Factcheckers just need to retire

*Sigh!* Again, the factcheckers disgrace themselves by making an utterly ridiculous awarding of truthfulness scores. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), has made the charge that presidential candidate Mitt Romney didn't pay any taxes for the last 10 years. Was Reid absolutely, positively certain about that? No.

"He didn't pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that's true? Well, I'm not certain," said Reid. "But obviously he can't release those tax returns. How would it look?"

Reid went on to allege that Romney's wealth must be much greater than he has ever specified. The original source, Politico, then made clear that "Reid did not identify his alleged source." The best the Romney camp could muster was a non-denial denial. They alleged that their guy had

"gone above and beyond the disclosure requirements by releasing two years of personal tax returns in addition to the hundreds of pages of personal financial disclosure documents he has provided to the FEC and made public."

No one is saying that for presidential candidate to release their tax returns is a legal requirement, merely that it is a firmly established tradition that they do so (That particular tradition doesn't apply to House or Senate candidates, so to claim that Reid hasn't released his tax returns either is a false equivalence).

Various Republican spokespeople have gotten very heated and excitable about Reid's charge and have made wild charges about Reid being a "dirty liar," but the issue is where it was when Reid first charged Romney with hiding his tax returns because Romney could very quickly and easily clear up the whole issue by following tradition and releasing his returns.

So now Politifact jumps into the fray by charging Reid with making a "pant on fire" lie with his charge. First off, I'm not sure that someone has actually told a lie when they have admitted up front that they're simply passing on what someone else told them. Reid candidly admitted that he didn't have any independent evidence to corroborate what the anonymous source said. Obviously, Romney feels very hurt and insulted, but that's no reason to call Reid a liar.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) backs Reid up and confirms that "a Bain Capital investor" told Reid that Romney hasn't paid taxes for a lengthy period. Can Pelosi prove the underlying charge, that Romney hasn't paid such taxes? No, but she stands behind the story that Reid got this information from a fellow that he found to be credible.

Politifact has absolutely no business whatsoever calling Reid a liar. Reid's charge can't be proven to be true by any evidence in Reid's possession (Romney could very easily disprove the charge by releasing his tax returns), but Reid has not said anything that can be fairly characterized as being untrue. Politifact should STFU and toss their evaluation of Reid's truthfulness into the trash can, where it belongs.

Update:

As the blog Balloon Juice puts it: "Glenn Kessler has following the other fact-checking lemmings off the cliff by assigning 4 Pinnochios to Reid’s claim".

As the post makes clear: 1. It's incredibly, moronically stupid to use the word of tax experts to claim that Reid's claim "might" not be true. Romney has somehow gotten his IRA to hold something in excess of $20 million, meaning he's enormously clever about money matters. So what the average citizen is able to do is beside the point.

2. The McCain campaign remember, DID look at Romney's tax returns and gee, somehow, we're not hearing much from them. Hmm, wonder why that could be? Keep in mind, the original story was that McCain and his people looked at Romney's tax returns and decided that Sarah Palin would be a safer bet. Their story since then has changed to "No, no, no, Sarah was obviously the superior candidate."

Sorta, kinda half-true

President Obama has deranged conservatives just as W. deranged liberals. The right’s image of Obama, though, is more a figment of its imagination than the left’s image of W. was.
Maureen Dowd 26Feb2012

Is this a true statement? Sort of. We progressives felt Bush was a war criminal:

The Nuremberg Tribunal declared that “To initiate a war of aggression . . . is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

and that his work on the economy places him comfortably within the list of the five worst Presidents America has ever had.

The administration crows that the economy grew—by some 16 percent—during its first six years, but the growth helped mainly people who had no need of any help, and failed to help those who need plenty. A rising tide lifted all yachts. Inequality is now widening in America, and at a rate not seen in three-quarters of a century.

Allowing an American city to be flooded was absolutely inexcusable (Selected items from timeline):

Friday, August 26

GOV. KATHLEEN BLANCO DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY IN LOUISIANA [Office of the Governor]

Sunday, August 28

AFTERNOON — BUSH, BROWN, CHERTOFF WARNED OF LEVEE FAILURE BY NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER DIRECTOR...

