Category: Politics

Sunday morning’s Oregonian had a conventional wisdom cover article about how out-of-touch the city folk are from the real people of the country, based on the same faulty mathematics and map-reading that have characterized similar coverage. My response:

As Barbie once said: “Math is hard.” A prime example is in this morning’s cover
story “Voting in a Bubble” by Edward Walsh and Jeff Mapes, which posits that a
gap has opened between voters in Multnomah County and the rest of the state,
nay, the country. To bolster their argument, Walsh and Mapes tout the fact that
Multnomah County’s vote went for John Kerry by “nearly 24 percentage points
higher than his national showing” and about 21 points over the statewide
average.

What Walsh and Mapes seem not to realize is that the state average includes
Multnomah County. An average is the middle ground of a set of numbers. For
every outlying data point in an averaged set (Multnomah County for the
Democrats), there has to be some sort of balance. While it’s true that
Multnomah is the only county in the state where the vote is so lopsidedly
Democratic, much of Eastern Oregon is just as out-of-whack with the average
as Multnomah — just the other direction. Baker, Crook, Grant, Harney, Klamath,
Lake, Malheur, Wallowa, and Wheeler counties all voted for George W. Bush at
rates more than 20% of the state average this year. All but two of those counties
did so at rates higher than the 21% deviation from average they claim separates
Multnomah County from the rest of the state. Grant County, where over 78% of
the voters chose Bush (according to state figures available Sunday morning), is
over 30 percentage points off the statewide tallies of Bush voters, making them
the most out-of-touch county in the state, if you accept the terms of the article.
Not only was their vote far off the state average, but according to the majority of
Oregonians, they chose the wrong candidate.

There have been a number of official-looking graphs from news organizations in
the past few days showing “a pattern of heavily Democratic cities surrounded by
a sea of pro-Bush voters” in this election. Most of those graphs are organized by
county. At first glance, they appear somewhat intimidating for Democrats. And it
might indeed be scary if acreage — rather than people — voted.

I’ve provided a couple of charts of my own, which show the deviation from both
state and national averages in this election. There is a disparity from the norm in
Multnomah County. But there’s an equally wide deviation in most of the
counties on the other side of the Cascades. In fact, the only counties where the
vote was within a couple of percentage points of the state average were
Columbia and Washington.

open chart in a separate window

I’m surprised that a 1,300-word article managed to get to print without someone
realizing that if Multnomah County’s numbers are far off in one direction that
there has to be something of equal size on the other side of the average pulling
the other way. It took me all of about 10 seconds to see the problem in the
article’s argument, and I haven’t taken a math class for over twenty years.
Perhaps it’s time, though, for the Oregonian to send a few of its reporters and
editors to some remedial math courses.

The article points out that without Multnomah County, Bush would have won the
state by 80,000 votes. It’s no real surprise that if you eliminate a fifth of the
electorate, the results of the vote might change. Multnomah County accounted
for 343,290 of the 1,754,873 votes in the state, just over 19.5% of the voters in
the presidential race. Ignoring a similarly-sized number of ballots from the
counties with the highest percentage of Bush voters would eliminate the counts
of 19 counties (the nine mentioned above plus Curry, Douglas, Gilliam,
Jefferson, Josephine, Linn, Morrow, Sherman, Umatilla, and Union counties),
288,434 voters — only 16.5% of the total, and would have given Kerry a victory
margin of 161,341 votes, over two-and-a-half times the actual statewide result.
Eliminating Multnomah County from that scenario so that the counties
containing the fifth of the votes most skewed toward each candidate aren’t
counted still gives Kerry a slim margin of 8,827. To someone with even a
layman’s understanding of mathematics, it’s really no surprise that as you
eliminate data that deviates from both sides of the norm, the numbers tend
toward the norm.

I’m looking forward to Walsh and Mapes’s follow-up article, showing how
Eastern Oregon is drifting away from the state and nation because of a more
pronounced shift away from the Oregon norm than they found in Multnomah
County.

