Brendan Nyhan

Mickey Kaus explains a universal law of politics to Warren Beatty and Rob Reiner:

They don’t like you! They really don’t like you! Warren Beatty and Rob Reiner aren’t nearly as popular as their backers thought they were, according to the latest Field Poll. Beatty’s rating is 40% unfavorable/27% favorable–among Democrats! Yikes. .. Reiner is at least more popular than unpopular within his own party, but overall his unfavorables outweigh his favorables among independents (34/24) and overall (41/25). … Prediction: The eye-opening poll will get little coverage in the LAT. Too interesting! If it does, the Times will give it the obvious interpretation–that California voters have soured on actors-turned-politicos. But maybe they’ve especially (and unexpectedly) soured on Hollywood liberals. … P.S.: Light up, California! Reiner previously promoted a victorious state initiative that taxes cigarette sales to fund early childhood health and nutrition projects. He’s now so addicted to the cigarette money that he’s opposing an initiative to slap a further tax on cigarettes (to fund emergency rooms) because it might decrease cigarette sales and threaten the funding for his pet programs. …

Last night, Dick Cheney also said this:

American soldiers and Marines serving in Iraq go out every day into some of the most dangerous and unpredictable conditions. Meanwhile, back in the United States, a few politicians are suggesting these brave Americans were sent into battle for a deliberate falsehood. This is revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety. It has no place anywhere in American politics, much less in the United States Senate.

Again, see chapter 8 of All the President’s Spin for more on the falsehoods that were used to make the case for war. And under “revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety,” of course, one might file the administration’s post-war campaign to spin its pre-war claims and twist the evidence about what was found in Iraq, which we lay out in great detail in chapter 9 of ATPS.

Let’s consider one man’s post-war campaign of revisionism and deception: Dick Cheney. In April 2003, trailers were found that could have been used to produce biological weapons. However, most intelligence experts within the US government disagreed. Nonetheless, Cheney touted them as evidence of Saddam’s weapons programs. CIA director George Tenet was forced to privately correct Cheney (p. 194). After claiming that Saddam had weapons programs before the war, Cheney and others switched to claiming Saddam had “WMD capability” (p. 196). Cheney also selectively quoted David Kay’s report on Iraqi weapons programs, twisting its conclusions (p. 200), and misleadingly cited Saddam’s possession of uranium, which was a waste product that could not be used in nuclear weapons without refinement (p. 206-207). In October 2003, he hyped the fact that there were “active terror camps in Iraq” before the war, neglecting to mention that the camps in question — those of the al Qaeda offshoot Ansar ar-Islam — were located in an area of northern Iraq that Saddam had not controlled since the Gulf War (p. 209-210). And Cheney frequently linked 9/11 and Iraq rhetorically, while continuing to float unproven suggestions of an Iraq-9/11 link as late as January 2004 (p. 215-216, 211-212).

Last night, Cheney also floated the notion that criticizing President Bush in terms he finds “untruthful” hurts the troops:

One might also argue that untruthful charges against the Commander-in-Chief have an insidious effect on the war effort itself. I’m unwilling to say that, only because I know the character of the United States Armed Forces — men and women who are fighting the war on terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other fronts.

This is yet another suggestion that dissent is somehow unpatriotic.

Yet another protestation that the Bush administration supports dissent, this time from Dick Cheney:

[Cheney] said he respected the right of Murtha to form his own opinion. Murtha has served in Congress for three decades, is a decorated Marine combat veteran from Vietnam, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations defense subcommittee and has long been an ardent defender of the armed forces.

“Nor is there any problem with debating whether the United States and its allies should have liberated Iraq in the first place,” Cheney said. “Nobody is saying we should not be having this discussion.”

Um, yes they are.

Update 11/22: Last night, RNC chair Ken Mehlman joined in the fun, saluting dissent even as he condemned it as sending “the wrong message” to our troops and the terrorists:

Many Democrats who once agreed with the President about the danger of leaving Saddam Hussein in power now want an investigation.

Maybe this investigation will reveal that they were brainwashed. Or that, like John Kerry, they were for the war before they were against it, for short-term political gain.

Either way, this kind of political doublespeak sends exactly the wrong message to our troops, to the Iraqis and to our terrorist enemies.

Ladies and gentleman, dissent is as old as America. Questioning our leaders is a patriotic act. No one is immune to criticism — not the President, and not those who are attacking him.

But now they’re trying to rewrite history. It is pure politics.

Given 9/11, it’s pretty unbelievable that support for the war in Iraq has fallen so fast:

The three most significant US wars since 1945 – Korea, Vietnam, and now Iraq – share an important trait: As casualties mounted, American public support declined.

In the two Asian wars, that decline proved irreversible. With Iraq, the additional bad news for President Bush is that support for the war in Iraq has eroded more quickly than it did in those two conflicts.

This graphic from the article sums it all up:

I’m puzzled by the debate we’re having over whether President Bush made deceptive statements before the war. In the words of Lewis Black, when did that go up for grabs?

We covered this issue (and many others) in extensive detail in All the President’s Spin. The evidence is quite clear. And we also covered many other points of contention that are cropping back up (such as, for instance, whether Bush said Iraq was an “imminent threat”).

Yet Josh Marshall is gathering prewar quotes from his readers as if no one’s gone through them before. Brad DeLong is reprinting a deceptive “imminent threat” quotation from Scott McClellan that we debunked at Spinsanity in 2004. We’re again having a pointless semantic debate over the meaning of the word “lie.” And Glenn Reynolds and other conservative pundits are claiming that there’s no evidence Bush was deceptive.

