Four Walter Mittys For WaPo Fact Checker

Glenn “Geppetto” Kessler In Repose

Poor Glenn Kessler. Ever since the last Presidential election (and probably before), it’s been clear he imagines himself some sort of fanciful righter of wrongs, some ultimate arbiter of not just truth but also human intention – what he, Glenn, has divined that people really meant to do, in their heart of hearts.

Simultaneously, it’s been equally clear that what Kessler is often in reality doing is simply substituting what he, in his own heart of hearts, wishes the subjects who come under his analysis, had done or said. Like more recently, when Kessler awarded President Obama his most-ignominious brickbat (the dreaded “Four Pinocchios,” essentially a cutesy way for saying Kessler thinks something a flat-out lie) for Obama having committed the crime of claiming he’d called the Benghazi attack an act of terrorism, when Obama had actually said “act of terror.” The Horror™.

That last bit of (possibly mendacious?) dada from Kessler concerned the ongoing Republican silliness-fest that is the now eight-plus month series of hearings into the Benghazi attack. And – what do you know! – just today, we have the specter of yet another Benghazi-related ignominy from Kessler. This time, the Obama administration avoids the lowest rung; Kessler awards only three Pinocchios – though, given his willingness to award four for leaving “-ism” off a word, you’d think Kessler wouldn’t have had any problem assigning this “lie” the full four Pinocchios.

What has the Obama administration lied and deceived about this time, according to ol’ Gepppetto Kessler? This time, it’s concerning the recent dust-up over Republicans having provided inaccurate summaries to reporters of White House emails regarding the “messaging” over Benghazi that took place in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. If you’re not familiar with this bit of inside baseball…I don’t blame you. You can get a good overview of it here, from Jay Rosen, leading media critic/analyst.

Kessler, in his piece, takes issue with White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer having said several times after the altering of the summaries was revealed, that Republicans “doctored” them. Kessler, after reviewing all the facts he thinks pertinent, comes to the following conclusion:

But the reporters involved have indicated they were told by their sources that these were summaries, taken from notes of e-mails that could not be kept. The fact that slightly different versions of the e-mails were reported by different journalists suggests there were different note-takers as well. (emphasis added)

Yes. Each reporter present took slightly different notes. Yet the essential substance remains both remarkably clear and also consistent between reporters’ descriptions of what they were told the emails said. So, while the fact that reporters’ notes aren’t identical does prove that they were given summaries instead of verbatim text, what it does not, however, prove, is that the person giving those summaries was not both A) a Republican and B) giving inaccurate summaries that were intended to make the White House look complicit and culpable, when the actual text reveals it was not.

Yet that’s the very conclusion Kessler draws: that because the reporters who heard the summaries had what even Kessler called “slight differences” (note: not substantive differences) in how they characterized them, it proves that Pfeiffer’s claim that the emails were “doctored” is false – and possibly, Kessler subtly suggests, an attempt to smear Republicans and distract from….something? Kessler continues, extrapolating without basis that “Republicans would have been foolish to seriously doctor e-mails that the White House at any moment could have released.”

Yes, Glenn, that would indeed have been foolish. Yet politicians and elected officials often do foolish things, and merely observing that something would be foolish is also not evidence it isn’t exactly what happened. In fact, it is Walter Mitty-like fantasy to assume or suggest that it does constitute such evidence.

Kessler follows up this last piece of specious reasoning and non-evidence with this absolute corker:

Clearly, of course, Republicans would put their own spin on what the e-mails meant, as they did in the House report.

Right. Their own spin. Glenn Kessler is certainly old enough to remember (though he appears either not to care, or to have forgotten) that the concept of “spin” was originally introduced into the political lexicon with the phrase “spin doctor.” Someone who is spinning the news has always been assumed to have been “doctoring” it to best effect. On that basis alone, Kessler’s argument falls apart.

Rather than rest on what amounts to little more than argumentum ad dictionarium, though, the larger question Kessler’s words beg (and which he apparently misses) is that the entire concept of spin involves a spectrum of gray that goes all the way from simply stating things in the best possible light, through things like selectively choosing portions of quotes and leaving others out which would cause a reasonable person to change their mind about the substance, and all the way up to outright altering the facts of an issue in order to either avoid looking bad or to make an opponent look bad.

In fact, what Kessler is describing in the above quote is, roughly, what his own job concerns – or is supposed to, at any rate. Of course politicians and their spokespeople try to put their own actions and words in the best possible light, and those of their opponents in the worst. The entire reason for the existence of the job of fact-checker is to determine whether in doing so, said politicians and spokespeople have altered the facts to suit their agenda. That’s the line between mere PR and outright mendacity. The way Kessler frames it in this piece, it’s as if he considers that task – the one that literally defines his job description – unimportant or at least secondary to the question of whether reporters were honest about having received summaries. That is a separate question, and – at least in Jonathan Karl’s case, it’s clear he wasn’t honest (or at least wasn’t accurate) about whether what he wrote were verbatim from emails or from summaries.

However, if what Glenn Kessler wishes to do is render judgment on whether it’s fair for the White House to state the emails were “doctored” by Republicans, then he needs to address the question directly of whether that happened, and not simply  point out that reporters’ summaries were consistent with one another. The question is: were they consistent with the actual facts, with the emails themselves? And that question has already been answered in the negative. They were not. Kessler himself even admits in his piece that “[i]ndeed, for all the accusations that the White House deliberately changed the talking points, this e-mail comment from a CIA official would greatly undercut that claim: ‘The White House cleared quickly, but State has major concerns’.” (emphasis added)

Exactly. The emails show exactly what most reporters covering this mini-scandal show they do: that the White House attempted to coordinate so various spokespeople would be on the same page, but stayed out of the bureaucratic knife fight between State and the CIA, and certainly did not attempt to do what the GOP-provided summaries of portions of those emails tried to suggest: favor the concerns of State over other concerns.

