Brendan Nyhan

Via Wonkette, Crooks and Liars has posted a devastating Democratic ad that mocks Jeanine Pirro’s 32-second pause during her announcement speech. This race may be over before it begins…

Following up on my post from yesterday, the NARAL ad against John Roberts is already drawing criticism from prominent NARAL allies:

Within the larger liberal coalition of which Naral is a part, there was considerable uneasiness about the advertisement, although leaders of other groups generally refused to speak on the record. One who did, Frances Kissling, the longtime president of Catholics for a Free Choice, said she was “deeply upset and offended” by the advertisement, which she called “far too intemperate and far too personal.”

Ms. Kissling, who initiated the conversation with a reporter, said the ad “does step over the line into the kind of personal character attack we shouldn’t be engaging in.”

She added: “As a pro-choice person, I don’t like being placed on the defensive by my leaders. Naral should pull it and move on.”

Walter Dellinger, a former acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration and longtime Naral supporter, sent a letter on Wednesday to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and its ranking Democrat, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, respectively. Mr. Dellinger said he had disagreed with Mr. Roberts’s argument in the Bray case but considered it unfair to give “the impression that Roberts is somehow associated with clinic bombers.” He added that “it would be regrettable if the only refutation of these assertions about Roberts came from groups opposed to abortion rights.”

NARAL has also issued a lengthy rebuttal to the Factcheck.org analysis of the ad. I’m not familiar with some of the legal points in dispute, but NARAL certainly does not refute Factcheck’s claim that the thrust of the ad is misleading.

Via Mickey Kaus, Mark Blumenthal, aka the Mystery Pollster, has a great post showing that the decline in President Bush’s approval numbers during 2005 shows up in almost every major national poll. It is not an artifact of any one poll, as some have claimed.

Though she’s not well known statewide, Jeanine Pirro could potentially make Hillary Clinton work a little bit in her Senate re-election race. In principle, Pirro fits the perfect profile for a Hillary opponent — a moderate, pro-choice woman. This allows her to portray Hillary as too liberal and neutralizes any advantage Clinton might gain with women, especially on the choice issue. Plus she has the pledge issue on her side and could raise millions from direct mail if the race is close.

But the problem is that Pirro is not necessarily as a very strong candidate. That has set the initial storyline for the press, as we saw today in the New York Times story on her announcement, which — as Ian McDonald pointed out to me — contains a couple of jabs at Pirro for being unprepared and less than forthcoming. Check out this lead:

Decrying Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “empty promises,” Jeanine F. Pirro got her 2006 Senate campaign off to a fiery but rocky start today, broadly attacking Mrs. Clinton in a speech but struggling with questions about abortion, taxes, Iraq and her husband.

The NYT reporter also timed a pause in the middle of the speech when Pirro was missing a page in her text – yikes:

Ms. Pirro appeared poised during her first interaction with reporters today, even during a 32-second pause, mid-speech, as she searched for a page of text. “Could I have Page 10?” she asked an aide, Michael McKeon, who provided the text and said later that she had been writing until the last minute and left that page in another room.

Pirro is also getting bad press for flip-flopping on past issues and dodging questions, particularly about her husband, who apparently has a checkered past. Not a good start. If this becomes the storyline — rather than critical coverage of Hillary — Pirro has no chance.

A brief note on the strange customs of legislator-to-legislator campaign donations.

Peter Hardin has an article on Senator George Allen’s fundraising for his 2006 re-election campaign. Allen already has more than $5 million in the bank — and no opponent. That means that, like Hillary Clinton, he is likely to have millions of dollars left over that he can plough into his 2008 presidential campaign.

So here’s the puzzle. Allen is likely to run for president. Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, is likely to do so as well. Yet Frist’s PAC gave Allen $10,000 — money that Allen may use in the primaries against Frist! Why? My guess is that this is some sort of mutual back-scratching in which Frist repays Allen for heading the National Republican Senatorial Committee last cycle.

(It’s also worth noting that Allen’s report show signs of potential early 2008 support from top conservatives, including donors such as former Colorado Senate candidate Peter Coors of Colorado, Jerry Falwell’s wife, former White House operative Mary Matalin and former independent counsel Ken Starr. For more on Allen, see my previous posts about him.)