Monday, August 29

7:30 AM CDT — BUSH ADMINISTRATION NOTIFIED OF THE LEVEE BREACH...

MORNING — BUSH SHARES BIRTHDAY CAKE PHOTO-OP WITH SEN. JOHN MCCAIN [White House]

Tuesday, August 30

MASS LOOTING REPORTED, SECURITY SHORTAGE CITED...

2PM CDT — PRESIDENT BUSH PLAYS GUITAR WITH COUNTRY SINGER MARK WILLIS [AP]

Wednesday, August 31

PRESIDENT BUSH FINALLY ORGANIZES TASK FORCE TO COORDINATE FEDERAL RESPONSE...

And those are just the "highlights" of Bush's disastrous eight years. Now, Dowd sorta, kinda redeems her statement with her second sentence by pointing out that the right wing's view of Obama is much less reality-based than the left's view of Bush ever was. Birther stories, anyone?

As should be apparent to anyone with half a brain, the whole Birther bs is code for: President Obama is illegitimate.

By which Birthers mean either he’s black;  he’s a liberal;  or he’s not the guy I voted for. Or more likely, a combination of all three.

Obama's release of his long-form birth certificate was well-timed to deflate Donald Trump's budding presidential campaign.

No, sorry, but to compare progressive's "Bush Derangement Syndrome" with right-wing "Obama Derangement Syndrome" is an example of the traditional media's love for "false equivalence."

False equivalence

This is the most maddening of the Washington DC press corps' failings, this constant resort to false equivalence, the idea that "both sides do it." The conclusion of this constantly-repeated tale is, of course, that the "Goldilocks" conclusion gets continually reinforced, the idea that if "this bowl is too hot (or leftist) and if this bowl is too cold (too right-wing) then the one in the middle, the "sensible" centrist, must be just right."

Matt Bai of the WaPo examines the Republican debate of August 11th and writes a few very sensible paragraphs about how extremely reactionary the candidates all are on taxes. But then he veers off the rails with this abominable paragraph:

If this were merely a Republican phenomenon, the party would be alone in suffering the wrath of the average American voter. But it isn’t. You could have put a lot of Washington Democrats up on that stage, and asked them if they would have accepted $10 in new taxes or new stimulus in exchange for $1 in cuts to Social Security, and you probably would have gotten much the same response: hell, no.

Nonsense. The Democratic Party is nowhere even near as fanatically stubborn on any issues as the Republicans are on just about anything. The reason the Republican Party is not "alone in suffering the wrath" of the voters is (And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell understands this very well) is because voters can only spend so much time and attention to understanding political issues. If outlets like, say, Fox News take up some of that limited time with a lot of lies, then only a small minority of voters truly understands what goes on. Voters understand that our political system is deeply dysfunctional, but not necessarily why that is. If the average voter were truly well-informed and had the time and motivation needed to truly understand the issues, then Bai's analysis would be correct.

As a direct consequence of Bai's mis-reading, he then moves on to reach more incorrect conclusions:

And this is the central disconnect between Washington and the broad center of the country, the source of all that fury you see in the polls. Fewer and fewer Americans engage as activists in either party, which means that primaries are financed and waged primarily by the ideological extremes on either side.

There is no "broad center." Voters may not have any idea as to where they are on the political spectrum, but they have definite opinions as to what the right answers are. If they're given a set of questions and one then scores their answers on a right-left scale, Americans are a pretty leftist lot. True, both sides during primary votes are dominated by motivated, high-information voters, but Bai can't demonstrate, with actual, concrete examples, that Democrats are as equally ideological or intransigent as Republicans are. In order to maintain his narrative (that is based on a false equivalence), Bai has to be completely incoherent about the President. In one sentence, voters are "losing faith because [Obama] got rolled, and they’re still looking for someone — as they were in 2008 — who has the strength and shrewdness to reform the system." In a later sentence: "At least Mr. Obama seems determined to seek a grand compromise on cuts and revenues that would change the nation’s fiscal trajectory."

