June 03, 2004
Dukenfield's Law: lecture Friday
Some time ago, I applied Dukefield's Law -- "If a thing is worth winning, it's worth cheating for" -- to the problem of incentive-management systems such as high-stakes school testing programs. Now, with a helpful hint from Glenn Loury, I've formulated that problem in the context of principal/agent theory.
No paper yet, but if you happen to be in Los Angeles with a couple of hours to kill tomorrow (Friday) afternoon, I'll be giving a lecture on the topic as part of the Marschak Colloquim series.
Anderson School Room C-301, 1 p.m. - 3 p.m.
Here's the announcement, with an abstract.
Did Bush know?
Atrios says Capitol Hill Blue isn't a reliable source, and no one else has this yet as far as I can see, but Capitol Hill Blue reports that a witness told the grand jury in the Plame case that GWB knew in advance about the disclosure of her identity and did nothing to stop it. That would explain why the President suddenly decided he needed a lawyer.
It's not impossible that Capitol Hill Blue just scored a major newsbeat, but for now file this under "rumor." (Or, if you're a Democrat, under "pipe dream.") What's horrible is that we don't know anything about Bush's character that makes the story unlikely on its face. None of us would have believed any such thing about his father, for example.
[The New York Daily News reports that questions to grand jury witnesses (yeah, the questions that are supposed by law to remain secret)* have focused on Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.]
*Update Readers point out that the rule of grand jury secrecy applies to grand jurors, prosecutors, and investigators, but not to witnesses or to anyone the witnesses might tell, including their own lawyers. So if the Daily News's sources are witnesses or their lawyers, the story reflects no impropriety. My bad.
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Stuff I wouldn't know if I didn't read Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds pretends not to understand the difference between Bill Clinton and Reagan Republican (and fanatical Clinton-hater) Louis Freeh, whom Clinton, in a foolish gesture toward bipartisanship, appointed as FBI Director.
It does, however, appear that Freeh, or at least his underlings, had some useful intelligence that never got acted on.
(Of course, Glenn is also capable of pretending not to understand the difference between a joke from Matt Yglesias and the accusations of treason he and his friends routinely lob at people who disagree with them about the best way to defend this country. He's right to say that Bush-hatred on the left now exceeds Clinton-hatred on the right; he doesn't consider the possibility that it's much better justified.)
How's that again?
John Kerry calls the expansion of the stop-loss program a violation of the spirit of an all-volunteer military and "a back-door draft."
The AP's Nedra Pickler (perhaps with help from the Bush campaign?) finds someone to criticize Kerry:
Retired Navy Adm. Thomas Morris said Kerry's suggestion is "an insult to the wonderful volunteer service we have in the military and the wonderful people we have serving."
Pickler, who is notorious for inserting silly carping criticisms whenever she quotes a Democrat, doesn't seem to be bothered by the utter illogic of what Morris said. How is Kerry's criticism of the President "an insult" to anyone but the President and the people working for him?
The rest of the story is worth reading. Kerry has what seem like serious ideas about managing the military (outlined in this campaign fact sheet). And he has Adm. Crowe and Gen. Shalikashvili signed up for his national security team.
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The Padilla case
Phil Carter has thought about the Padilla case, and thinks the case for denying him everything from the right to counsel to habeas corpus doesn't stand up. Jonathan Turley agrees, and has some choice thoughts on the practice of de-classifying top secret information for the purpose of lobby the Supreme Court through the newspapers.
The more I think about it, the more it seems an insult to conservatives to call the Bush Administration "conservative."
Are we back to 1899?
Jake at Razing Cain thinks that the Philippine insurgency after the Spanish-American War has some lessons for our current problems in Iraq. They aren't happy lessons: he thinks that we need to stay for a long time, and that we won't.
