Brendan Nyhan

Via Americablog, the Bush administration is again playing the “dissent aids terrorists” card:

Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England portrayed the United Arab Emirates, of which the Emirate of Dubai is a part, as a vital ally in the war on terror. He noted that more U.S. warships reside there than anywhere in the world outside of the United States, including 590 military sea-lift command ships in 2005.

“We rely on them for the security of our forces there,” he said. England warned Congress of reacting too strongly against the Dubai deal. “The terrorists want us, they want our nation, to become distrustful, they want us to become paranoid and isolationist, and in my view, we cannot allow this to happen,” he said.

Much of the outrage over the deal strikes me as ill-informed and politically motivated, but this sort of rhetoric is over the line.

This Eric Alterman quote infuriates me:

I don’t mind if politicians want to exploit public ignorance in the service of a good cause.

In other words, Alterman — who complains constantly about the dissembling of the Bush administration — thinks deception in the service of a “good cause” is fine.

Andrew Sullivan also endorsed misleading the American people about the first Bush tax cut in a 2001 New Republic column:

Some commentators–at this magazine and elsewhere–get steamed because Bush has obscured this figure [15.6%, the percentage of GDP the government will consume in 2011 under the Bush budget] or claimed his tax cut will cost less than it actually will, or because he is using Medicare surplus money today that will be needed tomorrow and beyond. Many of these arguments have merit–but they miss the deeper point. The fact that Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smoke screen of “compassionate conservatism” shows how uphill the struggle is.

Yes, some of the time he is full of it on his economic policies. But a certain amount of B.S. is necessary for any vaguely successful retrenchment of government power in an insatiable entitlement state. Conservatives learned that lesson twice. They learned it when Ronald Reagan’s deficits proved to be an effective drag on federal spending (Stockman was right!)–in fact the only effective drag human beings have ever found. And they learned it when they tried to be honest about taking on the federal leviathan in 1994 and got creamed by Democrats striking the fear of God into every senior, child, and parent in America. Bush and Karl Rove are no dummies. They have rightly judged that, in a culture of ineluctable government expansion, where every new plateau of public spending is simply the baseline for the next expansion, a rhetorical smoke screen is sometimes necessary. I just hope the smoke doesn’t clear before the spenders get their hands on our wallets again.

Once again, it’s fine to dissemble as long as Sullivan agrees with you. With political commentators like these, it’s no wonder that American public debate is in such sorry shape.

Update 2/23 — Alterman links to my post today but fails to offer a substantive response:

Well, if I can infuriate Brendan Nyhan, here, at least I haven’t wasted my day…

Does that mean he’s conceding my point?

Update 2/24 — A reader objected that I presented Alterman’s quote out of context, so I’m including a larger quote below the fold…

(more…)

Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Iraq, called on Iraq’s politicians to “govern from the center, not the ideological extremes,” in a Los Angeles Times op-ed on Feb. 12, and called again for elected leaders in Iraq to “govern from the center” during an interview with the public radio show “The World” that aired last night (Windows Media audio).

Preach on, Ambassador! It’s terrible when governments divide the country by playing to their base rather than being inclusive and seeking to represent all citizens. Oh, wait…

Who says the Durham economy doesn’t benefit from having Duke here? This ad, from today’s Duke Chronicle, would make Adam Smith proud:

Pat Sellers, a political science professor at Davidson College, is running an innovative election simulation in which two teams of students are battling in a mock campus-wide election. One team created a female Republican played by a post office employee, and the other decided to run a fictionalized version of “Saved by the Bell” character Zach Morris as the Democrat. Students at the college will vote on Feb. 22.

The best part is the attack ads created by the students, which the college has put online — they’re surprisingly realistic-looking and at the same time a kind of meta-commentary on the genre (all links to Real Player video):

For an anti-Zach Morris ad, click here.
For a pro-Zach Morris ad, click here.
For a pro-Spencer ad, click here.
For an anti-Spencer ad, click here.
For an anti-Morris ad prepared by the outside class “interest group,” click here.
For an anti-Spencer ad prepared by the outside class “interest group,” click here.

Check them out.

Many of the so-called “Bushisms” on Slate are misleading, but this quote from the AP is real and actually made me laugh:

I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company.

Update 2/21: The White House transcript puts it better:

I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British [sic] company.

Guess the administration isn’t altering transcripts today. (To my surprise, it turns out there are lots of “[sic]” annotations in White House transcripts.)

