Unfair liberal counterattack / Guilt-by-association season (5/20)

By Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan

During the past year, a number of liberal groups have begun to move aggressively to counter conservative influence in the media. One of the newest participants in this effort, a group called Media Matters for America, has already demonstrated its willingness to use unfair standards and faulty evidence to attack its opponents.

In the last few weeks, the Bush administration has twice attacked political opponents by connecting them to hated figures. (Read the whole column.)

5/20/2004 05:53:54 AM EST |

The White House association game (5/17)

By Brendan Nyhan

In the last few weeks, the Bush administration has twice engaged in the increasingly popular tactic of unfairly connecting one's political opponents to hated figures.

Most recently, in a letter to the editor published Saturday in the Washington Post, Lawrence Di Rita, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs in the Department of Defense, compared the newspaper to the soldiers accused of mistreating prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison outside Baghdad. His evidence? The fact that in a recent editorial the Post raised questions about the relationship between the administration's policies and what took place at the prison.

On May 12, the Post argued that new US government procedures for "harsh" prisoner interrogation such as hooding, sleep deprivation and forcing prisoners to maintain awkward or painful positions violate the Geneva Conventions and "contributed to the criminal abuse of prisoners in Iraq." The editorial included this passage:

[Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen A.] Cambone made no attempt to reconcile his claim of U.S. adherence to international law with the actual procedures his office has helped to promulgate [in his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee]. Instead he insisted that the crimes at Abu Ghraib -- which, though they went beyond the established practices, were based on the same principles -- were the responsibility of the guards and their commanders, and not the intelligence-gathering system. In this he was contradicted by the witness sitting next to him, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who repeated the conclusion of his own investigation: that the practices were introduced by intelligence interrogators who were improperly placed in command of the guards.

Di Rita responded with a letter that directly likened the paper to those who now face court-martials for their actions:

The Post's continued editorializing on narrow definitions of international laws and whether our soldiers understand them puts The Post in the same company as those involved in this despicable behavior in terms of apparent disregard for basic human dignity.

The Post editorial offers little support for such an extreme characterization. Comparing the paper to prison guards accused of illegal mistreatment of prisoners on the basis of a single editorial is a ridiculous and unfair attempt to silence criticism.

Di Rita's letter echoes a recent statement by Bush advisor Karen Hughes. During an April 25 appearance on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer," she took a question about the importance of abortion in the 2004 presidential campaign and connected support for the right to abortion to the beliefs of Al Qaeda, unfairly suggesting that abortion rights supporters share the values of terrorists:

BLITZER: There is a clear difference when it comes to abortion rights between the president and his Democratic challenger, John Kerry. In your opinion, Karen, how big of an issue will this abortion rights issue be in this campaign?

HUGHES: Well, Wolf, it's always an issue. And I frankly think it's changing somewhat. I think after September 11th the American people are valuing life more and realizing that we need policies to value the dignity and worth of every life.

And President Bush has worked to say, let's be reasonable, let's work to value life, let's try to reduce the number of abortions, let's increase adoptions.

And I think those are the kind of policies that the American people can support, particularly at a time when we're facing an enemy, and really the fundamental difference between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life. It's the founding conviction of our country, that we're endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, the right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Unfortunately our enemies in the terror network, as we're seeing repeatedly in the headlines these days, don't value any life, not even the innocent and not even their own.

These two statements share a common thread - both Di Rita and Hughes seek to manufacture associations between the administration's political opponents and hated groups, thereby tilting political debates in the White House's favor. Such disreputable tactics have no place in American political debate.

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Related links:
-Axing the tough questions (Brendan Nyhan, 5/21/02)
-Closing Down Debate: Ashcroft's Attack on Dissent (Bryan Keefer, 12/10/01)
-Spinsanity on terrorist labels and Taliban/Iraq comparisons

5/17/2004 06:31:37 AM EST |

Cheap attacks on patriotism (5/13)

By Brendan Nyhan

During two recent interviews, prominent figures on the right and left have engaged in cheap attacks on the patriotism of their opponents.