I'm not sure I agree with Jake substantively, and I think the comparison is not entirely apposite. Iraq is a much more sophisticated society (measured, say, by literacy rates) now than the Philippines were in 1899. Nor is it obvious to me that the Philippines is a happier place now for our having decided to keep it after we took it from Spain, rather than turning it loose. Still, his thoughts are worth pondering.
One of the continuities between the Vietnam-era anti-war movement and the movement in opposition to the war in Iraq is the curious absence of arguments from American history. Those two movements -- whether you agree with their purposes or not -- carried on the great tradition of Lincoln and other Northern Whigs in opposing the Mexican War and of the Anti-Imperialists (including Mark Twain, Grover Cleveland, Carl Shurtz, William James, and Andrew Carnegie) in opposing the colonization of the Philippines.
It seemed to me back in the late '60s that the refusal to claim legitimate historical roots reflected (and reinforced) the anti-patriotic tone of much of the anti-war movement. It was, and is, quite possible to be anti-war and patriotic -- to be anti-war because of being patriotic -- but that isn't the dominant tone. Whichever side of the debate you're on, that's too bad.
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The two Chalabi leaks
Walter Pincus and Dana Priest make a point I hadn't considered. There are two leaks to consider in the case of Chalabi and the cryptographic secrets. (1) If in fact some drunken American official blabbed to Chalabi, who was it? (2) Who told the press (at least five different outlets) that the Iranians knew we had broken their codes and that Chalabi was suspected of telling them?
One possibility, of course, is that no one in the intelligence loop intentionally leaked the Chalabi information, but that various people learned about it when the FBI started asking questions. (The FBI didn't start polygraphing at DoD until yesterday, but the investigation had been underway for weeks.) But that wouldn't explain all the gory detail about what was in the Iranian resident's cable back to Teheran.
So this starts to look like a deliberate attempt by someone inside the government to discredit Chalabi. More infighting between the CIA/State axis and the neocons in DoD and the VP's office? Where's the NSC in all this? Is Condi Rice completely incapable of refereeing a bureaucratic squabble without having it appear on the front page of every newspaper in the world? (Apparently an NSC staffer drew up a staff paper -- presumably on instructions -- about how to marginalize Chalabi, but it got shot down.)
I'm either pleased or appalled to discover that Richard Perle is capable of the same sort of spy-novel analysis that occurred to me. The difference is that he believes it, or professes to believe it, as demonstrable truth, while I still think it's rather a far fetch. (In particular, if Chalabi was on the outs with the mullahs, what's his chief of intelligence doing holed up in Teheran?) Moreover, if the charge against Chalabi is false, why aren't we hearing leaks to that effect from OSD and the VP's office? (Josh Marshall reports that isn't happening.)
So far, though, Perle is standing firmly with Chalabi, and Chalabi's American lawyers (partners in Jim Woolsey's former firm) are blaming the story on shadowy "individuals within the U.S. government who have undermined the President's policies in Iraq" (read: non-neocons at State and CIA). But Woolsey himself, who went with Gingrich and Perle to confront Rice on Chalabi's behalf earlier in the week, before the cryptanalysis stuff went public, doesn't seem to have been heard from since. If I were a reporter, I'd really, really want to know what Woolsey has to say now. Are the extragovernmental neocons really prepared to back Chalabi against what seems to be a temporarily united Bush Administration?
[Update: Woolsey gives Salon a "no-comment" on Chalabi. I'd now assign a probability near zero to any story that makes Chalabi innocent. Perle, of course, is merely deranged.]
The day George Tenet leaves the government -- sometime next month, we're told -- should be a very interesting day indeed.
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Guess who's turned soft
on the cheese-eating surrender monkeys?
This ought to be embarrassing. (One might even call it a "flip-flop.") But this Administration is incapable of embarrassment. Bush's froggy-bashing supporters will figure he (and they) were right then, and not mind that he is lying now.
Why don't we arrest Chalabi?
Josh Marshall and Brad DeLong are wondering why Chalabi hasn't been arrested in connection with his apparent gift to the Iranians of one of our most precious secrets: that we'd broken the Iranians' codes.
