Another Scheer smear (7/19)

By Ben Fritz

Syndicated columnist Robert Scheer is up to his old tricks in a new column using cheap jargon and innunendo to broaden the standard attack against Vice President Dick Cheney over corporate misconduct.

The lead, for instance, implies that the time Cheney has spent at secure locations following September 11 has actually been an attempt to avoid political scrutiny. "Vice President Dick Cheney," Scheer writes, "has spent most of the past year in hiding, ostensibly from terrorists, but increasingly it seems obvious that it is Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the media and the public he fears." The accusation that Cheney was hiding from the SEC before its investigation of Halliburton was revealed is, of course, ludicrous. And, more generally, Scheer is using an irrelevant fact to set up Cheney as defensive and vulnerable.

Scheer then nonsensically attempts to link Cheney to Enron and Worldcom and thereby tarnish him by association:

Recent business scandals, however, are also the product of legal loopholes that allow firms to scoop up billions in unregulated profits. It was just such loopholes that allowed the rise and subsequent fall of Enron and telecom heavyweights like WorldCom--in the process making CEOs like Dick Cheney very, very rich.

Dick Cheney, however, was not the CEO or Enron or Worldcom. Unless he has evidence to actually connect the dots, simply saying those scandals benefited "CEOs like Dick Cheney" is nothing more than a cheap rhetorical trick.

Two of Scheer's accusations of "a slimy trail of conflict-of-interest questions" are similarly unfair. First, he points out that while Cheney was Secretary of Defense under the first President Bush, he "conveniently changed the rules restricting private contractors doing work on U.S. military bases, allowing the Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary of his future employer, Halliburton, to receive the first of $2.5 billion in contracts over the next decade." Conflicts of interest are not retroactive, however. Cheney's future employment by Haliburton does not constitute evidence linking the two at the time and, thus, creating a conflict of interest.

The term also doesn't apply to Scheer's second example. He points out that "When Cheney left to become CEO [of Halliburton], he recruited his Pentagon military aide, Joe Lopez, to become senior vice president in charge of Pentagon dealings, which ultimately formed the most lucrative part of the otherwise ailing company's business." Taking a job dealing with the government after leaving public sector work is not a conflict of interest (though some have raised other legitimate questions about the common practice). Conflicts of interest only arise when one has two interests that clash at once, which is not the case in the hiring of Lopez.

When Scheer sticks to the standard criticisms of Cheney he's on stronger ground. But overall, his irrational accusations and jargon reveal that Scheer is once again more interested in unfair attacks on conservatives than making a real argument.

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Related links:
- Spinsanity's previous coverage of Robert Scheer

7/19/2002 10:38:20 AM EST |

Bush reportedly asked to drop "trifecta" story (7/17)

By Brendan Nyhan

President Bush may finally stop repeating his fictitious "trifecta" story for good due to growing national press coverage. This is remarkable given that he shamelessly repeated the story twice in June just days after his budget chief was grilled about it by "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert.

Writing in the Chicago Tribune on Sunday (registration required), Jeff Zeleny reported that senior Bush advisors have asked the President to stop repeating his undocumented and unsupported claim to have listed three exceptions justifying deficits (the so-called "trifecta") during a 2000 Chicago campaign appearance.

According to Dana Milbank's July 2 Washington Post piece, Vice President Al Gore - not Bush - listed the exceptions in three 1998 speeches (this was a follow-up to an earlier Milbank piece that cited my June 18 post). Bush economic advisor Lawrence Lindsay did say in an interview at the time that the exceptions would apply to Bush as well. But there is still no evidence supporting Bush's claim to have endorsed the exceptions in Chicago, as Zeleny points out.

As a result, there is apparently a move afoot to cut Bush's losses:

This month, a sliver of light was shed on the inside-the-beltway controversy, when The Washington Post reported that indeed a presidential candidate had uttered the line about spending the budget into deficit in times of war, recession or national emergency. The only problem: It was Gore, not Bush.