Via Kevin Drum, here’s an excellent post from my friend Chris Mooney on the way USA Today has taken the awful “he said”/”she said” approach to journalism (which we denounce in ATPS) and applied it to op-eds:

Just because your editorial page takes a stance in favor of evolution, that doesn’t mean you have to publish nonsense as a rejoinder. But USA Today just did that today with this op-ed, from a Utah Republican (not a scientist), which has the gall to claim: “There is zero scientific fossil evidence that demonstrates organic evolutionary linkage between primates and man.” Absolutely outrageous…

[W]hile the op-ed page may be the place for airing a range of opinions, it is emphatically not the place for the airing of falsehoods and misinformation. This is a classic example of “balance” run amuck.

Indeed. Drum notes the ugly implications of this kind of pseudo-journalism:

When USA Today runs an article on September 26th about the 100th anniversary of the Theory of Relativity, as I hope they do, will they feel obligated to print a rebuttal from one of the many crackpots on the web who say that Einstein was wrong? I suspect not. Why then, do they feel the same need with evolution, which, if anything, rests on a more solid evidentiary foundation than relativity?

It’s a mystery. Perhaps in the future, instead of reporting on actual science, USA Today will simply take a poll and publish one of its cute graphics telling us what the majority of the citizenry believes. Then we can teach that in our public schools instead of just parroting the politically correct line from the liberal elites in our scientific establishment. Happy days!

According to the New York Times, Senate Judiciary chairman Arlen Specter wrote a letter to Supreme Court nominee John Roberts that “raises pointed questions about two recent court decisions invalidating legislation Congress passed under its authority to regulate interstate commerce.”

Chuck Schumer’s reaction? To act like he made up the idea, and refer to himself in the third person: “‘Arlen Specter sounds exactly like Chuck Schumer,’ said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York and a member of the Judiciary Committee.”

Or as The Hotline headlined the item, “Why Everything In Life Points To Chuck Schumer.”

Let the interest group hysteria begin!

NARAL, playing the role of the middle school crowd that taunts kids into fighting each other, has released a nasty ad that “accuses Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. of siding with violent extremists and a convicted clinic bomber while serving in the solicitor general’s office,” as the Washington Post put it.

After showing a woman injured in a bombing of an abortion clinic, the ad states that “Supreme Court nominee John Roberts filed court briefs supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber,” with the announcer later adding, “America can’t afford a justice whose ideology leads him to excuse violence against other Americans.”

I have no opinion right now on the argument Roberts made to the Court — I’m not familiar with it, and I’m not a lawyer. But the implications of NARAL’s attack are troubling. Our society is based on the rule of law. That means that if a statute is being applied incorrectly, it is wrong to enforce no matter how loathsome the defendant may be. Would NARAL have the government cease to file amicus briefs on behalf of violent criminal defendants? And remember, Roberts was working for the government at the time. The brief he filed may or may not reflect his personal views.

Here’s the context the ad omits (from the Post):

The case came during a period of widespread blockades of abortion clinics, including in the Washington suburbs, and involved figures convicted of anti-clinic violence. The issue before the court in Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic , however, focused more narrowly on whether the anti-discriminatory Ku Klux Klan Act could be applied against abortion protesters.

In his oral argument before the court, Roberts said, according to a transcript of the proceedings, “The United States appears in this case not to defend petitioners’ tortious conduct, but to defend the proper interpretation” of the statute.

Roberts’s allies said his views on violence were clear from a 1986 White House memo, endorsed by Roberts when he served in the White House counsel’s office during the Reagan administration, which said violent abortion protesters should not receive special consideration for presidential pardons. “No matter how lofty or sincerely held the goal, those who resort to violence to achieve it are criminals,” the memo said.

And of course, even though the ad clearly implies Roberts was “supporting” the clinic bombers and “excuse[d]” their actions, NARAL denied this to the Post, with their president saying that “We’re not suggesting that Mr. Roberts condones clinic violence.”

Right.

The irony is that this is the same sort of black-or-white logic that liberals denounce when the shoe is on the other foot. Criticizing the execution of the war on terror doesn’t mean you support Osama bin Laden. And filing a brief against the application of a law to violent anti-abortion protestors doesn’t mean you support their actions. If we can’t make these sorts of elementary logical distinctions, our democracy is doomed.

Update 8/9: Here’s FactCheck.org on the ad:

[T]he ad misleads when it says Roberts supported a clinic bomber. It is true that Roberts sided with the bomber and many other defendants in a civil case, but the case didn’t deal with bombing at all. Roberts argued that abortion clinics who brought the suit had no right [to] use an 1871 federal anti-discrimination statute against anti-abortion protesters who tried to blockade clinics. Eventually a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court agreed, too. Roberts argued that blockades were already illegal under state law.