Ken Waight of the valuable Lying in Ponds website, which codes the partisan content of pundit columns, notes a landmark:

Dreams really do come true. After analyzing 270 achingly predictable Molly Ivins columns over the past three years here at Lying in Ponds, I was shocked last week when it finally happened. Number 271, entitled “Not. Backing. Hillary.“, was her first “crossover column”, defined here as a substantive column (at least five positive or negative partisan references) in which the number of references favorable to the other party or unfavorable to one’s own party exceed those going in the usual direction. Ms. Ivins made 13 Republican-leaning references by seriously ripping Hillary Clinton and other Democrats she derided as “pragmatic folk”. Molly being Molly, she may not be capable of writing a simple column criticizing her own party — she also generated 12 Democratic-leaning references by praising Eugene McCarthy and other Democrats and criticizing the usual Republican suspects.

270 in a row! Unbelievable.

Via Wonkette, here’s the Washington Post children’s section KidsPost explaining Dick Cheney’s PR dilemma to the tykes:

Imagine this: You’re playing baseball with your brother when you accidentally hit him in the eye with the ball. You go inside, and the sitter gets ice for your brother’s eye. Your mom is at work, but you don’t call to tell her. Maybe that’s because you are worried about your brother, or maybe you don’t think it’s a big deal, or maybe you know you might be in trouble, even though you didn’t mean to hurt anyone.

If you can imagine that situation, you might be able to imagine the kind of week that Vice President Richard Cheney has had.

Hitting someone in the eye with a baseball, shooting a man in the face — what’s the difference anyway?

(The KidsPost setup is all too reminiscent of the immortal “Who broke my window?” commercial from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the 1980s. If only it had worked on Dick Cheney…)

Update 2/20: Writing on National Review Online’s Media Blog, Stephen Spruiell slams the KidsPost article:

So if Dick Cheney is the little kid, the White House press corps is supposed to be his MOM!!!? I can handle slanted narratives and distortions in the A-section, but putting political agendas in the news for kids?

Well, I don’t like the metaphor, but I think the American people are supposed to be the ultimate authority figure given that Dick Cheney works for us. The media are just the conduit.

Also, this is a good example of how the ideological press churns out reflexive accusations of media bias. If anything, the KidsPost article minimizes Cheney’s accident by comparing it to hitting a kid with a baseball. Nonetheless, National Review Online accuses the Post of having a “political agenda.” It’s absurd.

President Bush’s consultation with anti-global warming nut/writer Michael Crichton, which I criticized earlier this week, was picked up in the New York Times today:

In his new book about Mr. Bush, “Rebel in Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush,” Fred Barnes recalls a visit to the White House last year by Michael Crichton, whose 2004 best-selling novel, “State of Fear,” suggests that global warming is an unproven theory and an overstated threat.

Mr. Barnes, who describes Mr. Bush as “a dissenter on the theory of global warming,” writes that the president “avidly read” the novel and met the author after Karl Rove, his chief political adviser, arranged it. He says Mr. Bush and his guest “talked for an hour and were in near-total agreement.”
“The visit was not made public for fear of outraging environmentalists all the more,” he adds.

And so it has, fueling a common perception among environmental groups that Mr. Crichton’s dismissal of global warming, coupled with his popularity as a novelist and screenwriter, has undermined efforts to pass legislation intended to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas that leading scientists say causes climate change.

Mr. Crichton, whose views in “State of Fear” helped him win the American Association of Petroleum Geologists’ annual journalism award this month, has been a leading doubter of global warming and last September appeared before a Senate committee to argue that the supporting science was mixed, at best.

“This shows the president is more interested in science fiction than science,” Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, said after learning of the White House meeting. Mr. O’Donnell’s group monitors environmental policy.

“This administration has put no limit on global warming pollution and has consistently rebuffed any suggestion to do so,” he said.

Not so, according to the White House, which said Mr. Barnes’s book left a false impression of Mr. Bush’s views on global warming.

Michele St. Martin, a spokeswoman for the Council on Environmental Quality, a White House advisory agency, pointed to several speeches in which Mr. Bush had acknowledged the impact of global warming and the need to confront it, even if he questioned the degree to which humans contribute to it.

Robert Novak claims this week that John McCain’s Straight Talk America PAC has obtained access to President Bush’s direct mail list:

Major political contributors to George W. Bush who have never given a dime to prospective 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain received letters, dated Feb. 8, asking for donations to the senator’s Straight Talk America political action committee.

Obviously using President Bush’s direct mail list, the letter signed by McCain asks for $1,000 or $1,500 to support candidates agreeing with McCain on “key issues.” It specifically lists “limiting federal spending, immigration reform, military readiness, global climate change, Social Security reform, reining-in lobbyists, reducing the power of the special interests and putting an end to wasteful pork barrel spending by Congress.”

Each recipient received a card to be filled in for McCain’s files. “I’m asking you to update your file card,” requests the letter, though the Bush contributors had no previous card in the senator’s files.

Did President Bush sell or give McCain his list? I highly doubt it. It’s more likely that McCain used publicly available information to target major Bush donors, or purchased another list that overlaps with the Bush donor list. Still, it will be interesting to say how many Bush donors jump on board the McCain train…