It's a good question, but it has a simple answer: Chalabi didn't break any of our laws.
He's not an American. He didn't have a security clearance. He's a Shi'a Iraqi and the head of a political party the INC, and he owes loyalty to (in some order) his country, his sect, and his party. If he persuaded some of the neocons that he was "one of us," that was a sharp move on his part and a mistake on theirs, but, as Lincoln would have noticed, calling an Iraqi an American doesn't make him one.
Since Chalabi owes no loyalty to the United States, he is, as purely logical matter, incapable of betraying the United States. And it's not a crime for a foreign national who has never signed a security agreement to do whatever he likes with information someone hands him. (If there were evidence Chalabi had paid for the information of stolen it, that would be a different matter; then he would arguably be a spy, and criminally chargeable as such. But so far there's no evidence of that.)
So it was neither disloyal nor illegal for him to take information some American official gave him and use it as seemed best to him for the good of his country, his party, his sect, and himself. If he acted contrary to the interests or laws of Iraq, that's for the Iraqis to decide.
But it was illegal (though not, I'm sure, subjectively disloyal) for the American official, whoever he was, to share such a sensitive secret with a foreigner. And that's why it was illegal: foreigners aren't to be trusted with such secrets.
Similarly, if Chalabi did in fact help con the United States into liberating his country from a tyrant that's something he can legitimately brag about. (Though it was somewhat impolitic of him to do so as volubly as he did.) Deception is, after all, a legitimate tool of diplomacy. If Franklin deceived the court of Louis XVI into providing help to the American Revolution, would anyone call that misconduct on Franklin's part?
What seems to have happened here is that Chalabi remembered where his loyalties lay, while his neocon sponsors forgot. He conned them. Their bad, not his.
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Yes, it mattered
For those who think the choice between Dean and Kerry was mostly one of style: Kerry's friends are trying to unseat Rep. Jim "we only invaded Iraq because of the Jews" Moran, while Dean is headlining a fundraiser for him. Note that Moran is still defending his remark as "the truth."
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Tenet's departure
If George Tenet was fired, as Josh Marshall thinks, why did the firing seem to take the President by surprise?
I have absolutely no information on this I didn't get from public sources, but it seems to me more plausible that Tenet decided he'd had enough -- perhaps after having seen a draft of the Senate Intelligence Committee report -- and headed for the door on his own, catching Team Bush flat-footed.
An even more optimistic possibility from the anti-Bush perspective: Tenet wanted to use the fact that the neocons in OSD and the VP's shop and their buddy Chalabi had managed to blow a major cryptographic secret to persuade the President to carry out a purge of the people who have been giving him such bad advice, and quit when he lost that argument.
In any case, whether Tenet jumped, fell, or was pushed, he's now (to switch metaphors) potentially a skunk outside the tent pissing in. If he's sufficiently angry or concerned for the country, he could do the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign a world of damage.
Update: The Deputy Director for Operations (i.e. spies) is quitting, too.
Bush hires a moutpiece for the Plame grand jury
No, thinking about hiring a lawyer isn't the same as admitting guilt, or even intending to obstruct the investigation, and I wish the DNC spokesgeek hadn't tried to pretend otherwise.
But it does seems as if the special prosecutor thinks that Mr. Bush might be able to aid him in his inquiries, and that the White House Counsel doesn't think it appropriate to advise the President on what to say. That's unlikely to be good news for Mr. Bush. At minimum, it suggests that someone close to him is under suspicion.
(I'm not persuaded by the spin that every time Fitzgerald takes a bold investigative step -- subpoenaing reportes, seeking to question the President -- it's merely his ritual due diligence before dismissing the grand jury without any indictments. That might be right, but it doesn't seem to me like the least hypothesis.)
Another worrisome development for the President: if his consultation with his new lawyer leaked so promptly to the press, Mr. Bush needs either a new assistant or a new lawyer. My betting would be on the latter: the obscure counsellor the President consulted seems to have taken the opportunty to become somewhat less obscure.
