Six months have passed since the Phoenix reported that the US Census Bureau’s latest income and poverty reports contained significant errors (see “The Politics of Poverty,” News and Features, October 10, 2003). The reworked numbers, which will show that median after-tax household income declined far more in 2002 than the bureau reported, have been ready since January, according to sources in the agency. All that remained was to work out a “release strategy,” according to one manager in the Housing and Household Economics Statistics Division. A follow-up call in March to find out when the new numbers would be made public yielded this information from Dan Weinberg, chief of the division: the bureau still needs to establish a “release strategy.” It’s starting to look an awful lot like the “release strategy” is to not release the new numbers at all.
As first reported by the Phoenix last fall, the bureau used erroneous marginal tax rates in calculating 2001 data. As a result, the reports released last September falsely claimed that median after-tax household income remained stable in 2002, when in fact it dropped significantly — probably about 1.5 percent. The Census Bureau conceded the error and promised to redo the figures.
Since then, the words “Available Soon!” have adorned the Web page where the after-tax figures should be (ferret.bls.census.gov/macro/032003/rdcall/toc.htm). Meanwhile, the original report, containing incorrect data, is still available from the bureau’s main page — as are the September press release and briefing documents that tout the false numbers as evidence that things are not so bad. The bureau has known that this is not true for six months, and has had the corrected data in hand for at least three.
This would hardly be the first time that, given a choice between an upbeat falsehood and a dour truth, the Bush administration embraced the comfortable lie.
In other news, George W. Bush won the Nobel Peace Prize for smiting evil doers everywhere and bringing freedom to the world. You can look it up.
A military contractor has fired Tami Silicio, a Kuwait-based cargo worker whose photograph of flag-draped coffins of fallen U.S. soldiers was published in Sunday’s edition of The Seattle Times.
Silicio was let go yesterday for violating U.S. government and company regulations, said William Silva, president of Maytag Aircraft, the contractor that employed Silicio at Kuwait International Airport.
[…]
Pentagon officials yesterday said the government’s policy defers to the sensitivities of bereaved families. “We’ve made sure that all of the installations who are involved with the transfer of remains were aware that we do not allow any media coverage of any of the stops until (the casket) reaches its final destination,” said Cynthia Colin, a Pentagon spokeswoman.
Maytag also fired David Landry, a co-worker who recently wed Silicio.
Silicio said she never sought to put herself in the public spotlight. Instead, she said, she hoped the publication of the photo would help families of fallen soldiers understand the care and devotion that civilians and military crews dedicate to the task of returning the soldiers home.
Freedom of the press is the cornerstone of democracy. I love democracy, don’t you?
Bush warned the editors that the United States “is a battlefield in the war on terror” and said he can understand public fears of a terrorist attack before the November election. “This is a hard country to defend,” he said. “Our intelligence is good. It’s just never perfect, is the problem. We are disrupting some cells here in America. We’re chasing people down. But it is a — we’ve got a big country.”
On Tuesday evening, Bush told Republican congressional leaders during a meeting at the White House that it was all but certain that terrorists would attempt a major attack on the United States before the election, according to a congressional aide. The leaders were struck by Bush’s definitiveness and gravity, the aide said.
Still, Bush told the editors, the administration is “making good progress in the defense of America.”
Condi said similar things the other day, as well. So, what’s the deal? Are they hearing some of that famous “chatter” or is this some kind of election year gambit?
Since they lie by reflex, it’s hard to tell, and while I am this close to believing the absolute worst about these people, I haven’t yet concluded that they are capable of controlling a massive enough conspiracy to actively allow another terrorist attack for political purposes. So, I expect that this is just Framing The WOT for Dummies.
First and foremost they want to ratchet up the fear level so that everyone will gather around their hero Boy George. For whatever reason they believe that people trust him to keep the babies safe. I doubt that, but I agree that it is a default position for those who aren’t paying much attention or are not very bright. Terrorist-attack-scary-president-bullhorn-bombs-safe.
Secondly, this frames the election in case there actually is an escalation of terrorism and I don’t think it matters all that much if it’s on American soil. After their blatently phony partisan reading of the Spanish election it’s clear that the Republicans are going to say that voting for anyone other than George W. Bush is rewarding terrorism. Osama hates Bush, therefore we must love Bush or be accused of appeasing Osama. Nice and Neat. And if Kerry allows any daylight between himself and Bush on national security, he’s “cutting and running,” and appeasing the terrorists, too.