First to strike was the editor of the New York Post, Col. Allan, in comments last month to the New York Observer about his competitors at the New York Daily News:

Somebody sure is a propaganda sheet, said Post editor-in-chief, Col. Allan. The folks at the Daily News, he said, "are becoming more and more determined to attack the Bush administration. They are doing so with increasing shrillness."

Mr. Allan said such partisanship reflects poorly on his competition. "Frankly, I think it's borderline disloyal," he said.

Allan's remarks are a classic attempt to suggest that those who offer criticism or critical coverage of the government are traitors who betray the country - a particularly disturbing comment from the editor of a newspaper.

More recently, in an interview with the Spanish language network Telemundo, Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, slammed President Bush and Vice President Cheney for not serving in the Vietnam War. She said, "To have a couple of people, who escaped four, five, six times and deferred and deferred and deferred calling him anything regarding his service is in and of itself unpatriotic. Unpatriotic." (Fox News reported that "She added that she was referring to Cheney's lack of military service and to the attacks from the Bush campaign on various aspects of the Vietnam service of her husband.") But as the Associated Press points out, Bush and Cheney have criticized Kerry's record on defense issues, not his service in the Navy, though Bush advisor Karen Hughes has questioned Kerry's honesty in suggesting that medals he threw at a later protest against the war were his. Heinz Kerry's attack echoes the Kerry campaign's false claims that criticism of his defense record is equivalent to an attack on his patriotism.

Calling someone unpatriotic is an especially serious charge, but lately it has become just another tool for partisans to silence criticism they don't like.

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Related links:
-The misreported jobs projection / Attacks on Kerry's patriotism? (Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan, 2/26/04) [Published in the Philadelphia Inquirer]

5/13/2004 06:02:42 AM EST |

One of these things is not like the other (5/13)

By Brendan Nyhan

In a "Scrapbook" item in the new edition of the Weekly Standard (subscription required), the conservative magazine indulges in the laziest form of guilt by association.

Under the headline "When Men Shall Say All Manner of Evil Against You Falsely," the Standard writes, "Separated at birth?" and then reprints the two following quotes:

I have some reservations about people who have never been in the face of battle, so to speak, who are making cavalier decisions about sending men and women out to die. A person who comes immediately to mind in that regard is Richard Perle, who, thank God, tendered his resignation and no longer will be even a semiofficial person in this administration. . . . I call them utopians. I don't care whether utopians are Vladimir Lenin on a sealed train to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz. Utopians, I don't like. You're never going to bring utopia, and you're going to hurt a lot of people in the process of trying to do it.

-State Department chief of staff Larry Wilkerson, quoted by GQ, May 4

Now when President Bush became the president, many of these people came into government: . . . Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of state . . . Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon. And it's interesting that he had a nickname titled "the prince of darkness" . . . Now, the thinking of these neoconservatives is written of in scripture. In the book of Revelations 2 and 9 it reads, "'I know the blasphemy of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.'"

-Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan at the National Press Club, May 3

Of course, the headline "Separated at birth?" is supposed to suggest that Wilkerson, the chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, is somehow similar to Farrakhan. But the Standard provides no argument for why Wilkerson's comments have anything to do with Farrakhan's anti-Semitic innuendo. Instead, it crudely juxtaposes the two statements based solely on the fact that both criticized Wolfowitz and Perle at approximately the same time. Is this what passes for journalism these days?

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5/13/2004 05:54:58 AM EST |

Abu Ghraib: Abuse from all sides (5/13)

By Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan

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5/13/2004 12:23:03 AM EST |

A battle of donkeys and chicken hawks (5/6)

By Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan

The Bush campaign is once again using a vote against a huge appropriations bill to make it appear that John Kerry opposed one of its specific provisions, this time funding of body armor for soldiers. Meanwhile, Senator Frank Lautenberg is the latest Democrat to use the label "chicken hawk" to tar Republicans and avoid substantive criticism of Kerry's record on national security issues. (Read the whole column.)

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5/6/2004 01:00:41 AM EST |

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