This is a tired re-run of a debate that we’ve already engaged at great length. So here’s an offer for working journalists or high-profile bloggers of any political stripe — if you would like to read ATPS, send me your address and I will send you a copy. And if you’re not a journalist and haven’t read it yet, please pick up a copy on Amazon today. It’s still the definitive guide to Bush administration spin!

Mickey Kaus points out that conservatives are purportedly warming to John McCain, and suggests that, in a general election, McCain “would come close to being elected by acclamation”:

On NBC’s Chris Matthews Show yesterday, David Brooks said conservatives had warmed to John McCain, and Matthews said he’d heard the same thing. … Let’s see. Conservatives are for McCain. Liberals like McCain. Centrists love McCain. Doesn’t that mean McCain might, er, win? Who’s going to vote against him? In a general election, it seems like McCain would come close to being elected by acclamation! It will take all the genius of the American political system to make sure he isn’t on the ballot.

But prominent conservatives like David Keene and Grover Norquist still loathe McCain, and they are major players in the GOP nomination process. Plus a substantial portion of the base doesn’t like McCain — 19% of GOP primary voters already say they would definitely not vote for him.

In addition, as I’ve shown, most Democrats would already vote against McCain in a hypothetical race against Hillary Clinton — and this is before he spends two years attacking Democrats to establish his GOP bona fides.

As soon as McCain has to run for president, his poll numbers will look like everyone else. The reason McCain looks so appealing now is that he’s never faced significant Democratic criticism. But he will soon.

Update 11/21: Atrios notes that McCain traveled to Alabama today to endorse George Wallace Jr., who has spoken four times to a racist hate group. As I wrote, his poll ratings are going to go way, way down with non-Republicans.

Washingtonmonthly.com guest blogger Steve Benen notes that President Bush again proclaimed his support for “open debate” today, contradicting the long history of post-9/11 attacks on dissent by his administration and his party.

During a brief press conference, Bush first said that “Those elected leaders in Washington who do not support our policies in Iraq have every right to voice their dissent. They also have a responsibility to provide a credible alternative. The stakes are too high, and the national interest too important, for anything otherwise.”

He later returned to the subject and made the following statement:

…[T]his is a worthy debate, and I’m going to repeat something I’ve said before. People should feel comfortable about expressing their opinions about Iraq. I heard somebody say, well, maybe so-and-so is not patriotic because they disagree with my position. I totally reject that thought. This is not an issue of who’s patriot and who’s not patriotic. It’s an issue of an honest, open debate about the way forward in Iraq.

Someone doth protest too much.

Jason Zengerle devastates the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes in this week’s New Republic. Here’s how the column begins (TNR subscription required):

Earlier this month, The New York Times and The Washington Post reported what seemed to be big news. In February 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had concluded that a captured Al Qaeda commander named Ibn Al Shaykh Al Libi was probably lying when he told debriefers that Saddam Hussein had provided chemical and biological weapons training to the terrorist group. Still, the newspapers reported that, even after this, the Bush administration used Libi’s claims to sell the war. Colin Powell touted Libi’s statements as evidence of a Saddam-Al Qaeda link in his February 2003 presentation to the United Nations; President Bush did the same in an October 2002 address to the nation.

And, yet, the news was greeted with a collective yawn. The Times buried its article on page A14, the Post on page A22. The Bush administration, meanwhile, declined to comment for either article; nor did Bush officials feel the need to address the stories in subsequent days. All of which proved that, nearly three years after the Bush administration claimed that Saddam’s ties to Al Qaeda were a primary justification for the war in Iraq, no one–not even the administration itself–is now willing to seriously argue that the dictator and the terrorist group had a meaningful relationship.

Well, no one, that is, except for Stephen Hayes. Like a Japanese soldier hiding in a cave who never got the news that the emperor had surrendered, Hayes, a writer for The Weekly Standard, continues to fight–stubbornly insisting that Saddam did, in fact, support Al Qaeda.

Media Matters catches another anti-democratic attack on dissent:

On the November 18 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy asked Fox News contributing market analyst Tobin Smith: “The Democrats’ assault on Bush, is that bad for America and the markets?” Doocy, who appeared to have read the question off a note card he was holding in his hand, said the question was “here on the card.” He then asked: “What does that mean?”

Here’s the full transcript:

DOOCY: Hey, let’s ask — we understand — it says here on the card —

SMITH: Yeah.

DOOCY: “The Democrats’ assault on Bush: Is that bad for America and the markets?” What does that mean?

SMITH: Well, we’re going to talk about it this weekend, but I’ll give you the short answer. Listen, I just want Republicans to act like Republicans. I mean, you know, the Democrat [sic] assault is one thing. The other issue is that we’ve had Republicans that have just taken a temporarily insane pill, I think, and have decided that all of a sudden that we need to tax profits and that we need to get rid of, you know, tax benefits. And I think that that combined is what really has got people sort of spooked.

In an editorial today denouncing calls for withdrawal from Iraq, the Wall Street Journal passes along a comforting tale for war supporters:

We are told that among the papers discovered along with Saddam two years ago was one saying that the Baathists-turned-terrorists will know they are winning when a candidate for President of the United States calls for withdrawal from Iraq. Saddam and Zarqawi know the real lessons of Vietnam, even if too many Members of Congress do not.

How convenient that such a document turned up! Of course, no proof is provided that it even exists. Any guesses as to who the Journal’s source was? John Bolton? Karl Rove, perhaps?