But, I think this fear mongering is an opportunity. I say go right in his face and hammer him for saying that the mighty USA can’t protect itself from a bunch of pissant terrorists. (It’s logical, of course, that we can’t protect ourselves against all possibilities, but since the Republicans successfully tossed logic down the garbage disposal for the last four years, I see no reason why we should allow them to dredge it out now.) Our purpose is to get this dangerous incompetent out of the White House.
If we do get hit before the election, we’ve been innoculated because we said he wasn’t adequately protecting America. Time for a change. If we don’t get hit, Bush doesn’t get the credit because he’s already admitted that he doesn’t think the country can be protected. Its dumb luck.
“This is a hard country to defend?” That’s defeatist talk, boy. But it’s no wonder, coming from the man who vacationed through the month of August before the first terrorist attacks while the entire intelligence community was running around with its hair on fire. Looks like you still haven’t learned from from your mistakes. You’ve had almost three years to shore up our defenses, the treasury is almost bankrupted and now you whine to us that the country is a battlefield but it’s really big so you can’t protect it?
You refused to figure out what went wrong the first time until the widows of the dead insisted; you wasted months before you agreed to a new department of Homeland Security and you still haven’t funded it; you decided to fight a foreign war based on bad intelligence and phony claims of grave danger, tying down our troops in Iraq when they could be catching the terrorists overseas and protecting us here at home. (In case you forgot, that’s what the National Guard is supposed to do, flyboy.)
Now you tell us the terrorists are planning to attack us again and there’s not much you can do about it?
It’s time for a new president who’ll put the safety of the American people first.
Intelligent, mature and rich in educational backround and experience.
vs
major strength is his ability to work with others. He makes a welcome addition to any group or team effort.
—
He utilizes the English language expertly, both orally and in writing. He is an alert and active original thinker with great potential…
vs.
a good representative of the military … in the business world.
—
[He] constantly reviewed tactics and lessons learned in…operations and applied his experience at every opportunity
vs
I have personally observed his participation and without exception, his performance has been noteworthy.
—
The detachment of this officer will be a definite loss to the service. He is the dedicated type that we should retain and it is hoped that he will be of further perhaps earlier greater service to his country, which is his aim in life at this time
vs
[This officer] has not been observed at this unit during the period of report.
Pressed on how Iraq would assume sovereignty amid weeks of spiraling violence, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz called June 30th “just one step in a process,” and not “a magical date” in which the U.S.-led occupation will shift responsibilities to a new Iraqi government.
But at a news conference last Friday with British prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush said of the June 30 handover:
“One of the essential commitments we’ve made to the Iraqi people is this: They will control their own country. No citizen of America or Britain would want the government of their nation in the hands of others and neither do the Iraqis. This is why the June 30th date for the transfer of sovereignty will be kept.”
This is obviously one of those days designed to make me feel like I’m not completely going crazy. (I’m grateful for this because I have a terrible cold and I feel like driving my car into a guard rail to end the misery.) But, glory of all glories, the Washington Post has published an editorial taking Attorney General Ashcroft to task for his disgraceful testimony last week.
IN HIS TESTIMONY last week before the Sept. 11 commission, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft loosed a remarkable attack on Jamie S. Gorelick, a commission member who served as deputy attorney general during part of the Clinton administration. The “single greatest structural cause for the September 11th problem,” Ashcroft said, “was the wall that segregated or separated criminal investigators and intelligence agents,” and the “basic architecture for the wall . . . was contained in a classified memorandum” from 1995 — which Mr. Ashcroft had conveniently declassified for the hearing. “Full disclosure,” he said, “compels me to inform you that the author of this memorandum is a member of the commission” — that is, Ms. Gorelick. Mr. Ashcroft’s allegations, which triggered criticism and demands for her resignation from prominent Republicans, are grossly unfair.
[…]
Pretending that such a deep-seated institutional problem was Ms. Gorelick’s single-handed creation should have been beneath the attorney general.
It wasn’t all that much commented upon as far as I can tell, but it truly was one of the most shocking performances by an Attorney General I have ever seen. As I wrote in my mildmannered piece entitled Consummate Prick:
Has there ever been a more blatantly partisan Attorney General than the Crisco Kid? This testimony today was contemptuous, dishonest and disturbingly inappropriate.