— Darrel Plant

In the black and white world of George W. Bush and his followers, one mantra is endlessly repeated: “The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power.” My own thought is that this may be but is not absolutely true. I can think of a few situations, for instance, in which the world might not have been better off without Saddam Hussein in power:

• If Hussein had actually had WMD, and had shipped them to terrorist cells around the world before dying in his sleep.
• If a comet hit the Earth, obliterating all life, including Saddam Hussein.
• If a country invaded Iraq, toppling the Hussein regime, leaving chaos, civil war, and tens of thousands of dead Iraqis in its wake.

To the Editor:

I’m surprised that in talking about his appearance on Crossfire, you replaced Jon Stewart’s reference to Tucker Carlson with “[male appendage].” It seems unnecessarily prim considering that in the same paragraph you left Carlson’s prior namecalling untouched. Perhaps you’d care to explain to your readers what Carlson meant when he called Stewart Kerry’s “butt boy”, and how it’s less of a sexual reference than calling someone a “dick.” And perhaps you could mention Time/Warner’s stake in CNN, Crossfire, and Carlson’s career.

From the October 25, 2004 issue of TIME‘s People section:

Comic Gets Cross, Fires
Usually when the competition’s biggest star is accused of abusive sex talk involving a fibrous sponge (see story, this page), you’ve had a good week. That was before CNN’s Crossfire invited on JON STEWART, below left, of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. Hosts Paul Begala and TUCKER CARLSON, below right, expected some light yuks but got a pointed lecture when the fake news anchor likened their political shout-a-thon to “pro wrestling.” There followed one of the most uncomfortable talk-TV showdowns since Harvey Pekar did David Letterman. The audience laughed and applauded as Stewart called the stunned hosts “partisan hacks” who were “hurting America” by dumbing down the political discourse. Carlson countered that Stewart had acted like Senator John Kerry’s “butt boy” by throwing him softball questions. “You’re on CNN,” Stewart said. “The show that leads in to me is puppets making crank phone calls.” “I was just shocked by how sanctimonious he was,” Carlson later told TIME. “I thought, This must be some elaborate routine, and there’s going to be a punch line at the end.” Which there was, sort of. “You’re more fun on your show,” Carlson told the comic. Shot back Stewart: “You’re as big a [male appendage] on your show as you are on any show.” Easy there, guys. That kind of talk can get a TV star sued nowadays.

Vice President Dick Cheney is pressing the fear button by claiming terrorists could set off a nuclear weapon in the U.S. That’s why we’re supposed to support the administration’s wars. That’s why we have to give up our hard-won civil liberties. That’s why we need to vote (assuming they’ll let us vote at all) for George W. Bush.

Now, I’m not as old as Cheney, but I personally remember a bit of the last half of the 20^th century. During much of my early life, this nation lived under the threat of total nuclear annihilation — not just one city being wiped out by a nuke, but most of the country, along with the rest of the world. As far back as the late 1950s and early 1960s this concern was so prevalent that it spawned a whole slew of movies and books still remembered (by some) today: Fail-Safe, A Canticle for Leibowitz, and Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, among others.

Oddly enough, we were able to weather that threat without wholesale abridgement of the ideals of the nation. In fact, civil and sexual rights were expanded during the era of the Cold War. Various administrations fought change — it’s what administrations do — but there was overall progress.

Nor were we locked into a single party’s candidates. From the time the Soviet Union developed its first nuclear weapons to the fall of the USSR, control of the White House changed party hands five times: in 1952, 1960, 1968, 1976, and 1980.

I’d love to see someone ask Cheney why America under Bush and the Republiwimps is so weak that it can only deal with the threat of terrorism by clamping down on dissent when we once we able to simultaneously expand our freedoms and stare down the threat of global destruction.

What world has CBS’s Bob Schieffer been living in all his life? As the moderator of the third debate this was his first question:

Senator, I want to set the stage for this discussion by asking the question that I think hangs over all of our politics today and is probably on the minds of many people watching this debate tonight.