So it’s anyone’s guess why Kessler could print such a thing in his own piece, then avoid any significant examination of or pronouncement about whether the summaries provided by Republicans were intentionally wrong, yet still come to the conclusion that Pfeiffer (and by extension, the entire Obama administration) deserve to be declared liars for saying the GOP provided inaccurate summaries that make the White House look bad. Kessler focuses on Pfeiffer’s use of the word “doctored,” yet he provides no evidence that – nor even any examination  of whether – the summaries were intentionally altered or merely an “oopsie” on the part of the GOP. Kessler’s “ruling” against Pfeiffer suggests that he believes the latter: that the GOP summaries just happened to result in the White House looking bad. Yet Kessler never examines the likelihood of this, nor presents any evidence to support this view. Readers are just supposed to take Kessler’s ruling on faith. Kessler concludes with:

The burden of proof lies with the accuser. Despite Pfeiffer’s claim of political skullduggery, we see little evidence that much was at play here besides imprecise wordsmithing…

It’s true enough that in a court of law, the burden of proof lies with the accuser. Yet even in a court of law, there are different standards of proof. In a capital case, the burden is indeed “beyond reasonable doubt,” but in almost all civil cases, it’s “preponderance of the evidence.” And despite the high-falutin’ language, Kessler’s column is not a court of law. Kessler also seems not to recognize his admonition regarding the burden of proof extends to himself as well.

In this case, the facts are that Republicans did indeed provide inaccurate summaries of White House emails to reporters, and those summaries did indeed make the White House look culpable for things they had not in fact done. That is, in fact, the very essence of “doctoring.” Unless you’re Glenn Kessler, apparently. But because Kessler apparently doesn’t like that most correct and most obvious conclusion, he wants to shift the burden of proof on Pfeiffer to holding him accountable for proving beyond reasonable doubt that Republicans wrote summaries of those emails which were intended to paint the White House in a bad light.

We rate Kessler’s “fact checking” four out of four Walter Mittys for obliviousness and substituting what he’d like to see happen for what did happen, while assiduously avoiding the actual facts.

9-11, Torture, And The Boston Marathon

Today,  less than a full day after the horrible terrorist bombing of the Boston Marathon (no link; it’s all just speculation and grief-porn at this point, plus it’s been all over the news – you can’t have missed it), the New York Times obtained a pre-release copy of a 577-page report from a non-partisan organization called the Constitution Project headed by former Bush administration Undersecretary of Homeland Security Asa Hutchinson, concerning the so-called “enhanced interrogation” methods employed at the behest of the Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, the timing of the report and the bombing in Boston are a coincidence. Yet it seems somehow appropriate that a damning report concluding that the last time the United States was exposed to a significant terrorist attack on our soil we allowed ourselves to respond by lowering ourselves to employing torture, comes on the heels of a very similar kind of test for the United States. According to the Times, the report concludes, unequivocally, that the United states tortured:

The sweeping, 577-page report says that while brutality has occurred in every American war, there never before had been “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.”

I debated for quite a while whether to make the last letter of my previous sentence an S or a D, whether torture is something we did, or something we might still do. In the end, I chose the D, even though it’s always possible future events may reveal me as having been not cynical enough. Because when it comes to something as detestable and immoral as torture, I have to be able to hope that this thorough, damning review from the Constitution Project will allow the debate to be refocused from whether what we did was torture onto a recognition that yes, we did torture — and are we really (or do we want to be) the kind of country that does such things, openly? I say that despite the miscalculation, overreach and perhaps even ill intent revealed in this report of a few of the decision-makers in the recent past, we are not that kind of country, and we do not want to be. We are better than that. I am. You are. We all are. For a long time in America, we used to think that two oceans, the longest undefended border with a friendly country in the world, and the biggest, baddest military in history made us immune from what is sadly a too-common experience in the rest of the world. 9/11 shattered that sense, and because it was new and unfamiliar and frightening to us, we allowed some of our leaders to make part of the deliberate national reaction to it an abhorrent set of acts: torture. Sadly, yesterday in Boston reminded us again, as nothing I can think of since 9/11 has, that even if our old sense of immunity from the world’s ills was ever true (which I doubt), it no longer is. Terrorism happens. Yet it seems to me that this time, something is different. Yesterday in Boston, as that now-familiar sense of surprise, confusion and sudden tragedy we all remember from 9/11 instantly overcame the crowd nearly as quickly as the smoke from the bombs themselves, we saw (as Patton Oswalt observed in his now-famous viral facebook post) dozens of people running toward - not away from – the carnage and destruction. To help. To bind wounds and stop bleeding and offer comfort and help find lost loved ones. Earlier finishers of the marathon who were suffering dehydration and were in the medical tents receiving intravenous fluids ripped the IVs out of their own arms to make room for the much more-grievously wounded from the bomb blasts. Heroism during tragedy isn’t new, nor is it uniquely American. There are plenty of stories of heroism and generosity from 9/11. But in the immediate aftermath of yesterday’s bombings, there seemed to be less of the 9/11 sense of panicky disbelief (both at the scene and in the general population watching via the media), of “how could this possibly happen,” and more of a sense of “oh my God, this happened — let’s go help.” Because we’re better than that. The change from post-9/11 to yesterday wasn’t limited to those in Boston, either. All over the Internet, notorious for its extreme, ill-considered and anonymous bashing, there was a sense of tension and loss…but also of restraint. Not everywhere, but it was noticeable, widespread. John Cole at Balloon Juice, a former conservative pseudo-warblogger in the wake of 9/11, urged his readers:

I refuse to be scared. You should too. I am going to sit here in my house and watch a show or two, then go to bed, and while I can commiserate with the wounded and dead and the horrible grief their loved ones must be experiencing, I am not going to spend the next couple weeks freaking out, because that is what the bombers and the war pigs want.

When President Obama addressed the nation and his speech did not contain the word “terrorism,” and some of his usual enemies started up with the talk that the President was weak, even as wounds were still being tended in Boston, that reaction was repudiated and shunned. Even amongst many of the people who continue to be among Obama’s most vocal opponents, it wasn’t business-as-usual. RedState’s founder Erick Erickson tweeted:

Sorry folks, I’m not interesting in beating up the President today. God bless him. He’s got his work cut out for him.