I also haven’t heard anything from Senator Kill Bill yet about citing Thomas Pickard for perjury:
BEN-VENISTE: And you told the staff according to this statement that Mr. Ashcroft told you that he did not want to hear about this [terrorism] anymore. Is that correct?
PICKARD: That is correct.
Ashcroft denied he ever said that. Somebody’s lyin’ under oath.
President-elect Bush asked some practical questions about how things worked, but he did not offer or hint at his desires.
The Joint Chiefs’ staff had placed a peppermint at each place. Bush unwrapped his and popped it into his mouth. Later he eyed Cohen’s mint and flashed a pantomime query, Do you want that? Cohen signaled no, so Bush reached over and took it. Near the end of the hour-and-a-quarter briefing, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Army Gen. Henry H. Shelton, noticed Bush eyeing his mint, so he passed it over.
Josh and Atrios discuss the new polls showing Kerry falling behind even though Bush has had the worst couple of weeks of his presidency. Quite rightly, Democrats are asking, “what will it take?” Both bloggers ponder the idea that this is because “the president gains as national security and war issues become more salient, even if they are becoming more salient because of what seem to be objectively bad news about his policies.”
I think this is essentially correct. People associate war leadership with Bush and when the war is in the news some still feel a rally ’round the president effect. But more importantly, I think it is because John Kerry was becoming a cipher. Without him out there offering a strong rhetorical counter argument, people who don’t pay attention to the details get the impression that he’s not offering any alternative.
It’s one thing for Kerry to allow Bush to swing in the wind on the pre-9/11 stuff. Let the widows and the whistleblowers take that on. The less partisanship the better. But, Iraq is something else entirely.
Iraq is a crisis and an ongoing problem and it isn’t enough for it to be seen blowing up on television. Kerry has got to convince people that Bush is the problem and that he can fix it. Instead, he’s acting clueless and disengaged.
A lot of my readers commented that he shouldn’t allow himself to get caught up in a specific plan and that his best bet was to lie low. I agree that he needn’t offer a specific plan, but I disagreed that he should lie low. I believe that he needs to offer some hot, critical rhetoric about Bush’s mistakes and that he should simply say, over and over again, that Bush can’t solve the problem because Bush is the problem. I suggested he say (among other things):
“…this crisis untimately requires a political solution and George W. Bush has run out of political options. A new president and a fresh start are what’s required to fix this problem. Only then can we rebuild the trust of our allies and go back to the drawing board with all the parties and set a proper course for a free and democratic Iraq.”
Not that I have any illusions that his people are reading this blog, but I was nonetheless I gratified to hear him on Russert and quoted in USA Today saying:
More U.S. troops and a new president could be needed to win international support for U.S. efforts in postwar Iraq, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said Sunday.The Massachusetts senator said President Bush has created a “quandary” for the nation by failing to develop a broad coalition to fight the war, to secure Iraq and to let countries that didn’t fight participate in rebuilding.
“It may well be that we need a new president, a breath of fresh air, to re-establish our credibility with the rest of the world” and bring other countries into Iraq, Kerry said on NBC’s Meet the Press.
If Kerry doesn’t make it clear that Bush is the problem, there are enough people out there who are likely to do a rally round the flag bit to swing the election. Saying “I’ve got a plan” every five seconds isn’t going to get the job done. It’s about framing the election in terms of Junior’s mistakes, which considering the news of the last few weeks shouldn’t be all that difficult. And it has to be done with the kind of rhetoric that makes the media focus on Kerry.
A Kerry spokesman told Salon on Thursday that it’s incumbent on Bush — not Kerry — to address the crisis in Iraq. “What has the president said about this?” the Kerry spokesman asked. “He needs to explain what his policy is, what his plan is to address what’s going on right now. But he’s been down on his ranch in Crawford. The spotlight isn’t on John Kerry. The spotlight needs to be on Bush. He’s the president, and he’s the person who has carved out these policies.”
That was the problem. The spotlight is on Bush and unless Kerry sticks his neck out a little bit, Americans don’t even know he exists on the issue. People don’t have to know what he’s going to do in detail — in fact they don’t want to listen to it. But, they must be convinced that Bush has screwed up the War on Terror and that he is now the greatest impediment to fixing it before they will be persuaded to abandon the president in “wartime.” It’s Kerry’s job to make that case and then to persuade them that his experience, his philosophy and his leadership qualities make him the better man to get that job done. The Kerry campaign made a mistake in assuming that the press could do that for them. It appears they are changing course now. We’ll see if the polls improve.