The images used in the ad are especially misleading. The pictures are of a clinic bombing that happened nearly seven years after Roberts signed the legal brief in question.

If you haven’t heard about him before, you should know about Andy Kindler, a comic the New York Times profiled last week who is near-legendary in the industry for mocking his colleagues:

Among those things in past years have been a joke-by-joke deconstruction of a Robin Williams HBO special and an offer of $1 million to anyone who could provide “footage of Whoopi Goldberg being humorous.”

But Mr. Kindler’s favorite target by far each year is Jay Leno, whose dominance of the late-night ratings at the expense of David Letterman he sees as a triumph of mediocrity over true comedy genius.

This year he focused on Mr. Leno’s role in the Michael Jackson trial. “The judge put a gag order on Jay Leno,” he told the crowd. “If I knew that was possible, I would have spent the last 10 years down at the courthouse.”

Needless to say, no matter how important such a booking may be to a comedian’s career, Mr. Kindler has never been on the “Tonight” show, and he said he wouldn’t accept an invitation if he received one. (A “Tonight” spokeswoman did not respond to messages asking for comment.)

Nor is he eager for more sitcom work. He calls himself a fan of the format itself and acknowledges that well-written sitcoms like “Everybody Loves Raymond” do occasionally make it onto the air. But he phrased his thoughts on the current state of television comedy in the form of a hypothetical question: “Should I go out for a guest role on ‘Will & Grace’ or should I hang myself? It’s a dilemma.”

Ben Fritz, my friend and former Spinsanity co-editor, worked with Kindler on a pilot for AMC recently, and (in my biased opinion) it was extremely funny. What’s strange is that even though celebrity snark is popular on blogs, it’s rare on TV outside of the Daily Show or late-night talk show monologues because people are so scared to make enemies. Kindler is fearless in his mockery (see his diatribes against Leno above), yet he’s likable while he does it — a hard combination to pull off. So tell your favorite cable channel to put him on the air!

PS If I haven’t mentioned it recently, Ben, who writes for Variety, also co-edits a satirical entertainment news website called Dateline Hollywood that is consistently more clever than The Onion (now sadly moribund). One of their pieces just got picked up on Gawker today.

Matthew Yglesias makes an apt point on Tapped last week about the new right-wing comic book series about a dystopian future of “ultra-liberalism,” which is part of a long series of persecution fantasies coming from the right:

It’s rather odd to see persecution fantasies coming from the right at a moment when Republicans control the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Executive Branch, the judiciary, most statehouses, and most state legislatures. And yet a right-wing persecution complex is evident to even a casual consumer of right-wing media. To hear the conservative blogs, magazines, and radio shows tell it, despite total conservative domination of the political system a coalition of liberal reporters, academics, and Hollywood stars manage to be the real governing force in America.

We’re asked by various individuals to believe that this conspiracy is so vast that it improbably includes the entirety of the American defense, intelligence, and foreign-policy apparatus as well as (needless to say) a judiciary whose membership was overwhelmingly appointed by Republicans.

And yet, given how crazy this notion is, it’s not totally crazy. Biomedical research keeps moving forward, as do gay rights. The government is getting bigger, not smaller. Endless screaming has yet to lead to invasions of even half the countries conservatives want to see overthrown. The problem, however, isn’t that a liberal conspiracy is keeping the right down. The problem is that the right’s agenda is patently unrealistic. The United States lacks the capability to implement conservatives’ favored national-security agenda. Nobody has any idea how to stem America’s slow-but-steady evolution toward greater tolerance of gays and lesbians. And the government is big primarily because it provides services people value. Most of all, the elites who run institutional conservative politics couldn’t care less about accomplishing anything on this agenda — they’re too busy staying in power and cashing in on K Street.

Ironically, the very people Liberality for All is looking to as America’s saviors are the essence of the problem. The conservative rank-and-file is being exceedingly ill-served by FOX News and right-wing talk radio. These are the outlets that ought to be sounding the alarm about the Republican Party’s abandonment of conservatism. Instead, they’ve decided to join in the party and become GOP propaganda outlets rather than bastions of ideological conservatism. Meanwhile, they seek constantly to entrench the persecution complex ever more deeply in the minds of their followers in order to allow their own betrayal to escape scrutiny.

Rush Limbaugh is a master at this game. He blames liberals for every constraint preventing the conservative wishlist from being implemented. It’s a monocausal theory of history — Karl Marx would be proud. And now liberals are starting to blame their defeats on conservative conspiracies. Everyone’s a victim, apparently, in 21st century politics.