Brendan Nyhan

NPR’s Alix Spiegel recently interviewed military psychologist Bryce Lefever, who used to work in the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program, which trained US military personnel to resist brutal interrogation techniques including waterboarding. Toward the end of the interview, Lefever argued that the “real ethical consideration” governing interrogation practices is to do “the most good for the most people” — the language of utilitarianism:

SPIEGEL: Like many of the psychologists who were involved in some way with these interrogations, Lefever now says that he wasn’t completely in favor of using the methods. He preferred what’s called rapport-building techniques, and thought that the harsher methods, if known, could damage America’s image. Still, Lefever says, he feels that the psychologists involved are being unjustly vilified, characterized by the press as unethical in a completely unfair way.

Dr. LEFEVER: The press loves to report something provocative. And psychologists were supposed to be do-gooders. You know, the idea that they would be involved in producing some pain just seems to be, you know, at first blush, something that would be wrong because we do no harm. But the real ethical consideration would say, well, by producing pain or questioning of somebody, if it does the most good for the most people, it’s entirely ethical, and to do otherwise would be unethical.

SPIEGEL: Now, let’s pause for just a second. This description of ethical obligation is not something you would hear from a civilian psychologist. For a civilian psychologist, the only concern is the patient, the person sitting in front of you. But according to Lefever, this group of military psychologists saw things very differently.

Dr. LEFEVER: The ethical consideration is always to do the most good for the most people. And America happens to be my client. Americans are who I care about. I have no fondness for the enemy, and I don’t feel like I need to take care of their mental health needs.

This sort of reasoning is chilling coming from a doctor. Modern medicine is fundamentally non-utilitarian in its practices. Both civilian and military doctors try to help the sick regardless of whether it is costly or difficult to do so — a practice may not comply with the dictate to do “the most good for the most people.” Anyone who has taken an introductory philosophy course would be familiar with the ethical dilemmas that utilitarian reasoning creates. Is it time for the military to send their doctors back to school?

Has any recent party-endorsed legislation been promoted as disingenuously as “The Keep Terrorists Out of America Act”? The PR campaign for the bill falsely suggests that the Obama administration is going to turn dangerous Al Qaeda terrorists from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility loose on U.S. soil.

For instance, a National Republican Senatorial Committee web ad that I saw tonight on the Drudge Report asks whether captured top Al Qaeda leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammad are “[c]oming soon to a neighborhood near you” and suggests that Obama may be considering “Housing Terrorists in your area” (not “imprisoning” or some other more appropriate term):

In a reflection of the intellectual seriousness of the endeavor, the ad’s disclosure statement has two typos and the one-page website it links to has a giant misspelling in the banner graphic:

The title of the ad’s website is “Help Stay Protected From Gitmo Detainees,” but the same (il)logic applies to virtually any dangerous criminal who has been imprisoned. Republican governors, for instance, also “house” murderers and evildoers in “a neighborhood near you” whenever they build a new prison or transfer prisoners around their states. I look forward to the GOP’s efforts to protect the country from this dangerous menace.

Matthew Yglesias flags a bizarre argument by the Heritage Foundation’s Dan Holler against comparative effectiveness research on health care:

Second, the administration is pushing for Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) to be primarily organized by the government. The type of information collected by CER could eventually be used inappropriately if a “Federal Health Board” was created to decide which types of treatment would be available to whom and when. Most Americans, and many people who are on government-run health care, are skeptical that unaccountable and unreachable government bureaucrats can improve the quality of their health care.

Is Holler aware that there is a “Federal Health Board” that “decide[s] which types of treatment would be available to whom and when”? It’s called the Food and Drug Administration. (One can’t take policy expertise as a given when it comes to Heritage staff and “experts.”)

Assuming that Holler is aware of the FDA, he appears to be attempting to imply that more draconian medical regulations are going to be implemented as a result of comparative effectiveness research. But as Yglesias and Ezra Klein point out, this hypothetical scenario is both unlikely and poorly thought out. How, exactly, does research on the costs and benefits of health care lead to restrictive bans on medical practice?