Update:
Mistah Kurtz’s column explains some of the problem:
When President Bush delivered a routine stump speech to a group of New Mexico homeowners on March 26, CNN and Fox News each carried his appearance for 35 minutes, and MSNBC for 33 minutes.
When John Kerry gave what was billed as a major address on national security at George Washington University on March 17, he was knocked off the screen by a large explosion in Baghdad. CNN and Fox each dropped Kerry (who had been reduced to small box) after three minutes, and MSNBC never picked him up. But as the Iraq coverage continued, all three networks carried Vice President Cheney in California attacking Kerry as weak on national security — Fox for 28 minutes, MSNBC for 23 and CNN for 13.
In the daily battle for airtime, Bush has drawn more than three times as much live cable coverage as his Democratic challenger, yet another example of the advantages of incumbency.
A review by The Washington Post, using a video monitoring service, finds that the cable news networks have covered more Bush events and stayed with them longer. From March 3, the day after the senator clinched the nomination, through Friday, they have devoted 12 hours and 11 minutes to live appearances by Bush — including Tuesday’s prime-time news conference, which was also carried by NBC, CBS and ABC. Kerry’s live cable coverage during this period: 3 hours 47 minutes.
Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt calls the coverage “a testament to who’s making news. . . . We think being on the cable news programs is very important because people who follow politics and cover politics keep a close eye on their TVs during the day.”
[…]
MSNBC Vice President Mark Effron says that “we take more of President Bush when he’s acting in his legitimate role as president of the United States.” Yet even “if he’s in a plant talking about the economy, for our world, that’s news.” Kerry, says Effron, “hasn’t exactly been out there grandstanding and making a lot of news.” But most of these appearances generate newspaper stories.
Politics is TV with the sound turned off. For many Americans, if you aren’t on TV, you don’t exist.
Via Catch.com, this e-mail (excerpted) from the wife of a soldier in Iraq. She describes how her husband’s company was literally waiting at the airport to leave for home when their tour was abruptly extended. Her husband briefly stayed behind but the rest of his unit was ambushed on their way back and one of the soldiers was killed:
This extension was a death sentence for that poor soldier. This extension cost three children their father. And it will cost much more. And now, to touchstone: My husband signed up so that he could go to college. If we would have forseen this, there is no way that he would have put his name on that dotted line. He has missed the birth of his third child…..he could die out there. He’s supposed to be sitting safe in Kuwait right now, but instead, he’s in a tent because their barracks were taken over by 1st Cavalry soldiers who went in to replace them. They haven’t got enough food right now, because there are too many soldiers on that base, and DoD was too short sighted to think that they might end up needing more troops. All their stuff is out to sea at the time being, so they are just sitting ducks waiting for their equipment to come back. This is a fiasco and a logistical nightmare. DoD and Rummy have been denying that there is a troop shortage for MONTHS! General Shinseki predicted this and was forced to retire. In November, Senator McCain called for at least 15,000 more troops. Well, shucks, seems they were right after all.
This is why grunts in the military coin phrases like FUBAR, although this ranks right up there with the FUBARest civilian brass in history. Rummy simply refused to entertain the idea that his RMA, electronic battlefield, third wave wet dream wasn’t working. Now, the shit comes down and you’ve got troops being extended at the very last minute and they don’t even have enough food.
I heard McCain on the radio yesterday saying something about mistakes are always made in battle and yadda, yadda, yadda. He cited McArthur’s gloriously successful Inchon landing maneuver which was followed by his absurd calculation that the Chinese wouldn’t push back into the south as an example of a major achievement followed by a major mistake. Of course, he fails to mention that McArthur followed up that major mistake by insisting that we should start WWIII, and got fired for it, so I’m not sure how much water that argument holds. In any case, we are reaching a point where somebody needs to be fired. For my money, if you want to take care of the ongoing FUBAR problem, that somebody should be George W. Bush.