We’re learning. We’re remembering that we’re better than that. We’re better than the despicable means employed by violent cowards like Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Mohammed Atta and whoever did this yesterday to make us afraid or divide us or force us to do something they want…or maybe just make us like them. Here’s the thing, though: we’re also better than the worst of our own instincts and reactions, and that means we’re better than the equally despicable (not to mention ineffective) means of preventing future attack through authorizing the use of torture. If any good can come out of the confluence of such a tragedy as yesterday’s bombing and the revelation that the country we all love so much engaged in some of the worst acts possible, let it be that we continue to learn how to respond to such tragedies without losing our bearings, our sense of what makes us human — our souls, if you wish. As much despair as yesterday provided us all, much like 9/11 did, it also provided me that hope. I have to believe that as the findings of this report from the Constitution Project become conventional wisdom – that what the Bush Administration’s carefully-crafted legal rationalizations after 9/11 enabled (no, compelled) representatives of the United States of America to do on our behalf in both Iraq and Afghanistan falls within the definition of torture – that the debate we’ve had on whether “enhanced interrogation” was legal, or was torture, or was justifiable, will be over. I have to believe we have all learned enough since 9/11 that the next time one of our leaders or influential figures says something like this:

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

…their words will find no purchase. Their suggestions will be shunned and repudiated across the board, because enough people will remember, will have learned, that what such words really mean will end up here (from the Times’ story on the Constitution Project’s report):

The use of torture, the report concludes, has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.” The task force found “no firm or persuasive evidence” that these interrogation methods produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means. While “a person subjected to torture might well divulge useful information,” much of the information obtained by force was not reliable, the report says.

We. Are. Better. Than. That.

I Do Not Heart Huckabee

GOP Presidential also-ran/religious troll Mike Huckabee inadvertently hit (or at least suggested) the wingnut trifecta Saturday when speaking to the Iowa Republican Party’s “Celebrate Life” event. Via Rawstory:

During his keynote speech at the Republican Party of Iowa’s Celebrate Life event on Saturday, Fox News host Mike Huckabee compared abortion in the United States to the systematic elimination of the Jewish population by the Nazis.

If you absolutely must watch Huckabee’s execrable comments in their entirety, here you go (barf bag not included):

Mike Huckabee has managed to remain even somewhat relevant in US politics for as long as he has due to two main factors. The first is that this kind of awful, lunkheaded horseshit is exactly what a large swath of today’s GOP base wants to hear. That gives him a built-in constituency. But there are plenty of others with as much or more hate to spew. Why has Huckabee succeeded – to the extent he has – where others have failed?

The second main factor in whatever success Huckabee has had is that the man sounds reasonable. And by “sounds,” I mean the actual sound of his voice. It’s also generally known – if you’re familiar with Mike Huckabee at all – that he is not just a former governor of Arkansas, but also a preacher. A man of God. That knowledge, coupled with the soothing and quite pleasant tone of his voice, almost serve to mask the hateful garbage that comes out of his mouth. Someone like Rush Limbaugh sounds and has the mannerisms of a nasty, brutish schoolyard bully: simultaneously full of fear and loathing at anyone he perceives as “the enemy™.” By contrast, Huckabee sounds like a kindly father figure – or if “father” is a bit much for you to stomach, maybe scout leader or youth group advisor. He sounds nice, even though he isn’t, and it’s what’s allowed Huckabee’s voice to be heard where people with very similar views get (rightly) marginalized for those views.

But when you get a dose of The Full Huckabee, from a setting in which he’s more-relaxed and feels he’s speaking exclusively to an audience of like-minded people (like he apparently did at the Iowa GOP’s “Celebrate Life” event), that’s when the ugliness shines forth so brightly that not even the folksy charm and soft-spoken demeanor can conceal it.

Aside from the generic awful inappropriateness of likening much of anything to the Holocaust, it struck me as interesting that Huckabee would choose to use the Schindler story as his touchstone for the comparison. Huckabee made it a point to mention that Schindler was a “bad guy” initially, highlighting that he made much of his fortune from the forced free labor of the Jews in pre-war Germany.

As I sat there seething, listening to this hateful garbage drop from Huckabee’s lips in that charming folksy voice, it occurred to me that he shouldn’t be complaining about it, he should be organizing! I mean: the GOP isn’t pro-life, they’re simply pro-birth. They’re not interested in funding Head Start or increasing funding for education, they don’t favor providing health care to expectant mothers, any of a host of other pro-ACTUAL life (not just birth) measures are anathema to the modern GOP. So why not use that indifference to the actual lives of others? Why not take Oskar Schindler’s whole example, since Huckabee was holding him up as an example anyway? Why not just go the full monty and advocate not only the eradication of legal abortion, but push for a companion law that allows the actual children who are the products of state-mandated births to poor mothers who would’ve chosen otherwise to be shipped as soon as they’re old enough right to America’s factories, to live lives of indentured servitude as a neverending repayment for their upbringing at someone else’s expense?

It’s genius! It’s clear large chunks of the south are still angry about and have not gotten over the loss of the Civil War. Shipping the human products of universal anti-abortion laws off to factories helps solve that by bringing back slavery, and it increases industrial production at virtually NO cost, since you don’t need to PAY slaves! Think about it! The wingnut trifecta: outlaw abortion, bring back slavery and increase private wealth!

Oy. This is what happens to me when I’m unwise enough to watch Huckabee speak for any length of time.

Four People Shot To Death In PA – While NRA Press Conference On Newtown Was Happening

Wayne LaPierre of the NRA Looks On In Annoyance As Someone Manages To Tell A Little Truth

To be clear, no, the people were not shot AT the NRA press conference. But if you listened live to NRA head Wayne LaPierre’s whiny, aggrieved, aggressive bullshit this morning at the NRA press conference, then really, the only rebuttal or answer of any kind that needs to be made can be made by the local Pennsylvania news media:

BLAIR COUNTY, Pa. — The Blair County district attorney said that four people, including the alleged gunman, are dead after a series of shootings along a rural road on Friday.