Bad lawyer! Bad lawyer! No retainer!
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The Iranian mole
Matt Yglesias thinks he knows why things have been going so badly for this country in the past three years. What his theory lacks in direct factual evidence it makes up for in its sheer sweep.
June 02, 2004
Toward a semi-voluntary military
The all-volunteer military seems to be getting less voluntary by the day.
Stop-loss orders have apparently been converted from an emergency measure to part of the force-planning process. That works for now, but what will it do to enlistment rates over the long term, especially if we ever have a non-jobless recovery?
Now a reader calls my attention to this Army Times story, which puts a somewhat less cheerful face on the Army National Guard's vaunted success in meeting its re-enlistment targets. It turns out that recruiters were (falsely) threatening men and women getting off active duty that unless they signed up for the Guard they'd be immediately called back up and shipped to Iraq.
I'm sure the Army Reserve spokesman was telling the truth when he said the threats were unauthorized, though they were apparently very widespread. But in the intervening week there's been no suggestion that those who were bluffed into re-upping will get a chance to take it back.
It seems to me there's a lot of short-sighted thinking going on here. This sort of corner-cutting with our own folks ignores Kleiman's First Principle of Karma Yoga: You give surprises, you get surprises.
In the long run, this leaves the country weaker.
But then, there's been a lot of that going around lately.
June 01, 2004
Unforgiveable
If the Times has this one right -- and the story seems very solidly sourced -- it's the worst chapter so far in the Chalabi story (which, I think you will agree, is saying a lot). Not that it was the most damaging thing Chalabi has been accused of doing, though it's plenty damaging enough. But it's the one thing that Chalabi couldn't have done if he was actually on our side.
Looting and plundering? Hey, it's not our stuff.
Feeding classified information to the Iranians? Well, if Chalabi is going to be an effective leader of the Iraqi Shi'a he needs to have some dealings with the mullocracy in Teheran, and it would have been reasonable for us to give him some chickenfeed to help establish his bona fides. Not everything classified is in fact dangerous, and there are probably some things we know that it would help us to have the Iranians know.
Feeding us Iranian disinformation? Well, he wasn't fooling anyone who didn't desperately want to be fooled.
But telling an intelligence service deeply entwined with international terrorism that we had broken its codes? There's no way that could be anything but a major blow to U.S. security interests.
According to the Times, the FBI is investigating the small number of people who both knew about the Iranian codes and were close to Chalabi. They're looking in the Defense Department, though Josh Marshall , who thinks he can guess the name of the likeliest candidate, hints there may be some White House folks involved as well.
[I have to disagree with Marshall on one point, though. He thinks that, given the near-worship accorded Chalabi by some of the neocons, it's not surprising that they told him about the code-breaking. It surprises the Hell out of me.
Giving that sort of "sources & methods" information to a non-U.S.-national with no genuine need-to-know is flat-out astonishing, no matter how much you admire him. It's also very, very, very illegal; given his nationality, Chalabi couldn't possibly have had the necessary "codeword" clearances. So I'd lay long odds against a real intelligence or military-intelligence professional having done it. And I'd bet that Jim Woolsey, for example, changes his tune both about Chalabi and about the Administration; if not, his experience as Bill Clinton's DCI must have driven Woolsey completely bonkers.
I was never really close in to this stuff, and have far less than my share of respect for the classification system, but even I'm creeped out by this one, jus as I was by the Valerie Plame fiasco. Sources & methods are sacred.]
Some of the story sounds like spy-novel stuff:
American officials said that about six weeks ago, Mr. Chalabi told the Baghdad station chief of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security that the United States was reading the communications traffic of the Iranian spy service, one of the most sophisticated in the Middle East.