Think Progress buries the lede in a post about how Rush Limbaugh echoed the absurd accusation of Rep. Pete Sessions that President Obama is intentionally increasing unemployement. In the same quotation from his show, Limbaugh states that Obama supports “forced reparations” — a phrase which suggests that the nation’s first black president supports reparations to the descendants of slaves (audio via Media Matters):

LIMBAUGH: As the economy performs worse than expected, the deficit for the 2010 budget year beginning in October will worsen by $87 billion to $1.3 trillion. The deterioration reflects lower tax revenues and higher costs for bank failures, unemployment benefits and food stamps. But in the Oval Office of the White House none of this is a problem. This is the objective. The objective is unemployment. The objective is more food stamp benefits. The objective is more unemployment benefits. The objective is an expanding welfare state. And the objective is to take the nation’s wealth and return to it to the nation’s quote, “rightful owners.” Think reparations. Think forced reparations here if you want to understand what actually is going on.

Contrary to Limbaugh’s suggestion, however, Obama has consistently opposed reparations for slavery.

I try to avoid blogging about entertainers, but there’s no avoiding the fact that what comedian Wanda Sykes said about Rush Limbaugh at the White House Correspondents Association dinner was loathsome (video):

“Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails,” Sykes said. “So you’re saying, ‘I hope America fails’, you’re, like, ‘I don’t care about people losing their homes, their jobs, our soldiers in Iraq’. He just wants the country to fail. To me, that’s treason He’s not saying anything differently than what Osama bin Laden is saying. You know, you might want to look into this, sir, because I think Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker. But he was just so strung out on OxyContin he missed his flight.”

Sykes then said, “Rush Limbaugh, I hope the country fails, I hope his kidneys fail, how about that? He needs a good waterboarding, that’s what he needs.”

Adopting the language of GOP attacks on dissent since 9/11, Sykes equates Limbaugh’s political speech with treason and compares him to a terrorist. Like many conservative talk show hosts, she also uses aggressive language expressing a desire for a political opponent to be physically harmed — specifically for Limbaugh’s kidneys to fail and for him to be waterboarded. This echoes the practice of many conservative hosts who make “jokes” about waterboarding liberals.

What’s striking is how liberals — who were frequently outraged about accusations of treason during the Bush years — have sought to downplay Sykes’s comments. Time’s Joe Klein called it “just comedy”. TPM’s Josh Marshall posted a reader email arguing that Bush’s routine about lost WMDs was more offensive. And Media Matters, which documents conservative attacks on dissent in excruciating detail, has posted multiple articles criticizing the conservative response to Sykes while minimizing or ignoring the content of what MM’s Eric Boehlert called “a couple jokes at the expense of Rush Limbaugh.”

Of course, as Media Matters and Tapped’s Adam Serwer pointed out, Limbaugh makes similarly offensive “jokes” on his show attacking dissent and comparing liberals to terrorists. And yes, he is far more powerful and influential than Sykes. But if it’s wrong when Limbaugh does it, then it’s wrong when Sykes does it too.

The hypocrisy here is staggering (especially in the Media Matters case). Imagine that a conservative comedian had accused Keith Olbermann of treason at the WHCA dinner back in 2004 and said he should be waterboarded. Would liberals have minimized the comments as “jokes” and catalogued all the offensive things Olbermann has said on his show? I don’t think so.

Update 5/12 12:49 PM — Matthew Yglesias comments on my last paragraph above:

But these aren’t symmetrical cases. Jokes advocating that conservative proponents of waterboarding should be subjected to waterboarding make a real political point, namely that this practice the right dismisses as “dunking” is, in fact, horrifying torture. The point of the joke is that this would be clear enough to Limbaugh if it was done to him. A comparable case, I guess, is if a conservative comedian were to say “if Keith Olbermann likes higher taxes on the wealthy so much, then he should have to pay higher income taxes, too!” But I don’t think Olbermann or his fans would find that particularly stinging since I take it he already understands the basic implications of Obama’s tax policies.