The district attorney said the victims are one woman and three men, including the gunman.

Three Pennsylvania state troopers were injured.

Remember: all this happened while Wayne LaPierre was explaining to the national press that the NRA’s much-ballyhooed “meaningful contributions” were, in essence: suggesting having armed guards at all schools. In other words, more men with guns. As if Virginia Tech didn’t have its own police force. Jeebus.

As someone on Twitter remarked: isn’t it terrible there weren’t men with guns at Ft. Hood? They could have prevented that tragic massacre.

The debate on guns – and the culture of guns – in the country needs to change. Now. After Newtown, it may finally be starting to.

(h/t BoingBoing)

Foot-Bullet ‘Pragmatism’

Pragmatic Obama Fans’ Political Strategy
(image courtesy of Geof Kern photography)

How amusing. Here’s die-hard Obama fan Karoli Kuns* at Crooks and Liars, gamely rallying the troops through the obligatory fear-based warning about Teh Preznit Romney:

537 votes. That’s all that stood between Bush and Gore. It came down to 537 votes. That’s too close. Way too close.

The past is the past. But the only way to overcome all of the roadblocks is to step up and cast a vote in overwhelming numbers. Even if you think they’re jacking with voting machines…it can only be overcome by voting in huge numbers. They can’t jack everything no matter how hard they try, but it means getting out and voting.

As a standalone appeal, there’s nothing at all wrong with that message (except perhaps its failure to make a positive case FOR the President, but that’s not really the point of such appeals as this one). In fact, it’s quite correct as far as it goes: the election of 2000 should have reminded all of us that every vote DOES matter. I’ve written about that fact many times, for example. When 537 votes is the margin of victory in a national Presidential election, there’s no doubt that every vote, every action by the campaigns, matters – and might mean the difference between victory and defeat.

But when such a message comes from die-hard Obama fans like Karoli who have spent most of the last three years essentially telling progressives and anyone who agrees with them  to fuck off:

Here’s a big sad pug face for Eric Alterman to go with his whining, entitled column over at The Nation today. Yes, you heard me right: He’s a big whiner who needs to put on his big boy pants and get with it.

…then it’s rather rich, indeed.

Should this election turn out to be as painfully close as the 2000 election, I wonder whether people like Karoli will spend even a moment’s reflection (given that her top stated goal has been to re-elect the President) speculating whether perhaps comments like hers over the last three years (or comments like these from more-official sources) could have alienated a combined total of at least 538 voters who otherwise would’ve pulled the lever for Obama?

Nah. Probably easier to just blame Jane Hamsher or Ralph Nader Jill Stein for not falling in line.

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* Karoli’s words, not mine:

Breitbart Site Distorts HuffPo Piece on Gallup Poll to Claim Bias

One of the reasons I don’t bother doing this on a more regular basis is that I have only so many hours in the day, and other priorities. That alone wouldn’t keep me from writing about something I felt was important, and certainly outright misrepresentation by media (even right-wing media known for its bias and distortions like Andrew Breitbart’s ventures) could be considered important.

The problem is, at much of the insular, self-referential alternate-reality universe that is today’s right-wing media, these distortions happen with such regularity that it would take many more hours than I have in my day even if I did nothing else. That’s why we have Media Matters, I guess. ;o) However, in this case, the distortion was brought to my attention by a conservative-leaning friend on Twitter who obviously believed what it had to say, and it was also so blatant that I just had to stop and write a quick debunking.

Everyone knows that as we head into the last month before a quadrennial Presidential election, the stakes are the highest they get in American politics. As such, it’s not surprising that this is the month in which some of the nastiest of the dirty tricks get pulled, and also when all attention is focused on any little twists and turns that might affect the race, if it is close. One of the closest-watched indicators are the polls. This is how everyone from the conservatives to the liberals discovers how the candidates are doing, day to day, and so it is probably inevitable that questions about the pollsters’ impartiality might arise. Truth be told, if there were genuine evidence that any one pollster was putting their firm’s thumb on the scale in favor of one candidate or the other, I’d be interested in such a story, too. In 2010, for instance, Nate Silver of the excellent FiveThirtyEight blog at the New York Times, pointed out that Rasmussen Reports was statistically biased and inaccurate in favor of the GOP. But Nate Silver is a statistical analyst and poll-watcher par excellence. The hacks at Breitbart are nothing more than conservative mouthpieces, always on the lookout for whatever makes Democrats or liberals look bad.

So it is perhaps not surprising to read this at Breitbart’s site:

WE TOLD YOU SO: HUFFPO BUSTS GALLUP POLL BOOSTING OBAMA BY TINKERING WITH SAMPLE ON EVE OF ELECTION

Conservative critics of mainstream media polling are feeling vindicated today after the left-wing Huffington Post revealed the fact that the Gallup poll likely altered the percentage of non-whites in its sample in the weeks after the Democratic National Convention, likely boosting President Barack Obama’s approval rating–and, possibly, his poll margin.

Other than the annoyingly shout-y headline about the Huffington Post “busting” Gallup – one of the nation’s oldest and best-respected polling firms – the claim is indeed the sort of signature-Breitbart style of eye-catching. It certainly would be significant news if Breitbart (or even HuffPo…heck, anyone) had caught Gallup fudging its statistics to benefit the Obama campaign or Democrats in general.

Of course, as is also usual for Breitbart, they’re betting readers won’t click through to read the HuffPo article they link to which supposedly “proves” the charge. Sadly, they are probably correct in this estimate of their readership. Readers do not come to Breitbart’s site for rigorous analysis or fact-based news, they come to have their already-existing beliefs about the way certain thins are validated and reinforced. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when one does click through to that article, one finds a very different story:

The estimated nonwhite percentage of the sample for the past five weeks was as follows:

Given the size of Gallup’s weekly adult sample, typically over 3500 respondents, the increase from the previous four weeks to the first week of October is very unlikely to be explained by random variation alone. This change, however, does bring the nonwhite share of Gallup’s sample much more closely into line with the 2010 Census estimate of the nonwhite share of the U.S. adult population which was 31.8 percent.