So in recent days, some senior advisers have asked Bush to eliminate the Chicago line from the stump speech. They hope the move will quash the talk among Washington critics that Bush may be telling tall tales.

One White House adviser said privately that the administration wants the label of exaggerated storyteller to remain precisely where it was in the last campaign--with Gore.

Zeleny also made headway in getting a White House spokesman to comment directly on the issue for the first time. Scott McClellan vaguely claimed that Bush's anecdote is true, but provided no evidence to back up his assertion:

Asked repeatedly for the genesis of the Chicago line, administration officials could not provide a date or location.

"Those of [us] who traveled with the president on the campaign trail recall the president saying it," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. He did not elaborate.

It's important to note that others who followed the campaign disagree. The New Republic wrote that "[n]o reporter who covered the 2000 campaign can recall Bush ever having said anything like this." And the ABC News political unit sought the help of reporters who covered the campaign in finding evidence of such a statement and still failed to do so.

Zeleny's excellent reporting helps to make up for Edwin Chen's Los Angeles Times article Saturday on the increased projection for the 2002 federal budget deficit (registration required), which discussed the trifecta story without once noting the questions raised about its accuracy. Hopefully, the press will pay closer attention to stories like this in the future.

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Related links:
-Blogger defenses of "trifecta" don't make the cut (Brendan Nyhan, 6/20/02)
-Losing the "trifecta" (Brendan Nyhan, 6/18/02)
-The mystery of the trifecta (Brendan Nyhan, 5/15/02)

7/17/2002 01:25:00 PM EST |

Coulter critics descend to her level (7/14)

By Bryan Keefer

As I have shown, Ann Coulter's new book, Slander, is full of egregious jargon and outrageous attempts at deception. Unfortunately, rather than claiming the high ground, several critics on television and in print have descended to her level, attacking Coulter in a manner that only supports some of her most outrageous claims about liberals.

Notably, on CNN’s "Crossfire" on June 27, liberal co-host James Carville spent much of his time smearing Coulter with comments like "conservatives ramble and you’re rambling right now" and off-the-cuff dismissals such as "Well, I don’t care about your book." Carville also repeatedly asked insubstantial questions like "Is [National Review writer] Ramesh Ponnuru - is he a girly-boy or not?" and "[Pat] Robertson, is he a pathetic moderate?" Much to his credit, Carville’s conservative co-host Tucker Carlson tried to get Coulter to admit the asymmetry of her argument – to no avail.

By far the most vicious critique, however, is Charles Taylor’s review on Salon.com, which derides Coulter as "the most visible and vociferous of the conservative fembots" Embarrassingly, he writes that while he doesn’t "know the social background of Coulter," he has "encountered [her] type before." Using this as a springboard, Taylor then constructs a hypothetical psychoanalysis of Coulter, who, like other "fembots," he says, holds her views because "they seem unaware that not everyone shares their privileged existence, or seem to believe that anyone who doesn't has only themselves to blame." After cheap shots like suggesting that Coulter "gets her thong in a bunch," Taylor concludes:

Coulter and her brood could benefit from a little conservative ideology themselves. Arguing with them is like paying attention to disobedient children. They should be treated like spoiled brats who mouth off. Put them over the knee, paddle their fannies, tell them to wipe that smirk off their face and to speak up only when they've learned something about the world.

Taylor's dismissal of Coulter by reference to crude stereotypes of conservative ideology and ad hoc psychoanalysis is just as bad as the worst of her own jargon-laden prose. This, of course, is exactly the reaction Coulter is seeking to provoke. Carville and Taylor seem happy to provide it because attacking her provides liberals with the same thing Coulter offers to conservatives: ideological red meat.

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Related links:
-Throwing the book at her (Bryan Keefer, 7/13/02)

7/14/2002 08:25:24 PM EST |

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