According to American officials, the Iranian official in Baghdad, possibly not believing Mr. Chalabi's account, sent a cable to Tehran detailing his conversation with Mr. Chalabi, using the broken code. That encrypted cable, intercepted and read by the United States, tipped off American officials to the fact that Mr. Chalabi had betrayed the code-breaking operation, the American officials said.
American officials reported that in the cable to Tehran, the Iranian official recounted how Mr. Chalabi had said that one of "them" — a reference to an American — had revealed the code-breaking operation, the officials said. The Iranian reported that Mr. Chalabi said the American was drunk.
The Iranians sent what American intelligence regarded as a test message, which mentioned a cache of weapons inside Iraq, believing that if the code had been broken, United States military forces would be quickly dispatched to the specified site. But there was no such action.
The account of Mr. Chalabi's actions has been confirmed by several senior American officials, who said the leak contributed to the White House decision to break with him.
Now, if you really wanted to play spy-novel games, I suppose you could still think Chalabi was innocent. Say the Iranian mullahs have decided (as Wesley Clark thinks they have) that U.S. success in Iraq would be a deadly threat to the survival of their regime. And suppose they think that discrediting Chalabi would make that success less likely. And suppose they've discovered in some other way that we've broken their codes. Then that message from Baghdad -- sent conveniently down a channel the sender was on notice was broken -- was a way of disposing of Chalabi while also obscuring the actual process by which they learned the code was broken.
None of that is impossible (not nearly as implausible as the paranoid fantasies Michael Ledeen has been concocting on the subject), though it doesn't jibe very well with the fact that Chalabi's intelligence chief is now a fugitive in Teheran. But the more obvious interpretation is more likely to be correct: that one of Chalabi's neocon buddies got sloshed with him and blabbed, and Chalabi told it to an Iranian who stupidly sent it down an insecure channel.
The phrase "criminal negligence" gets thrown about a lot in politics. But in this case it's precisely applicable. Whoever that drunken buffoon was did something criminally negligent: the crime being defined at Sec. 798 of Title 18 of the United States Code.
The other people who trusted Chalabi weren't criminally negligent. But they were stageringly, astonishingly, earth-shatteringly wrong. Either the President has to fire them, or we have to fire him.
Update Matt Yglesias more or less agrees with Josh Marshall:
Whoever turns out to be the culprit, and whatever rank he holds, it should be noted that the general climate in which this took place was established by decisions at the very highest level. Chalabi was treated and portrayed as a man whose interests were all-but-identical to those of the United States and, under those circumstances, why wouldn't you share sensitive intelligence with the future leader of the New Middle East?
Yes and no. Yes, the decision to deify Chalabi was made at, if not really "the highest levels" at least at the second-highest level. But no, that decision didn't mean sharing information about broken codes with him. Product, maybe. But the fact that we had broken the Iranian ciphers was simply non of Chalabi's business. Whoever told him was either very, very stupid or very, very drunk.
Or, perhaps, both.
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Two in a row
Herseth beats out Diederich by a couple of percentage points. Diederich has to be losing sleep tonight wondering whether it would have come out differently if he hadn't effectively conceded defeat two days ago. On the other hand, maybe it was a clever move to mobilize his forces and de-mobilize the Democrats.
In any case, it's a second straight red-state House seat pickup for the Democrats. Not a bad omen for November.
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Alex Polier speaks
Alex Polier, the victim of the "Kerry intern" flap, has written a fascinating blow-by-blow account. Somehow I doubt that the Kerry-haters will bother to link to it.
As I said before, the depth of depravity displayed by those who hyped this scandal and then refused -- still refuse -- to retract makes the behavior of the ordinary criminals and drug dealers whose conduct I study professionally seem rather innocent by comparison.
Update The Talmud has something useful to say on this, and the blog Yesh Omrim expounds the text skilfully. I suppose rising sea levels aren't exactly the same as a Flood, but there are definitely parallels.