First of all, it’s not clear that Sykes was making a point about Limbaugh’s support for waterboarding — if that was her intent, she didn’t make it especially obvious. The more general point was calling for physical harm to Limbaugh, which was quite clear (Yglesias omits all of the other offensive things Sykes said). And of course my point stands regardless of the particular point about waterboarding. Let’s imagine instead that a comedian had “joked” about Olbermann being a terrorist and hoping his vital organs fail. I ask again: would liberals have minimized the comments as “jokes” and catalogued all the offensive things Olbermann has said on his show? Obviously not.

Update 5/12 2:25 PM — Yglesias adds the following in a gracious update to his post:

In an updated version of the post, Nyhan focuses his ire on the accusing Limbaugh of treason point. Fair enough — people shouldn’t accuse Limbaugh of treason. That’s not much of a joke. Likewise for the terrorist business.

While I stand by my claim that the significance of Arlen Specter’s party switch has been exaggerated, it’s still interesting to see how his voting patterns have changed since he defected from the GOP caucus.

Stanford’s Simon Jackman has estimated an ideal point model for the 111th Senate treating Specter as a new legislator since the switch. Though Specter’s verbal statements about “card check,” health care reform, and the Minnesota Senate race have provoked a backlash among his new party, his roll call votes so far actually place him to the left of twelve Senate Dems (though, as Jackman emphasizes, there is still a great deal of uncertainty in the estimate):

Given the prospect of a competitive Democratic primary in 2010, I’d guess Specter will continue to move left. The fact that he is an unprincipled hack should help facilitate this process.

As someone who grew up watching WWF when the heels were often Russian or Middle Eastern cultural stereotypes, it’s fascinating (though not wholly suprising) that Mexican pro wrestling, which is known as “lucha libre,” has created anti-immigrant villains known as the Foreign Legion:

It was billed as an invasion. On a chartered tour bus carrying two dozen fighters, promoters of the wrestling style known as lucha libre rode through California last month to stage matches replete with the colorful masks, sexual slapstick and frenetic, acrobatic fighting style that have propelled their sport to rival soccer for popularity in Mexico. The headliners were long-haired, muscle-bound and handsome, promising crossover material for the American market.

But in the heart of the fight card, a deeper conflict played on the racial tensions and stereotypes of a downtrodden immigrant audience. Among the wrestlers, the vilest of the vile were the members of La Legíon Extranjera, the Foreign Legion, gringos who openly disparaged the spectators, their language and their country. The invasion, in this sense, referred to the chance for the Mexican heroes to drive out the Foreign Legion.

Just as American wrestling leagues enjoyed broad popularity in the waning days of the cold war with villainous Soviet characters like Nikolai Volkoff and Krusher Khrushchev, the lucha libre promoters have tailored their story line to the times. With immigration policy and the violent Mexican drug wars consuming the attention of policy makers, the cartoonish confrontation of north and south in the ring has found an eager audience in California, home to 37 percent of the nearly 12 million Mexicans estimated by the nonprofit Migration Policy Institute to be living in the United States.

Last month, I mocked two especially stupid bills in the House of Representatives. The first opposes the US dropping the dollar and the second opposes creation of a NAFTA superhighway. Unfortunately, both bills are based on misperceptions (see here and here, respectively). At the time, I dubbed the members of the House who sponsored or cosponsored both bills “The Congressional myth caucus.” Well, it’s time to give nine of them a promotion.

