Like others, the Bush administration has sometimes demanded their opponents prove a negative. For example, when the administration claimed there were more than sixty stem cell lines “viable for research” and scientists pointed out that they only knew of around ten, press secretary Ari Fleischer insisted “the burden of proof is on anyone who doubts [our claim]”. While such remarks are pretty obviously silly, Bush officials recently hit a new low: claiming that they were involved in a negative.
Yes, Ben Ginsburg, the lawyer who recently resigned from the Bush-Cheney campaign after it was revealed he was also working for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, insisted he was not doing any coordination. In fact, his job was to make sure there was no coordination! As he told Reuters, “I was at the nexus of making sure (coordination) didn’t happen.” I guess the Bush administration is so against coordination that they had to coordinate to make sure they didn’t coordinate.
This reminds me of the time Ashcroft commented that “those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty … only aid terrorists”. His remarks were widely reported but what was less reported was that Ashcroft’s office wrote to reporters who covered the story, insisting that Ashcroft had not attacked his opponents and reporters who falsely claimed otherwise were simply aiding the terrorists. (“Anyone who reported … he criticized anyone who opposed him was absolutely wrong and in doing so became a part of the exact problem he was describing,” were the exact words.)
I could go on for days recounting Bush’s “errorisms”. Like when he introduced his tax policy by claiming that under it a single mother of two making $22,000 a year would pay no income taxes. (She was only paying $72 before.) Or when he claimed seventeen times (long after he’d been corrected) that he said at a Chicago campaign stop he’d only deficit spend in times of war, national emergency, or economic reession. (The statement had been Gore’s.)
But it’s unfair to just pick on Bush; other conservatives are funny liars too. For example, on Tim Lambert’s excellent weblog you can watch as he debunks Ross McKitrick, a prominent global warming skeptic. So desperate is McKitrick to find some way to disprove global warming, that he’s gone thru a variety of increasingly desperate tactics. Once he simply made up an excuse why the data was wrong which was disproved as soon as it was tested. Then he tried something a little more complex but which was still disproved after a little bit of serious analysis. But then things get really weird. He made up new rules of physics, treated missing data as a temperature of zero, and failed to convert between degrees and radians. Finally, in an almost inspired bit of deception, he invented his very own temperature scale to try to prove his point. You almost feel sorry for the guy.
But even this isn’t quite as bad as John Lott, weblogger Lambert’s previous foe. Lott, a “resident scholar” at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank, is the author of the bestselling book More Guns, Less Crime. Lott’s book attempted to prove that letting people have concealed weapons actually lowered crime rates. Unfortunately for him, his analysis was bogus (he had miscategorized his data). Of course, being false didn’t seem to hurt sales any. Maybe that’s what led Lott down the road of more bizarre and absurd claims.
For example, Lott claimed a survey showed a gun only needed to be shot less than 2% of the time for effective defense. The lowest previously published number was 21%, so scholars were curious about the source. Lott originally cited sixteen national surveys for the number, none of which could be found. Later he claimed the number was based upon his own survey, but he was unable to provide any proof he had actually conducted the survey, including data (lost in a hard drive crash), pay receipts (the work was done by volunteers), phone records (they did it from their dorm rooms), computer software used (he threw the CD away), contemporaneous notes (he threw them all away), or others he worked with (he can’t remember the names of the volunteers and didn’t talk to anyone else about it). But he really did conduct the survey, honest!
In another low point, Lott went on the Internet pretending to be a female student of his, Mary Rosh. (“[Lott] was the best professor I ever had,” she gushed.) Mary frequently spoke up on Internet discussions to defend Lott’s work. And Lott, under a variety of identities, posted seventeen five-star reviews of his book to Amazon. When this was discovered, he confessed to the Washington Post: “I probably shouldn’t have done it — I know I shouldn’t have done it — but it’s hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously.” His regret was apparently shortlived — he began posting under false names again the very next day.
To bring things full circle, perhaps it was Lott’s success that inspired the seemingly-ubiquitious Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Despite the fact that their claims are all contradicted by official Navy records, their own previous statements, and all but one of the men who actually served with Kerry, these guys have been attacking Kerry’s war record on every TV talk show. (And their story doesn’t even make internal sense.) But conservative commentator Michelle Malkin (whose new book suggests we should throw all the Arabs in concentration camps — to protect freedom!) did them one better and suggested Kerry intentionally wounded himself. The charge would be sort of serious except for the fact that Kerry’s wound was shrapnel from a rocket-launched grenade. (Imagining Kerry trying to wound himself with a rocket-launched grenade is almost as funny as Ross McKitrick inventing his own temperature system!)
Anyway, all this silliness goes a long way toward explaining why the two best news sources these days are Fafblog! and The Daily Show. Sadly, most people watch media where false notions of objectivity insist this absurd nonsense is given an equal footing with, you know, the truth. But on the bright side, at least that idea’s pretty funny too.
posted August 26, 2004 10:27 AM (Politics) (7 comments) #