, and future plans, showing why their principles are so harmful – and how they can be defeated before they destroy our society altogether.

Update 4/27 9:28 AM: The Human Events ad for Ponnuru’s book current running on Drudge refers to Democrats’ “War Against Humanity.” A tip for aspiring authors out there: When your PR copy starts to sound like alien invasion science fiction, perhaps you’ve gone a bit too far.

Here in Durham, someone named Robert “Naughty” Nauseef is running a bizarre campaign for a seat on the district court. I don’t know about you, but I’m not usually inclined to vote for judges named “Naughty”…

In an email to supporters yesterday (PDF), GOP chairman Ken Mehlman returns to his party’s tactic of motivating the base by promoting fears of Democratic impeachment. Here’s the key question from the “Republican Grassroots Voices Survey”:

3.) If the Democrats win control of the Congress in 2006, what is the one thing you would be most worried would happen?
-Democrats will try to censure or impeach President Bush
-Democrat would raise your taxes
-Democrats would cut and run from the central front in the War on Terror
-Democrats would sell out American values to Hollywood liberals
-Democrats would impose government-run health care 

Besides the impeachment fear-mongering, it’s also worth noting the language of the last three choices. The GOP doesn’t even include the word Iraq in the third item, instead calling it “the central front in the War on Terror” (TCFITWOT?). Also, the Republicans juxtapose “American values” with those of “Hollywood liberals,” and suggest that Democrats would “impose” government-run health care as if no democratic process existed (breaking news: President Bush can veto legislation).

Amnesia can apparently strike at any time:

Though the Senate unanimously confirmed Mr. Kaplan, Mr. Lautenberg also grilled him about reports that he was on hand for the so-called Brooks Brothers protest in November 2000, when a large group of Bush supporters — many in business attire — stormed a room in Florida where supervisors were conducting a ballot recount

Asked by senators in 2003 whether he was part of the protest, Mr. Kaplan said he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. “My responsibilities and role was to go into the room and be an official observer,” Mr. Kaplan said. “So while I was there, I was not, to my recollection, a participant.”

That’s funny. Kaplan’s memory seemed to work fine back in 2002:

Kaplan described his role in a lecture at the Harvard University Institute of Politics, calling the demonstration the “Brooks Brothers Protest,” a reference to the way the demonstrators were dressed.

And on Friday, the Washington Post’s Al Kamen described Kaplan as “a key part of the legendary Brooks Brothers Riot that helped persuade Miami election officials to stop the recount.”

I have to call bullshit on this:

Tracey Schmitt, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said her party has “never questioned Democrats’ patriotism,” but she added: “We do question John Kerry’s motives, considering his eagerness to engage in political theatrics as he ponders a presidential run.”

As I’ve noted before, there is a long list of statements in the public record in which Republicans suggest that Democrats who question the war or the president are essentially committing treason (“aid and comfort,” etc.). I believe the public interprets those statements as attacks on patriotism; if someone is siding with the enemy, what inference are we supposed to draw?

Recently, Republicans have gotten even more explicit. Ken Mehlman stated in March that “Democrats should to be focused on winning the War on Terror, not undermining it with political axe-grinding of the ugliest kind” and claimed that “Democrat leaders never miss an opportunity to put politics before our nation’s security. And now, they would rather censure the President for doing his job than actually fight the War on Terror.”

(Note: As a commenter on this site previously noted, a number of prominent Democrats overtly attacked Republican patriotism in 2003-2004. I’m of course offended by those statements as well.)