So, contrary to what Breitbart’s reporter claims, the switch in sampling of non-whites isn’t a nefarious plot to go in the tank for Obama in the final weeks of the campaign, it’s a correction of earlier numbers, either due to sampling error, or to a higher estimate of non-white voting population. Even that is a guess, since Gallup (as the HuffPo article makes clear) doesn’t release the racial composition of its daily tracking sample. The numbers in the above graph are estimated based upon respondents answers. In other words, no one but Gallup truly knows.

The author of the HuffPo article, Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University, goes on to opine that “the increase from the previous four weeks to the first week of October is very unlikely to be explained by random variation alone.” I’m not sure I agree, given that the number goes up eight-tenths of a point, holds steady for a week, then goes DOWN more than two points before going back UP to slightly less than three points above where it had been. I’m not the expert that Abramowitz is, (then again, neither are the partisans at Breitbart.com), but a fluctuation of two or three points first one way, then the other, seems well within the realm of random statistical variation. More than that, though, is Abramowitz’s statement that those numbers are his own ESTIMATES of what Gallup’s own, real numbers must look like. In other words, in the absence of the real numbers from Gallup, Abramowitz is extrapolating and guessing to get the above chart, and then making tentative assertions based on his extrapolations.

If you read Breitbart, however, all such nuance and qualification is lost. Instead, you’re told (several paragraphs down in the piece) that the reason might be because the Justice Department is strong-arming Gallup. Their evidence for this is a link to yet another right-wing site, Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller, which says the DoJ filed an unrelated lawsuit against Gallup, though – hilariously – they also say in a separate article that this lawsuit, though announced, has never even been filed. It gets even murkier after that, with “evidence” in the form of quotes from their own pundits claiming without evidence that the polling numbers for this election are somehow employing “absurd assumptions about turnout.”

When you’ve got to quote yourself as evidence that your suspicions are correct, you might have a credibility problem. Beyond that, though, is the simple fact that Professor Abramowitz, in his HuffPo article, was making an educated GUESS at what Gallup’s racial sampling might be, and his professional opinion as a political science professor is that if he’s correct, “the increase in the percentage of nonwhites in Gallup’s latest weekly tracking poll sample is a welcome development that should produce more accurate estimates of not only presidential approval but also support for the presidential candidates among registered and likely voters.”

Exactly so. But you’d never know – or even hear – it, if all you read was the Breitbart piece.

I Get Post-Debate Letters

Fired up? Ready to go?

I sometimes forget that the email address I used to sign up for Obama campaign updates (almost exclusively fundraising appeals these days) gets filtered into its own special folder in my email inbox, because otherwise it’s simply too annoying to deal with the daily volume of email from that single source, this close to election day. So it wasn’t until today that I thought to check that folder, and found this after-debate appeal from the President’s campaign:

If you want to be president of the United States, you have got to be willing to stand up and tell the American people the truth.

Mitt Romney had a chance to do just that the other night, and he chose a different path.

Rather than own up to his plan for $5 trillion worth of tax cuts for the wealthy that he’s spent more than a year talking about, he denied it. Instead of telling the truth about his plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program, he dodged the question. And given the chance to explain how he’d “replace” Obamacare, he offered no plan.

Oh, boy. I could feel my blood start to boil as soon as I read that – I didn’t even need to get down to the ubiquitous hat-passing appeal for more of my money. This was my reply:

Look, I know you’re deathly afraid of coming off in a way that will let Sean Hannity portray you as the “angry black man.” And not without reason. But as Jon Stewart of all people put it on Thursday after that turd of a performance you turned in, shouldn’t you display at least as much of the “fired-up, ready to go” spirit and sense of urgency as you request of your email list volunteers? It’s just too early for you to start playing to not-lose, to start taking a knee and running out the clock.

Jesus Christ, Barack, going into that debate on Wednesday, everyone agreed that if Romney had a bad, or even just an OK night, and you had a good one where you really held his feet to the fire, you’d make the trending-downwards of the Romney campaign permanent. You’d “put him away.” Instead, you proved Chris frigging Christie right when he took his wide, bloviating ass onto the talk shows in the pre-debate days and arrogantly proclaimed that Mitt Romney was going to wipe the floor with you.

And yes, you did win in the “honesty” category. And yes, it sucks that since 1960, the press have discovered (and in fact actually CELEBRATE) that their source of employment itself – the media – can make candidates President on the basis of who had the better hair or smile rather than who had the better arguments and policies. But for crying out loud, it isn’t as if this is exactly new information you or your supposed campaign professionals are only now having to adjust to on the fly, in the moment. You knew it going into that debate; that’s the way it’s been now for fifty years. But instead of bringing the kind of enthusiasm you regularly (though not always) display on the stump, you gave the nation (many of them tuning in for the first time to the campaign that evening) Professor Obama, the 3D chess player and detached, bored leader of a diffident class of freshmen students.

Mitt Romney kept lobbing meatball after meatball over the heart of the plate, the kind of lies that just BEGGED to be swatted into the third deck…and you just kept standing there taking pitches.

What. The. Hell.

Go out there and act like you want to win this thing. Because if you don’t act like that, why the hell should anyone else?

The Obama campaign’s email continued on with this final bit of insanity:

Debates are one factor, but you need to remember: what he or I say in those debates will not decide this election.

Breathtaking, in its insipidness, isn’t it? I mean, think about that sentence for a moment. After an election – especially if one is on the losing side – there’s a tendency to stir the ashes, to keep doing autopsy after autopsy and analysis after analysis, trying to figure out what went wrong, what that magic “one factor” was that swung the painfully close election into your opponent’s column and sent your candidate to the showers. All such post-facto scab-picking is of course useless in the “no-sense-crying-over-spilled-milk” sense of the word. But something campaigns or their supporters seem to fail to notice is that aside from the futility of playing the “shoulda, woulda, coulda” game, the other undeniable truth in any such close loss is that almost any of the factors that swung the opponent’s way can be said to have been “the deciding factor.”