Erm, sorry, but "getting rolled" doesn't sound to me as though it's equal to having the "strength and shrewdness to reform the system" and wow, would anyone trust such a person to seek a "grand compromise"?!?!?! Going for a "grand compromise" and "getting rolled" sound to me like a surefire formula for a grand failure! How in the heck does all of that work in one package? Once one starts off one's analysis badly, one just goes downhill from there.

Response to letter in DelCo Times

I submitted this comment to the DelCo Times in response to a letter there, but several hours later, it still hasn't been posted. Here it is anyway:

I was out of town when my letter was published on April 18^th, but feel that I am obliged to respond to the latest from Margaret Kane. First off, someone asked me what a “progressive” was as opposed to a “liberal.” Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) is a liberal while Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) is a progressive. Ideologically, they're very similar, but Schakowsky and Durbin were both members of the “Cat Food Commission” (Officially, the “Deficit Commission,” or “Bowles-Simpson”) but Schakowsky quit in disgust, denounced the group and produced her own (much better) deficit-reduction plan as the other members clearly just wanted to punish all non-millionaires for not being millionaires. Durbin voted for the Commission's recommendations, pathetically mewling that he had to maintain credibility with the hard-core Republicans in the group. Today, Durbin is further disgracing himself by remaining with the “Gang of Six,” even though the Republicans in the group have said “No way, no how, ain't gonna happen” to any sort of tax increase.

So essentially, liberals are wimpier versions of progressives.

As a progressive, I absolutely and unequivocally denounce JimmyG's comment that he desires the death of Sarah Palin. Back during the Bush-Cheney years, we progressives made it a point that “I oppose the death penalty so much, I wouldn't even apply to Bush or Cheney.” Even with all of the evil those guys performed, we still didn't want to call for their deaths. We wanted people to oppose the Bush-Cheney policies and not Bush and Cheney as people.

As to Kane's essential point, that “both sides do it” and that progressives and right-wingers are equally bad in calling for violence against their opponents, this is what we call a “false equivalence.” The examples have some elements in common, but they're simply not the same. The reporter/blogger David Neiwert has documented a rising tide of right-wing violence that simply has no equivalence on the left.

And yes, Sarah Palin was contributing to increasingly violent language in politics with her “target” map and richly deserved to be denounced for it. Was she the one and only example? Not at all, but she was an especially high-profile target for critics as her map was especially irresponsible in normalizing talk of violence in politics.

Evidence that the left is just as bad as the right?

A commenter in the Inky gives us a link to a blog post by Michelle Malkin that purports to show that the left is just as bad as the right when it comes to uncivil and incendiary rhetoric. To quote Howard Dean talking about Colin Powell's case that Iraq had WMD “I was impressed not by the vastness of evidence presented by the Secretary, but rather by its sketchiness.”

Malkin presents lots and lots of objectionable material put out by the left in their presentations (Written and during protests) against various figures on the right. I was particularly disgusted by the image Malkin chose to start off her piece with, a picture of Sarah Palin being slugged by a very large hand, her glasses flying off and her teeth breaking. This is a revolting image that I have absolutely zero problems denouncing and condemning. There's also a video of a fistfight that took place at a Tea Party rally where the Tea Partiers were just minding their own business and exercising their First Amendment right to protest government policies. Again, I have absolutely zero problems condemning this sort of thing, Malkin presents a long list of mugshots accompanied by their crimes, some serious, slashing tires, stalking and trying to run down a Congresswoman with his car. Many of the charges also include people attacking campaign signs and throwing salad dressing and custard cream pies. None of the conduct that's documented is excusable and all were properly punished.

What's missing is anything from any sort of prominent person on the left side of the political aisle. Madonna and Sarah Bernhard, who are more entertainment than they are political figures, are about it. The rest are all members of rallies and/or people you've never heard of. As the book review to "The Case For Bush Hatred: Mad About You" by Jonathan Chait, makes clear:

The trouble with this parallel is, first, that this sort of Bush-hating is entirely confined to the political fringe. The most mainstream anti-Bush conspiracy theorist cited in York's piece is Alexander Cockburn, the ultra-left, rabidly anti-Clinton newsletter editor. Mainstream Democrats have avoided delving into Bush's economic ties with the bin Laden family or suggesting that Bush invaded Iraq primarily to benefit Halliburton. The Clinton haters, on the other hand, drew from the highest ranks of the Republican Party and the conservative intelligentsia.