As Jon Stewart pointed out on the Daily Show, Rep. Pete Hoekstra has introduced a constitutional amendment to protect parents’ rights based on the supposed threat posed by the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been signed by every country except the US and Somalia. The supposed threat to parents’ rights posed by the treaty is, as Stewart puts it, “Sh*t that’s never going to happen.” Here’s the clip:

When we compare the cosponsorship list for Hoekstra’s amendment with the list of supporters of the other two bills, we can construct a new list of nine representatives who sponsored or cosponsored all three bills. Here they are — the elite members of the Congressional myth caucus:

Michelle Bachmann (R-MN)
Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD)
Paul Broun (R-GA)
Mary Fallin (R-OK)
Trent Franks (R-AZ)
Phil Gingrey (R-GA)
Kenny Marchant (R-TX)
Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI)

Zach Wamp (R-TN)

However, the list has at least one notable exception — Rep. Bill Posey, a freshman member from Florida. In addition to cosponsoring the phony dollar-protection resolution, Posey has introduced legislation that would
require presidential candidates to provide their birth certificate. The bill is inspired by the misperception that Barack Obama has a forged birth certificate and is not an American citizen, a topic on which Posey refused to express an opinion, saying he hadn’t “looked at the evidence.” Stephen Colbert provided an amusing response to Posey’s insinuations during a segment in March and a followup segment in April:

Incidentally, Posey’s bill is so outlandish that it has attracted zero cosponsors — not even Michelle Bachmann, the sponsor of the dollar resolution who was last seen trying to insinuate that Democratic presidents are somehow responsible for swine flu. When a bill like this doesn’t attract Bachmann’s support, you know it’s bad.

One more note on the importance of counterfactual reasoning in the debate over the effectiveness of torture, which I’ve recently highlighted in two posts (here and here). In a Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross that I only heard recently, New York Times reporter Scott Shane offered the most detailed exposition of this point that I’ve seen thus far (my emphasis):

GROSS: And you write that even the most exacting truth commission may have a hard time determining for certain whether brutal interrogations conducted by the CIA helped keep the country safe. Why do you think it will be so hard to determine for sure if these techniques actually resulted in information that helped deter a terrorist plots?

SHANE: Well, I think, if there’s strong evidence that valuable information came from this program and ultimately led to the capture of a lot of key al-Qaida leaders and that probably prevented future attacks – but whether these particular methods were necessary to get that information is a very different question. It’s, sort of an uncontrolled experiment. They used these methods and they got the information. Many experienced FBI and military interrogators will tell you that they believe you could have gotten the same information, possibly more information, using traditional rapport building methods. They don’t think these harsh methods were necessary and they think they risked producing false information as well.

I would like to believe that other journalists have thought through the issue as carefully as Shane, but it’s unlikely — the counterfactual reasoning that is necessary to evaluate causal claims is not well understood even among quantitative social scientists.

As a political scientist, it’s often frustrating to see Nate Silver being treated as an expert in the quantitative study of politics. Silver is obviously very bright, but he is a blogger who can run regressions and make charts, not a trained social scientist. As a result, while I like his energy and his quantitative approach, I typically find his analyses to be ad hoc and lacking any grounding in previous research.

Here’s a recent example. A few days ago, he wrote a post that compared the voting records of Senator Arlen Specter and Rep. Joe Sestak, who might challenge Specter in the 2010 Democratic Senate primary. To do so, Silver used the DW-NOMINATE scores developed by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal. Specifically, he compared the post-switch DW-NOMINATE score he projected (rather arbitrarily) for Specter with Sestak’s DW-NOMINATE score in the 110th Congress. The problem is that DW-NOMINATE scores are not comparable between chambers, which Silver would know if he had used them for research purposes. (Poole has developed other algorithms which generate scores that can be compared across chambers.) Even if you accept Silver’s questionable projection methodology, the whole exercise — which was cited by Josh Marshall — is simply invalid.

If you like Silver’s work and are interested in analytical blogging about politics, I would also recommend the work of top political scientist bloggers like Charles Franklin, Nolan McCarty, Andrew Gelman, and the folks at The Monkey Cage.