When George W. Bush won by the slimmest of margins in 2000 (leaving aside that in many ways, it was the SCOTUS and not the voters who (s)elected him), such agonized, after-action analysis was at its height. The favorite scapegoat for Al Gore’s loss was of course Ralph Nader. And, with a loss of 537 votes in Florida, certainly the 90,000 Nader voters in the Sunshine state can have been said to have “made the difference” between President Gore and President Bush. But it’s equally true that if Al Gore had been able to win his OWN STATE, Florida would not have mattered (Presidents almost never lose their home states; both 2000 and again this year are outliers in that regard — Mitt Romney is behind by as much as thirty points in Massachusetts). Others pointed to electronic voting machine irregularities in Ohio, or any number of other factors that, had that one factor been different, would have resulted in a President Gore. Here’s the thing (and the reason why such noodling is pointless after a loss): they are ALL true. Yup, had any one of those things been different, we’d have had a different President in 2001. And because this is true, it makes it patently silly to claim that this or that specific factor was THE thing that cost Gore the election. It ALL matters.

That’s why this Obama letter – especially that last sentence I quoted – is so noxious. Because in their blizzard of email to supporters, the Obama campaign at least pretends to know this: they say things like “the call you make today to a voter in Ohio or Iowa or Florida may make the difference.” When it comes time to ask their supporters for money or volunteer time or even simply enthusiasm, the Obama campaign seems to understand full well that there IS a threshold between winning and losing, and that indeed everything that helps the campaign is a factor in getting them across that threshold and into a second term.

Which is why it’s borderline insulting for them to claim that a thuddingly bad debate performance by the President which was viewed by some sixty million Americans supposedly “will not decide this election.”

Bullshit, Barack – and you know it. If the race is truly close, it may very well be that everyone from you and whichever one of your staff wrote this email to the “professional left” that you allow your campaign to so roundly ridicule may be sitting around in the days after a President Romney is elected, each offering up that one factor out of hundreds which “was the deciding factor.” If you lose in November by a handful of votes in Florida or Ohio after having had the momentum trending in your direction up until last Wednesday, it will certainly be valid to note that was the day you lost.

Last thing: of course you and your staff are right, that virtually all independent journalists and fact-checkers agree that Mitt Romney lied his way through Wednesday night. But allowing Thursday-morning fact-checkers to do what you should have done in the moment is not only vastly less effective, it’s a paler version of the same kind of “coulda, woulda, shoulda” that happens on the day after an election. Don’t let Romney get away with it again. And don’t delegate the job of refuting him to your underlings or the media in the week AFTER Romney tries to foist off that kind of nonsense on not just you, but the American public. Instead, act like you ask US to behave: as if every phone call, every small contribution, every door knock and yes, every debate performance might just be “the deciding factor.” Because it might be.

Both Sides Do NOT Do It

Dear media, centrist politicians of all stripes, onlookers, pundits, and anyone else who’s tempted by the easy and shiny but false equivalency of “both sides do ____” (behavior X in politics):

No. They don’t.

One of these things weighs a LOT MORE than the other…

Oh, there are certainly behaviors that all politicians and partisans engage in. Most politicians will portray every situation to their advantage. Most will puff up their own experience and denigrate their opponents, and similar behavior. If you find that sort of behavior reprehensible, then perhaps following politics isn’t for you, because that’s called “campaigning,” and yes, virtually all of them do it. That’s not what I’m talking about.

Dana Milbank Conveniently Defines Concern Trolling For Us

And by “defines,” of course, I mean “embodies”:

Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay rights organization, posted an alert on its blog Tuesday: “Paul Ryan Speaking at Hate Group’s Annual Conference.”

The “hate group” that the Republicans’ vice presidential candidate would be addressing? The Family Research Council, a mainstream conservative think tank founded by James Dobson and run for many years by Gary Bauer.

The day after the gay rights group’s alert went out, 28-year-old Floyd Lee Corkins II walked into the Family Research Council’s Washington headquarters and, according to an FBI affidavit, proclaimed words to the effect of “I don’t like your politics” — and shot the security guard.

Oy. You see where this is going, don’t you? To borrow a phrase from Berkeley Economics professor Brad DeLong: why, oh why, can’t we have a better press corps?

Of course it’s terrible this security guard was shot. Anytime a mass (or, as in this case, even a single) shooting happens, it’s awful. And looking for the larger causes, if any (beyond madness), of such shootings is always a worthwhile pursuit of law enforcement. Was this an isolated incident? Was it a terrorist attack? Will there likely be more? These are basic questions that should be – and are – asked by the public servants tasked with responding to such crimes.

However, because this particular case is unusual in that it was both explicitly political in origin and specifically from a traditionally liberal source (gay rights supporter) against a traditionally right wing target (homophobic Christian dominionists), Lord, how the media’s solons of liberal rectitude rush forth to show their “reasonable” bona fides by being first in line to condemn not just the shooting itself, but the “unjustifiable” actions (Milbank’s words) of the Human Rights Campaign and the Southern Poverty Law Center – the groups which labeled the Family Research Council a hate group.