Lefty blogger Digby cites Right Wing Watch:

In 2007, conservative activist Mark DeMoss launched something called The Civility Project, seeking to get governors and members of Congress to sign on to a short pledge vowing to conduct themselves civilly:

• I will be civil in my public discourse and behavior.

• I will be respectful of others whether or not I agree with them.

• I will stand against incivility when I see it.

Four years and thousands of dollars later, DeMoss is shutting down the project after securing such pledges from only three members of Congress while enduring countless insults from his fellow conservatives:

The piece goes on to cite conservatives who were so angry at being called to task that the author declared many responses to be unprintable.

FAIR lists an awful lot of what conservatives describe as “lone nuts.” Yeah, these are people who acted alone and without obvious co-conspirators, but gee, they all had a real problem with liberals and Democrats.

Firedoglake looks at certain right wing reactions to Arizona Sheriff Dupniks charge that the political climate in Arizona made the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) possible and finds there was quite a bit of what the Red Chinese would have referred to as “self-criticism” in their remarks. They cite a Republican Senator making fairly innocuous criticisms of the Tea Party who, very interestingly, feels the need to do it anonymously. Are we worried about right-wing violence, perhaps?

Quoting right-wingers who make inflammatory statements that have the potential to encourage violence isn't difficult at all. The left-wing media watchdog groups FAIR and Media Matters have long lists of right-wingers making such statements. In fact, Media Matters has documented three separate individuals who have been “inspired” by Fox News' Glenn Beck to try and commit violent acts. Fortunately, all three persons were stopped before they could carry out their intentions.

Finally, we must also remember that truth is an absolute defense against charges of libel. So when right-wingers charge lefties with being uncivil when they charge that President George W. Bush lied and committed crimes against humanity, I really have a hard time applying the label of “uncivil” to such rhetoric.

Update:

Good column looks at the shooting of Rep. Giffords and the larger picture of civility in our politics. This was a particularly chilling statement that jumped out at me:

After Loughner’s massacre, Humphries was still faulting her — this time for holding "an event in full view of the public with no security whatsoever.”

The New Black Panther Party non-story

Stick a fork in it, it's done. Abigail Thernstrom is hardly a liberal on voting issues, but even she agrees that the New Black Panther Party and their antics during the 2008 election aren't worth all of the durm and strang that Fox News has applied to the complete non-story (Fox has featured the non-story 95 times as of July 16th). Fox News person Megyn Kelly defends paying so much attention to the non-story on the grounds of "fidelity to the law," but this concern of hers was something that suddenly appeared on January 20th, 2009. It was nowhere in evidence concerning Bush's warrantless surveillance or on the Bush/Cheney torture policies. So naturally, the WaPo Ombudsman is now convinced that his paper needs to start covering the story!

Obama and campaign contributions

In today's Inky editorial on the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, a commenter again brings up the fact that Obama received more campaign cash from BP than anybody else did. Over the past 20 years, BP has given a total of $2.89 million via their PAC and about $638,000 via individuals. Obama got a total of $77,051 from them. Does that represent a conflict of interest on Obama's part? Erm, not really. Obama pulled in $388,283,755 for the 2008 campaign. That means BP gave Obama about 0.0002% of his total campaign contributions. Obama's top 20 campaign contributors begin at $1,591,395 (University of CA) and go down to $493,835 (Latham & Watkins). So, no. If one is trying to explain Obama's actions concerning BP via their campaign contributions, one would achieve a major FAIL!

BTW, rather concern-raising message in the same comments thread:

Posted 08:41 AM, 05/30/2010

Kaiser Sosa

nancee - Obama and his cronies have NEVER been against "big government". What are you smoking? The progressives are the enemy within and should be crushed at every turn, in every institution. They are a cancer in our society.