May 31, 2004
The INC and physician kidnappings in Iraq
Left Blogistan seems to be aware, as neither Right Blogistan nor the mainstream media are, how devastating the Chalabi story is as an indictment of the sheer incapacity of the Bush Administration, which looks more like the Carter Administration every day. The Bushies look foolish for sponsoring Chalabi, for showering his Iraqi National Congress with money, for believing what now seems to have been Iranian disinformation, for letting his Iraqi National
Council expropriate for its own use any property that happened to strike its leaders' fancy, for giving him so much power in the reconstruction (not only control of intelligence -- it's Chalabi's intelligence chief, let's remember, who's now living in Teheran as a fugitive from Iraqi justice -- but control over the de-Ba'athification process), for not being able to get their act together when it finally came time to dump him, and for not being able to bring the neocons into line behind the new anti-Chalabi policy.
I have just one tidbit to add to the able coverage from Kevin Drum and The New Yorker:
It occurs in paragraph 32 of a 34-paragraph
LA Times story about the systematic kidnappings of Iraqi doctors, kidnappings which are bringing the country's health care and medical education systems to the brink of collapse.
The story points out that the kidnappings are partly for ransom but partly intended to drive the physicians out of Iraq to make the job of reconstruction that much harder. "Aha!," I thought, "Typical ex-Ba'athist/al Qaeda thuggery."
Well, partly. Remember the kidnapping charges that formed part of the basis for the raid on the INC offices and Chalabi's home? Apparently, one of them involved a physician who claimed he'd been snatched by "INC employees."
Okay, it's only a charge. Maybe the doc was a supporter of a rival faction, or even a Ba'athist trying to stir up trouble. On the other hand, maybe it was true. If so, was it just for the money? Or was the INC working to bring about chaos? After all, from an Iranian viewpoint, the only thing better than having the US dispose of Saddam Hussein would be to have the US dispose of Saddam Hussein and get a black eye doing it.
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Unfair!
Hey, wait a minute! I'm not one to believe in the myth of the liberal media, but this sort of language from a Washington Post news story strikes me as over the line:
The [Bush] charges were all tough, serious -- and wrong, or at least highly misleading. Kerry did not question the war on terrorism, has proposed repealing tax cuts only for those earning more than $200,000, supports wiretaps, has not endorsed a 50-cent gasoline tax increase in 10 years, and continues to support the education changes, albeit with modifications.
Memeorandum has a good round-up of bloggic reactions to the story, but all of them seem to me to miss the basic analytic point.
With Bush running 75% negative ads (v. 27% negative among Kerry ads), for all practical purposes the negative ads are the Bush campaign.
And it's not as if Bush and Rove had freely chosen a lying, negative campaign. It was forced on them by the logic of the situation.
Given that there's nothing really good to say about the record of the past three and a half years, Bush has no real choice but to go negative. And given that there isn't actually anything very bad in Kerry's public record, those negative spots are going to have to contain a high proportion of lies.
Under those circumstances, if reporters start calling Team Bush for all its negativity and dishonesty they will give Kerry (running a more positive and less mendacious campaign) an advantage that Bush will not be able to overcome. Unless the press goes back to its habit of neutrally reporting false allegations from the Bush campaign as "charges" and then dutifully reporting the Kerry campaign's answers to them, this election is going to be over before it starts.
So, although from an abstract perspective Milbank and VandeHei are just doing competent, objective reporting, from a practical viewpoint their pedantic insistence on the difference between truth and falsehood amounts to partisan bias. It's not as bad as it would be if the press followed Josh Marshall's absurd suggestion and called lies "lies" rather than using circumlocutions, but it's pretty bad just the same.
I think, in this case, it would be only fair to let Bush's people tell whatever lies they like about Kerry.
After all, fair's fair.
Backfire?
It looks as if Kerry is safe from the bishops:
Do you think it is appropriate for Catholic bishops to refuse to give communion to elected officials who publicly disagree with the Church's position on issues like abortion, or is that not appropriate?
Among Catholics:
17% Appropriate
78% Not appropriate
5% Not sure
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