After briefly glossing over the empirically demonstrable fact that “much of the political anger in America today lies on the right,” Milbank reminds us (by which he means: everyone not on the right) that “there are unbalanced and potentially violent people of all political persuasions” (in other words: all sides do it. See? Balance!) Milbank ends with what I’m sure he imagines is a solemn reminder to “[t]he rest of us” that we “need to be careful about hurling accusations that can stir up the crazies” (because really, people, liberals are just as guilty as conservatives here, and that’s what’s important…or, rather, what’s important is that I, Dana Milbank, be publicly seen saying that, so I can keep my “fair and balanced” club-card). Milbank also goes to great lengths to remind the reader of how he took Glenn Beck to task when Beck still had a show on FOX for whipping up hate and fear (see? I do it to conservatives, too! I’m just being fair here, people!), and he makes sure to point out that (just like you, faithful liberal!) he also “disagree[s] with the Family Research Council’s views on gays and lesbians.” Finally, Pope Dana I  condescendingly absolves both HRC and the SPLC of any responsibility for the shooting at the Family Research Council (I’m sure they’re relieved that the heat’s off). That’s a whole lot of prevarication and credential-establishing in setup just to drive home Milbank’s main point, which is that really, liberals are stirring up violence too, and they should just watch it with their criticisms and not call hateful, homophobic speech by its right name, lest the hordes of armed, crazed liberals start shooting up the place.

Milbank’s argument becomes internally inconsistent – even incoherent – because his real goal is: he desperately wants to tut-tut liberals and liberal groups and make the false equivalence between them and the constant churning of gun-rights absolutism, paranoia and various hatreds of much of the right. So Milbank chides the SPLC and HRC for labeling FRC a hate group (although he insulates himself by insisting that neither liberal group is actually responsible for the shooting at FRC), implying that HRC and SPLC should censor what they say in order to minimize the chance of any such violent liberal rampages. Huh? Uh, Dana? If the speech and activities of both those groups aren’t responsible for the shooting at FRC, why, exactly, should they self-censor it?

Where the bankruptcy of Milbank’s argument can really be seen, though, is in the distinction he tries to draw between right-wing groups in order to justify telling HRC and SPLC (and the rest of us) to watch what we say about some right-wing groups and activities. After re-re-establishing his bona fides by reminding us he disagrees with FRC about gays, Milbank pronounces FRC “offensive, certainly,” but not “in the same category as the KKK.”

Stop for a moment and think about that.

The problem with Dana’s distinction here between groups that are “offensive, certainly” (but aren’t real hate groups), and the real thing (by Milbank’s definition: the KKK, Stormfront.org, Westboro Baptist Church, and a few others)  is immediately obvious. The same point Milbank makes about watching what we (or the SPLC or HRC) say could easily be extended to even those groups Milbank admits are genuine hate groups. Is Milbank, by saying that the FRC is no KKK, truly suggesting he would have been happy (or at least not upset) if Mr. Corkins, the FRC shooter, had instead visited a Klan office, or some mailing address for Stormfront, and begun shooting? I’ll throw Dana a lifeline, here: I do not believe he would consider such violence justified if it had been carried out at the KKK instead of the FRC. Yet if you try to follow the tortuous internal logic of Milbank’s arguments here, that’s exactly what he implies: liberals and especially groups like the FRC and SPLC should watch what they say about groups like FRC because a) it might incite “the crazies” to violence and b) FRC is no KKK.

Of course, the reason for Milbank’s otherwise-inexplicable distinction is that he can’t simply tell the SPLC or HRC to just shut up, period. He’s trying to shame them into censoring some of their statements, yes…but he’s aware that he has to give a plausible-sounding reason for why these liberal groups ought to alter what they say. And so the distinction is born between “real” hate groups (ones that Milbank judges most “reasonable” people would agree are hate groups) and non-hate groups like FRC, against whom liberals should restrain their speech, lest they incite violence…for which they wouldn’t be responsible. Or something.

Why, oh why, can’t we have better “liberal” punditry?

Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire

Most of us heard this old cliché for the first time when we were children. The rest of us heard it at some point along the line. I’d venture a guess virtually all of us of voting age have heard it by now; it’s long been a bit of Americana. Well-known songs have been written about it:

The point is, the phrase “pants on fire” quite clearly is understood generally to refer to lying, even gross, flagrant lying. So until very recently, I had assumed that PolitiFact’s rating of the same name, “Pants on Fire,” was thusly named to indicate PolitiFact judged any claim they slapped with that label to be not merely inaccurate or false, but of having been uttered knowingly; in short: that the person making the claim was lying.

Boy, was I wrong.

Even if you’ve been watching nothing but Olympics coverage for the past week-plus, if you read this blog, you know that on July 31, Harry Reid gave an interview to the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein and Ryan Grim in which he said that a Bain investor had told him Mitt Romney had paid no taxes for ten years. I’ve already had my say on the advisability of the politics surrounding this claim by Reid, but needless to say, such a prominent Democratic leader saying such an inflammatory thing in the midst of a heated Presidential election caused quite a stir (and continues to do so). More than a week later, the story – if anything – appears to be gaining steam, rather than losing it.

This may, in fact, be exactly what Harry Reid and/or the Obama campaign wanted: for continued focus to remain on the startling fact that Mitt Romney, in sharp contrast to most other modern Presidential candidates, has refused to release more than two years of his tax returns; the two most recent years, when he knew he was running for President. Regardless of the strategy, though, this story has undoubtedly been, behind the Olympics and the recent abominable massacre at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, the biggest story around, for more than a week now.

You know what that means, readers! Yup, like a moth to a flame, it meant it wouldn’t be long until that unique specimen of the new breed of self-appointed, independent fact-checkers-for-the-people, PolitiFact, would be weighing in with their verdict on this issue. Well, the wait is over, folks: PolitiFact has rendered their verdict: Harry Reid’s statement earns the coveted “Pants on Fire!” And it is because of this that I learned I’d been making an incorrect assumption about the nature of the “Pants on Fire” designation.

How, I wondered, could Reid’s statement possibly have qualified for “Pants on Fire” status? Did Harry Reid lie? Well, what was his actual claim? It’s important to remember that Reid did not himself claim – as some of the more pugnacious and less careful right-wing outlets have asserted – that Romney had paid no taxes. Instead, Reid’s claim is that a Bain investor told him so. Now, is it possible that Reid is lying when he says a Bain investor told him that information? Of course it is! To date, Reid has refused to name his source for the information he says he received. Also – let’s face it – politicians, especially in election seasons, have been known to lie. Heck, if they didn’t, there’d hardly be a need for an organization like PolitiFact, would there?