 And that is, will our children and grandchildren ever live in a world as safe and secure as the world in which we grew up?

Schieffer was born in 1937. John Kerry was born in 1943. George W. Bush was born in 1946.

Schieffer was born in the midst of the Great Depression. For most of Schieffer’s first decade of life, war raged across North Africa, Europe and Asia, as well as the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers were killed.

When Schieffer was 13, the US and its allies went into Korea. In just about three years, over 44,000 American troops died. Following Korea, the Cold War went into one of its greatest periods of buildup, causing the paranoia and angst that led to movies like Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove. The period of Schieffer’s late teens saw the beginning of the end of legalized discrimination, with decisions like Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and actions like the Montgomery bus boycott.

Has Schieffer really forgotten what happened in this country in the 1960s? There were riots across the country in cities like Detroit, Los Angeles, Newark, and more. The US and USSR came to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy was assassinated. The US jumped into Vietnam full-force, where we’d lose nearly 60,000 troops and where more than 150,000 (including John Kerry) would be wounded before the war ended in the 1970s.

By the end of 1970, Schieffer was 33. Schieffer was grown up. Does he truly consider the world of his youth to have been “safe and secure?”

In the debate last night, GWB reveals how military success was defined to him in the Texas Air National Guard back in the ’70s:

LEHRER: New question, Mr. President, two minutes. You have said there was a, quote, “miscalculation,” of what the conditions would be in post-war Iraq. What was the miscalculation, and how did it happen?

BUSH: No, what I said was that, because we achieved such a rapid victory, more of the Saddam loyalists were around. I mean, we thought we’d whip more of them going in.

But because Tommy Franks did such a great job in planning the operation, we moved rapidly, and a lot of the Baathists and Saddam loyalists laid down their arms and disappeared. I thought they would stay and fight, but they didn’t.

And now we’re fighting them now.

What kind of a plan is it when you let the people you’re fighting get away? Particularly when your next move is to put yourself in a position where you’re surrounded by them? Was that Franks’s plan?

Imagine a law enforcement comparison. You’re a cop in Iraqtown. You and a bunch of other officers are involved a shootout with criminals holed up in the Baghdad Building, which is a long way from the nearest station. You move in fast and hard, shooting out windows, blowing off doors, etc. A couple of fires break out. You kill several of the perps, capture a couple others, but most of them scramble off into nearby buildings. Some drop their guns, some don’t. You move into the partially-destroyed building. As night falls, the criminals who escaped start shooting at you every time you step outside or go past a window. Is that a success? Ask your local police officer.

What’s most astounding about the feeding-frenzy behavior of the media over what’s become known as “Rathergate” is the realization that none of the reporters, commentators, or anchors so eager to pick at the flesh of Ol’ Dan seems to think it could ever happen to them.

Rather’s been on the right’s hitlist for years, but he’s managed to cling to the anchor chair nonetheless. If he gets forced out of that position over the fiasco surrounding the memos about George W. Bush’s Air National Guard service, it’s only going hasten the end by a couple of years at most. The people in the media calling for his head, though, some of them have careers that could be much more adversely impacted.

If the right thinks they can bring someone with Rather’s reputation down with a campaign of letter-writing, calls, and gas-bagging on talk shows — whether they actually do so or if they merely give CBS an excuse to pry Rather’s grip off the anchor desk — they’re hardly likely to stop with Rather and CBS. CBS has already proven itself susceptible to attacks of this type, by moving the Reagan biopic to Showtime last year and pre-emptively postponing the story they bumped from 60 Minutes II for the Air National Guard story — about how forged documents and other suspect intelligence were used to justify the war in Iraq — until after the election.

ABC, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC don’t give equal treatment to opposing sides of issues now — that’s why they’re not under the gun the way CBS is. They rarely invite invite people with truly liberal (as opposed to not-conservative) viewpoints on, much less someone wacky who was as far to the left as Ann Coulter is wacky and to the right. (I can’t think of anyone for that role, nor do I want to.)

