Liberal spin watch: Rangel, Kuttner, Dubner

Here's a roundup of the latest liberal nonsense in the news.

First, James Taranto notes that Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) compared the US war in Iraq to the Holocaust:

Powerful lawmaker Charlie Rangel has provoked the ire of the Anti-Defamation League by likening U.S. military action in Iraq to the Holocaust of World War II.

The Iraq war "is the biggest fraud ever committed on the people of this country. ... This is just as bad as the 6 million Jews being killed," the 74-year-old Harlem Democrat insisted during a Monday radio appearance on the WWRL-AM morning show with Steve Malzberg and Karen Hunter. "The whole world knew and they were quiet about it because it wasn't their ox being gored."

When interviewer Malzberg challenged Rangel's analogy, the congressman replied: "I am saying that people's silence when they know things terrible are happening is the same thing as the Holocaust."

Whatever you think about the war in Iraq -- which is morally ambiguous on a number of levels -- it bears no comparison to the Holocaust. The comparison is obscene.

Next, we have Bob Kuttner of the American Prospect, who wrote the following about John Kerry in the Boston Globe:

John Kerry may well give [the presidency] another shot, as the candidate who came up just one state short in 2004, perhaps due to deliberately contrived long lines that held down Democratic turnout in Ohio.

Note the carefully hedged phrasing, which allows Kuttner to suggest that the long lines in Ohio were a) "deliberately contrived" and b) prevented Kerry from winning, even though there's no convincing evidence to support either charge. Here's what the Washington Post found:

Electoral problems prevented many thousands of Ohioans from voting on Nov. 2. In Columbus, bipartisan estimates say that 5,000 to 15,000 frustrated voters turned away without casting ballots. It is unlikely that such "lost" voters would have changed the election result -- Ohio tipped to President Bush by a 118,000-vote margin and cemented his electoral college majority.

And even the Conyers report on voting in Ohio (PDF) states that "Whether the cumulative effect of these [alleged] legal violations would have altered the actual outcome is not known at this time." Absent stronger evidence, Kuttner is just casting aspersions.

Finally, there's Jeffrey Dubner of Kuttner's American Prospect, who purports to read Trent Lott's mind on Tapped (the magazine's weblog):

[T]he entire Republican caucus has cast a total of two votes against George W. Bush's nominees: Lincoln Chafee's vote last week against Priscilla Owen, and Trent Lott's vote against Roger Gregory, a Bill Clinton nominee who Bush renominated as a show of pre–September 11 good will and who was supported by John Warner and George Allen. (And Lott's vote, it would seem, was just to resist the integration of the Fourth Circuit, which had never seen an African American judge; Republicans blocked four separate African American nominees during Clinton's presidency.)

"[I]t would seem" that Lott opposed Gregory "just to resist the integration of the Fourth Circuit"? Lott has an ugly history on race and was the only senator who voted no on Gregory, but that doesn't excuse this kind of faux-psychological speculation. Without supporting evidence, it's just a blatant accusation of racism against Lott for opposing a black nominee -- the same kind of reductionism that Republicans use when attacking Democrats as bigots for opposing minority or religiously conservative judicial nominees.

Comments

[Stuart Levine]

Ok, Brendan--Why did Trent Lott vote "No?"

[Stuart Levine]

Brendan--I did a little digging on this issue. Take a look at the posting at: http://taxbiz.blogspot.com/2005/06/trent-lott-racist-or-just-hypocrite.html