Whooo-weeee! Are we a Glenn Beck listener, perhaps?!?!

A "conflict" that never should have been

We've seen people arguing that the current Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, was briefed on torture while she was still House Minority Leader and the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. The lefty response to this accusation has been two-fold. If she is indeed guilty of having "enabled" or "approved" of torture, sure, okay, let's have her standing in the dock along with the known criminals of the Bush Administration. The "Bushies" are the guys who should be doing hard prison time here in any event. If Pelosi should join them there, okay.

The second question is "Is the accusation accurate?" The answer to that is a bit less clear, but as of this point (23 May), those who say she wasn't accurately briefed on waterboarding have pretty much won the argument.

As to what the current debate is all about, member of al Qaeda Abu Zubaydah was captured on a raid on safe houses in late March 2002. The FBI had custody of him at first and claim that their reasonably gentle methods of persuasion got some useful information out of him. The CIA took custody of him in April and immediately began torturing him via waterboarding (What US soldiers in the Philippines in the early 1900s referred to as "the water cure").

A major problem with the accusation that Pelosi was informed as early as September 2002 though, is that the reference in the CIA notes of the briefing state simply that she was informed of "EITs" or Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. That indeed might mean that she was informed of waterboarding, but that's an awfully thin reed upon which to rest one's case. Deprivation of sleep could count as an EIT, but would not immediately or forcefully "shock the conscience." There's no reason anyone would remember such a reference as a particularly shocking act, but it also would fit under the definition of EITs. Some careful parsing of DCI Porter Goss's version of events asks the question as to what exactly Pelosi and others were told and it's far from clear they were told of waterboarding.

It's also far from clear just what she could have done about it.

Should Sen. (sic, she's actually a Rep.) Pelosi have held a press conference and outed Bush? Should she have leaked classified information? Should she have tried to stop Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld by any means possible? And how do you suppose the Republicans would have responded if Pelosi had tried to impede Bush? (which is something they now condemn her for NOT doing)

The GOP controlled the House and would have given Bush anything he wanted. Why then didn't Bush take the lawful path and simply ask Congress to change the laws banning torture?

The House of Representatives allowed the issue to get so far out of hand that Republicans were able to get a vote (They lost, 252 to 173) on an investigation, just of Speaker Pelosi and not of the torture issue as a whole. Of course the traditional media, as hopelessly corrupt and decadent as it is, despite having been informed right from the beginning that "the CIA's list might not be accurate," didn't really focus on that crucial point until Time Magazine finally acknowledged on 20 May that there really was no conflict between Speaker Pelosi's recollection and Bob Graham's (Retired Representative D-FL) careful, exhaustive notes and the CIA's version. It's just that the CIA's version is obviously incorrect. Amazingly, the WaPo is not yet ready to give up on the clearly wrong interpretation and continues to insist that there just might be something to what is, by now, clearly a non-story. Pelosi herself has said:

"I have made the statement that I'm going to make on this," Pelosi (D., Calif.) said yesterday at a televised news conference from Washington. "I don't have anything more to say about it. I stand by my comment."

Sadly, to view the whole discussion on waterboarding as a partisan "gotcha" talking point, as a Democrats vs Republicans or better yet, as a "hard left" vs "non-partisans" issue appears to be the only way that our NY Times/WaPo/Sunday talk shows traditional media press corps is able to comprehend the issue, or indeed, much of any serious issue. It's an extremely, pathetically sad commentary that parts of the press corps even concentrated on criticizing a 69-year grandmother's looks. This was an extremely good point about the press corps in general:

Additionally, this staunch avoidance of anything approaching a substantive assessment of the actual illegal conduct, in favor of a petty fixation on the partisan "helps or harms" game, helps only the "side" that has committed the crimes and wrongdoing.

As the news guy Mark Halperin put it: "Drudge rules our world." The press corps is obviously infatuated with a reporter whose stock-in-trade is gossip and triviality.