If Harry Reid were willing to disclose the name of the person who he says gave him this information, PolitiFact’s job would be straightforward: call Reid’s source and verify that he or she really did tell Harry Reid that Romney paid no taxes for ten years.

Period. That’s it.

Even in such a case, it’s critical to realize that it would NOT be PolitiFact’s job – at least, not as far as Harry Reid’s claim is concerned – to try to determine whether the Bain investor’s claim about Romney was true, because that’s a separate claim. It’s completely possible for it to be true that a Bain investor told Harry Reid that Romney paid no taxes for ten years and ALSO for it to simultaneously be false that Mitt Romney paid no taxes for ten years, if the Bain investor who was Reid’s source was lying or mistaken. In such a case, even though the Bain investor’s claim would be false (or possibly even a lie), Harry Reid’s claim (that the investor told him this information) would still be 100% true.

In reality, however, since Reid continues to refuse to name his source – and it isn’t hard to think of perfectly legitimate reasons for Reid not to name the source, reporters do this all the time to protect sources – Reid’s claim is unverifiable*. So, why did PolitiFact even weigh in on Reid’s claim, let alone assign it their most-notorious “Pants on Fire” rating? WAS Harry Reid lying? There’s no way to know, I thought! Confused and annoyed, I finally got around to looking up PolitiFact’s “Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter” page, which describes how and why they make the calls the way they do. Although the section that describes the ratings themselves is quite brief, it was there I discovered I’d incorrectly been assuming “Pants on Fire” meant “lying.” PolitiFact’s definition of “False” is essentially what most dictionaries’ is: “The statement is not accurate.” But “Pants on Fire” is defined by PolitiFact as: “The statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim.”

In other words, the only difference, for PolitiFact, between a false statement and a “Pants on Fire” statement is that the latter, in addition to being inaccurate, is also “ridiculous.” Not “said with malicious intent to deceive” or “knowingly false” (in other words: a lie), just “ridiculous.”

Now, it’s quite true, as any lawyer will tell you: proving someone is lying can be very difficult, because one must prove intent. You have to prove the person accused of lying KNEW their statement was false at the time they made it, and employed their false statement with intent to deceive. Although this can be difficult, it’s not impossible: in some cases, enough facts exist that it can be done. By contrast, however, proving that something is “ridiculous” is literally impossible, because what is “ridiculous” is a matter of personal interpretation, just like what is “tasty” or “loud” or “annoying” is a matter of personal interpretation.

That’s what’s so startling about PolitiFact’s definition of “Pants on Fire” – it’s not just that PolitiFact uses a different definition than what virtually everyone understands “pants on fire” to mean, it’s that the definition PolitiFact uses relies upon a subjective assessment. Stated more succinctly, PolitiFact’s assessment of “Pants on Fire” requires an opinion.

And that, folks, is why PolitiFact should be shunned for all serious fact-checking. They may continue to make the correct call in certain cases. But just as last year’s “Lie of the Year” fiasco showed, this most-recent foray on the part of PolitiFact from the safe and respectable waters of fact-checker into the much murkier territory of opinion-holder and shaper serves to show that PolitiFact has abandoned the role of neutral umpire: a “Pants on Fire” claim need be not just false, but deemed ridiculous in the opinion of the PolitiFact staff.

It may pain PolitiFact to hear this, and I would certainly agree that PolitiOpinion is both more unwieldy as a phrase and less compelling as a source for facts than “PolitiFact,” but (sadly) the former much more accurately describes what PolitiFact too often does: offer opinions on the political statements of the day. That makes them literally nothing more than glorified bloggers. If anything, it makes PolitiFact less honest and worthwhile than most political bloggers, because partisan bloggers don’t typically make an attempt to cloak themselves in the garb of neutrality as PolitiFact does. I’m not suggesting PolitiFact has particular political leanings, but it’s clear they moved some time ago from simply doing their best to determine the facts of a claim, into the realm of offering their opinion about the claim, as well.

They should stop pretending otherwise.

* I use the phrase “unverifiable” not just because it’s accurate, but because it matches additional specific language on PolitiFact’s Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter page:

In deciding which statements to check, we ask ourselves these questions:

•  Is the statement rooted in a fact that is verifiable?

By PolitiFact’s own standards, then, they should never have attempted to fact-check this claim. Because, while it’s quite possible that (as a later portion of the same section states) “a typical person [might] hear or read the statement and wonder: is that true,” it’s also undeniable that Reid’s claim cannot be verified. Which, if PolitiFact were following their own guidelines, should render the claim, however juicy and tempting it might be for PolitiFact’s editors, off-limits.

I don’t mention this last bit merely to be didactic or score further points on PolitiFact. I mention it because I think any organization which was genuinely committed to pure fact-checking would have only three – at most, four – “findings” they could bestow on any claim: true (or accurate), false (or inaccurate) and unverifiable, for claims for which the facts are impossible to determine. The fourth  potential finding could be “partly true” or “needs context.” This finding could be used in cases where the claim is technically true, but without additional context might convey an overall impression that is false.

It’s instructive to note that this is essentially the rating system utilized by one of the Internet’s oldest fact-checking outfits, snopes.com. Although Snopes has some political entries, they don’t confine themselves to the political realm (in fact, Snopes was started to debunk Internet urban legends, like the kidney-theft-ring). But since their inception, Snopes has stayed remarkably true to this spare, no-nonsense ratings system. By contrast, PolitiFact has a cumbersome at best system of six different ratings: true, mostly true, half-true, barely true, false and the infamous “Pants on Fire.”

It’s beyond my pay grade (and frankly, my interest level) to try to determine whether PolitiFact’s drift in mission from checking facts to weighing in with their own opinions is a result of their confused, bloated ratings system, or whether the ratings were specifically devised to allow PolitiFact editors to subtly inject their own opinions into the political dialogue under the guise of neutral fact-checking. What’s not subject to debate is how committed to pure fact-checking PolitiFact is. The evidence, both here and in previous cases, speaks for itself on that question.