But once CBS is sanitized (it won’t end with Rather), you can bet the same firehose of pressure is going to be applied somewhere else. Rather’s not exactly a flaming liberal, but the right sees him as one. They see anyone who criticizes them as a liberal/traitor/commie/terrorist. Columnists like Maureen Dowd who view themselves as protected and above the fray, able to make snarky comment on Democrats and Republicans alike, are going to find themselves in a whole new world, one where any criticism of the right leads to their own downfall.

Am I saying that journalists should have circled the wagons to defend Dan and the Memos That Time Forgot? No. But the gleeful rush to judgment over the memos obscured a legitimate story about Bush’s Guard service that wasn’t exclusive to CBS and exposed how little faith the media has in its own credibility, which is something the media’s enemies will exploit for years to come, no matter who wins the next presidential election.

The October 4 issue of TIME magazine has an article by Karen Tumulty and John F. Dickerson titled “Inside the Debate Strategies.” The print version’s accompanying graphic has some text that doesn’t appear online. Each of the candidates’ images has three “Things to Remember…” taped to the podium.

Kerry’s list includes:

2) Don’t use “who among us” and “NASCAR” in the same sentence

Referring to a supposed quote along the lines of “Who among us doesn’t love NASCAR?”

That twitched my mind all the way back to last week, when Bob Somerby’s The Daily Howler tore into the provenance of this particular attribution and traced it back to Maureen Dowd. In a letter to AmCop, the Times‘ public editor, Arthur Bovino, reportedly wrote that Dowd “got the quote from someone who had been at a Kerry rally and confirmed it with a reporter who had been there,” but Somerby found no other mention of this remark previous to Dowd’s. According to Somerby, Kerry did attend a NASCAR event in February and utter the words: “I happen to like NASCAR.” The Howler commentary compares the spread of this quote to the way Al Gore supposedly made a comment about inspiring Erich Segal’s Love Story.

For extra frisson, one of the two reporters Gore made his actual, offhand comment to — about how Segal had used Tipper and himself as models for the Love Story characters — and who said she was “appalled to see the way it was played in the media,” was Karen Tumulty of TIME, whose current story now has a reference to an unsourced, possibly false quote from a Democratic presidential candidate attached to it.

I’ve sent a letter to TIME asking them to either print a correction or provide a direct attribution, I encourage you to do the same.

Glenn Reynolds heard that “bookstore employees tend to ‘hide’ politically incorrect books” and with no proof aside from an anonymous message board post (quick, call Dan Rather!) extends that slur to all bookstore employees. My response to him:

I’m about as left as they come, and I worked in bookstores and distributors throughout the Reagan and GHW Bush eras, which were highly polarized times. Your view on bookstore employees — in general — is baseless. What people who run bookstores believe in more than almost anything else is the freedom of speech, something that those of you on the right don’t seem to understand.

If leftist book goons were actually hiding books by right-wing authors, how did Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Hannity, Scarborough, Coulter, Savage and their ilk sell so damn many books throughout the last decade? It’s not like the New York Times has been keeping them off of the bestseller lists.

You accuse “Borders employees” of bragging about hiding Unfit for Command. Do you mean all Borders employees? Or just one person who posted an anonymous note? Are you implying that conservatives are too stupid to work in bookstores and that they might not do the same thing?

Rummy unscripted. Talking about how you can have elections without complete peace, compares security in Iraq favorably with the United States. No problem, elections can go on.

From today’s DoD media availability (which I tracked down after hearing this comment on an Air America’s news broadcast):

We had something like 200 or 300 or 400 people killed in many of the major cities of America last year.  Is it perfectly peaceful? No. What’s the difference? We just didn’t see each homicide in every major city in the United States on television every night. It happens here in this city, in every major city in the world. Across Europe, across the Middle East, people are being killed. People do bad things to each other.  The idea that we’d have to stay there till that place was peaceful — as I think you said, or something like that — and everyone goes happily on their way, or whatever you said.  We’ll check the transcript.

Indeed.

[UPDATE] Cool, a link from Atrios!