Mary Matalin speaks up for Dick Cheney

Mary Matalin has come to Cheney's defense:

“If Barack Obama had come in and done what he said he was going to do and look at the stuff and see what is working, then Cheney would have continued to do what he was doing — working on memoirs, finishing his house,” she said. “He’s got a good life. He’s got stuff going on. He doesn’t care about being on TV. There’s no more politics there. He’s not settling any scores. He just wants people to understand.“

Okay, what did Obama say he was going to do? In MyBarackObama in the defense section, he speaks of "restoring" frayed alliances. That sounds to me like GeeDubya messed things up and Obama felt he had a mandate to fix them. It doesn't sound like there was much investigation to be done. Alliances needed to be restored because they were obviously frayed or broken.

Was torture "working" in any meaningful sense? Not according to former Army Intelligence Officer Stuart Herrington, who said:

"We have lost the moral high ground,"

"If we use torture when we question prisoners, we forfeit the right to demand that anyone treat our soldiers decently if they are taken prisoner,"

"If we engage in that kind of activity, we put our soldiers at increased risk."

It wasn't necessary to "look at the stuff and see what is working," it was already obvious that it wasn't "working."

If there are no "politics" to his appearing on the teevee, why won't Cheney appear with interviewers who will challenge him? If he's just going to be talking with people like Bob Schieffer of "Face The Nation," who didn't ask any tough questions or as Air America pointed out "he'd have no problem testifying before Congress about the torture memos, but stopped short of promising to do so under oath." Meaning he doesn't want to, y'know, actually be held accountable for anything he says.

What I find very disturbing is the tendency of people in the press corp's "village" to try and find some sort of middle ground in the "debate" (If you can dignify the discussion with that highfalutin' term) over torture. Folks, there IS NO "middle ground"! It's wrong, period! The idea that we should let people like former President Bush trust their "guts" is insane! Bush's "gut" is absolutely the worst guide to anything wise or sensible I can imagine.

Conversation with a conservative: political behavior comparable?

I challenged a conservative on an online discussion board following an article on which lefty sources he was familiar with as he kept complaining that I wasn't well informed and that I kept making old, discredited arguments.

rich 2056, I have read Saul Alinsky's "rules for radicals". What else is there to read. It lays out Obama's campaign stratagy and defines the moves he is making since taking office. As far as I am concerned any progressive is just someone that can't make it on his own. Got a job yet? He talks about how he will change the universe for the better, but what he really means is that he will stifle debate, defame excellance and reward mediocrity. He does not know how to make money but is very good at taking it from those that have it. The progressive movement is probably the greatest threat this country has ever faced. No, Rich, I am familiar with "your kind" and I would hope that you would go somewhere else with your drival.

My answer:

Here's a summary of "Rules" Nothing here about radicals being dishonest or deceptive. Alinsky even advocates that radicals have alternative solutions available for the problems they call attention to. [The discussion board generally doesn't allow links, but they allowed my follow-up with the link to be posted as it was clearly relevant to the discussion]

Now, folks in the traditional media like to assume the attitude of "A pox on both your houses" and many, many times it's completely inappropriate. Here's a piece on two sets of political ads. In the first set, former PA Senator Rick Santorum makes factually incorrect suggestions, the other set of ads are entirely accurate. Both sets of ads are "tough," but otherwise are quite different. The problem that the piece points to is that the reporter treats them as equivalents, which they very clearly aren't.

But it seems to me that reading the quickie summary of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" and reading the frames within which a typical Daily Kos post looks at a public meeting (at which the issue of gays is discussed) that "A pox on both your houses" is a pretty good way to look at the issue.

On points, the hearings were a resounding victory for the pro-equality side. There's simply no other way to judge it. Our side was on-message, tightly-focused, full of emotional and often-heartbreaking stories, and at the same time respectful of religious groups, who will be affected not a whit by the bill.

The other side came off as a ragtag bunch of whiners and fearmongers and faux-experts citing crappy science. Crappy, crappy, crappy science. Listening to audio only, I had to occasionally check to make sure I hadn’t time-warped back to the 1960s. By late afternoon, the anti-gay crowd could barely muster the energy to clap for their own speakers. It was...kinda pathetic, really. [emphasis in original]

This post views politics in much the same way that Alinsky suggests. Words are viewed as useful tools with which to persuade people. Both sides present their positions with all of their agonizing and debating in the past. For the activists, all of the pertinent questions have already been answered to their satisfaction. The purpose of the debate is not for us all to sit and reason together, but to sell a position to the public at large.


It's of course pretty ludicrous to suggest that the party of Richard Nixon's chief political dirty tricks strategist Donald Segretti, Ronald Reagan's William "October surprise" Casey, the elder George Bush's Lee Atwater and the younger George Bush's Karl Rove is in any way a moral paragon that liberals compare at all badly to. But manipulating information in order to present it in the best, most politically effective light is not necessarily a bad thing. Let's recognize that there's absolutely no necessity, whether we're using Saul Alinsky or not, to be dishonest. The current debate over torture is an instructive case. Former VP Cheney gave an interview in which he claimed that there were still-secret documents that exonerated the Bush Administration on torture.

The Bushies want this question — “did torture stave off terror attacks and save lives?” — hovering in the air. There’s plenty of evidence that torture hasn’t worked at all and has done more harm than good. Even some former Bush administration officials have conceded it hasn’t done anything to stop terror attacks.

But it’s easy for the Cheney camp to muddy the waters and turn this into a matter of debate by citing unspecified classified info that supposedly supports the claim that it has saved lives — info that we’ll never see.

So no, the former VP isn't precisely lying. He's just making misleading statements that are difficult to disprove. This was a tactic used constantly during the Bush years, the continual referencing to information that very few people had access to. "Yeah, yeah. The info's solid. Just trust us!" Of course, all of the secret information turned out to be just so much nonsense. Do groups on the political left have that option? No, such groups don't have the option of keeping crucial information on national security threats inaccessible to the government of the United States. If they have important information and don't share it with the government, they're then criminally liable if an attack occurs. "Radical" groups don't have the same option to get away with being able to mislead the public as groups in charge of the government do. It's also useful to keep in mind the fact that the government has become much more close-lipped with information since Alinsky's book was written and that the internet has made it much easier to double-check partisan claims.

Is there anything to the idea that if "radicals" take over the US, that the US will experience a repeat of Cambodia 1975, with the cities emptied and intellectuals forced to work on farms in order to punish them for being snobs? I don't think people on the left are naturally or inherently superior to those on the right, but something very crucial happened between the time Alinsky wrote his book and today.

The Soviet Union collapsed.

One of Karl Marx's ideas was that states could transform. That a state could start out as capitalist, become socialist and proceed to being communist. Not only did capitalism prove to be far more durable than Marx thought, but the Soviet Union started out being a centralized, militaristic and tyrannical system. What was it when it collapsed? It hadn't changed a bit. It was still a centralized, militaristic and tyrannical system.

What lefties, liberals and progressives concluded from that was that political systems, as they grow from being small political groups to running whole states, don't change. They change scale, but they don't change their essence. If we want to end up with a system that's egalitarian, that takes advice from all quarters, that respects the contributions of everyone and allows even opponents to make the occasional contribution, then we have to begin that way. It has to be built that way from the ground up.

Obama "talks about how he will change the universe for the better, but what he really means is that he will stifle debate, defame excellance (sic) and reward mediocrity." Of course all of that is merely guesswork, a presumption that our president will ever be so powerful that he can simply disregard the desire of the people that form his political base. Sorry, but after working with progressives for several years, I just don't see us as "stifling debate." The right-wing pundit and occasional Bill O'Reilly guest Michelle Malkin used to work as a reporter under the editorship of the highly respected progressive writer David Neiwert and refers to him as a "free speech absolutist."

Yes, the website Daily Kos (DKos' "Vision for America") deletes the comments of people they call "trolls." These are comments that are simply disruptive. Comments that a moderator disagrees with politically can only be combated by making a disagreeing comment after it. We as moderators for PhillyIMC and the IMC community in general observe much the same set of rules. So no, the left community in America does not quite come up to Neiwert's standard, but I don't think we fall much short of it and I don't think there's much risk of our copying the Khmer Rouge upon taking control of America.

WaPo Ombudsman & campaign coverage

Deborah Howell, the Ombudsman for the Washington Post, feels really, really awful about the paper's election coverage. Why does she feel awful about it? She feels that the WaPo tilted its coverage to favor Barack Obama and to make John McCain look bad. She backs up her assertion essentially by bean-counting:

The op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces (58) about McCain than there were about Obama (32), and Obama got the editorial board's endorsement. The Post has several conservative columnists, but not all were gung-ho about McCain.

Problem: Obama and McCain did not run similar campaigns! Comparing the two campaigns is an apples & oranges exercise. The demagoguery of McCain's Vice-Presidential running mate, Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin, was so extreme that the death threats made to Obama reached levels to where the Secret Service had to make the Obamas aware of them.

The Secret Service warned the Obama family in mid October that they had seen a dramatic increase in the number of threats against the Democratic candidate, coinciding with Mrs Palin's attacks.

Is it really fair or appropriate to do a bean-count to see how "biased" or "tilted" the WaPo's election coverage was without taking into account that the rhetoric coming from just one side was so demagogic, that it sounded so much like it was coming from a lynch mob, that the Secret Service was alarmed at the number of death threats that Palin's rhetoric was provoking?

And I'm sorry, but I really have to stick up for Palin here:

Irate John McCain aides, who blame Mrs Palin for losing the election, claim Mrs Palin took it upon herself to question Mr Obama's patriotism, before the line of attack had been cleared by Mr McCain.

Sorry, wrong answer!!! A presidential candidate is responsible for his campaign. Period! No ifs, ands or buts about it! That's why candidates say "I'm [so-and-so] and I approve this message" at the end of all of their campaign commercials. Palin has zero responsibility for her words, whether she decided to say them on her own or not. The campaign gives her the script that she speaks from, either on paper or via a teleprompter. Her job is to read the words given to her. She refuses to do the job, she gets fired (The campaign may be hopelessly incompetent, but they're still legally responsible). Absolutely no one is ever, under any circumstances, going to allow a partner in his or her campaign to just run off by herself and do her own thing. Ain't gonna happen.

McCain himself had to "dial it back" when a woman told him at a "Town Hall Meeting" that she was worried because she was convinced that Obama was an Arab. McCain snatched the microphone away from her and said that Obama was "a decent man" (And no, saying that Obama's "a decent man" doesn't really constitute an objection to the claim that he's an Arab). The inflammatory accusations were pulled back a bit.

Another problem with Howell's evaluation as to how well the WaPo did is how the paper did on "horse-race" stories versus "issues" stories:

The count was lopsided, with 1,295 horse-race stories and 594 issues stories.
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There were no broad stories on energy or science policy, and there were few on religion issues.

My feeling on "horse-race" stories is that well, any idiot can read a poll and there are at least half-a-dozen polling firms out there that do reasonably reliable work. Interpreting a poll to see what will happen next? That's far more a matter of art than science. Anyone who tells fortunes using palm reading, tarot cards or tea leaves is perfectly capable of (and probably has just as good a record at) making reasonably reliable guesses based on polling data.

What would I prefer the WaPo spend its time & resources on? That's easy. According to Bill Hamilton, assistant managing editor for politics, the paper is in the business of providing what they "were uniquely able to provide our audiences both in Washington and on the Web." Now, let's see, what can a large, well-funded, well-connected institution provide that, say, a blogger can't? Or what can it provide more easily than a lone blogger can? How about "broad stories on energy or science policy, [or] ... religion issues"?

In other words, the WaPo would serve the public interest much better by chucking at least three-quarters of the "horse-race" stories and concentrating more on "broad stories" on issues. I'm interested in seeing the WaPo concentrate on doing what it's good at. Let the bloggers and small papers do the "horse-race" stuff. The WaPo should concentrate on "issues" stories where they take a serious look at the issue, at each candidate's plan for dealing with the issue and for how well their plan is likely to work. Based on looking at a few Palin talks, I'd guess the McCain campaign wouldn't come off looking very good.