My overwhelming reaction to the 60 Minutes segment on Bob Woodward’s new book and the reports and leaks about the book over the weekend is that Woodward’s account shows a man who just doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to do this job. This may not strike some readers as a newsflash, I know, but Woodward does shed some new light on the question. Bush took this country in a radically new foreign-policy direction without really thinking through the consequences of his actions; without reckoning in a serious way with the question “What if we’re wrong?”; without seeking the input of aides who might have disagreed or painted a more complex picture than the one he wanted painted for him. It’s a profoundly irresponsible way to govern.
What his defenders will continue to call his “idealism” — the belief that God put him in the Oval Office to spread liberty’s bounty across the globe and so on — is in fact a rather shocking shallowness. It’s fine and indeed admirable for a world leader to speak this way, to aspire to greatness and fairness for his nation and for the world; Tony Blair did so in the run-up to the war, and his pro-war speeches were considerably more convincing than Bush’s. But clearly, Bush actually believes this and looks at global geopolitics this way. This, too, might be fine, if it were balanced by more hard-headed and skeptical assessments, but Bush seems to have embraced it as a totalizing explanation. And as such, it has barred other interpretations of world events at the door.
Even this might be fine, if the consequences had not been so tragic. But once Bush transformed himself in his mind into God’s messenger of liberty, things like the State Department’s multi-volume report on post-war Iraq — a report that predicted many of the tragedies that have come to pass — became irrelevant. What was the research of mere mortals next to the fiery inscriptions of God, emblazoned across his welcoming mind?
And so hundreds are dead today who didn’t need to die, because the possibility of their deaths was not supposed to be part of the great plan and therefore was not contemplated in its mandated fullness. There exists no acceptable definition of “idealism” by which the above qualifies as such. Neither is it quite malevolence. Dick Cheney is malevolent, all right, but he’s not the president, at least officially; not the one making the final call. It is incompetence. It is shallowness. To put it more colloquially, it?s trying to wish something true; we’ve all done it in our private lives, so we all know how irresponsible it is.
And it’s happening because the guy in charge doesn’t know any better. Our first impression was, catastrophically, right.
Yessiree. But to listen to bespectacled, waspy, Episcopalean beltway insider Fred “Nascar” Barnes, this is wrong because “real Americans” like him don’t need no stinkin’ Kissingerian nuance.
I’ll leave it to the inimitable Charles Pierce to retort:
One of the reactions to C-Plus Augustus’s prime-time blithering that makes me truly angry is the notion that only elitist Blue Staters expect the president to get from a subject to an object without breaking an ankle, but that the good plain-spoken average American doesn’t cotton to such book-larnin’, consarn it.
What a huge steaming crock of beans. One of the nice things about being a sportswriter is that you actually get to see a lot of the country and you get to meet a lot of its people, many of them living in places that people like David Brooks and the Crazy Dolphin Queen visit only in their smug condescension. I have seen the sun rise over the Piedmont and I have seen it set over the Mississippi Delta. I know the way Puget Sound looks on a clear morning, and the way the snow blows straight up off the surface of Lake Superior on a cold afternoon. I know how the Ohio sounds, and how it sounds different from how the Fox River sounds. I have played bingo in Wisconsin and I have played poker in Reno and I have gambled on horses in the sweet breezes of Keeneland. I’ve seen Tracy Chapman in a subway, and Muddy Waters on a midway, and Bob Dylan at Bally’s Grand on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City. I have seen Michael Jordan play. I have been around.
Don’t tell me what this country and its people think — and, especially, don’t be using that “We” thing to do it. Don’t tell me that, as a nation, we can’t distinguish courage from stubbornness, philosophy from platitudes, and an empty suit from a full one. Don’t tell me we prize simplicity when you really mean we prize the simple. Don’t tell me about my country and my countrymen, you smarmy, honorarium-fattened, makeup-encrusted hyenas. Don’t you freaking dare. I been there.
And, by the way, all of her Beltway Heather pals should note that Peggy Noonan this week intimated that asking the president of the United States what in the hell he’s doing makes you less of a real American. Go on. Go on the shows with her again, and know the contempt she feels for your craft. Then, go home and break every damn mirror you own.
It is foolish for Democrats to buy into the notion that it is too dangerous to question Bush’s competence to do this job. That is blatent GOP propaganda designed to cow us into discarding a potent argument. The vast majority of American people don’t follow politics to the extent that we junkies do and they don’t care all that much about the details. But they are remarkably good at cutting through the bullshit when it’s right in front of them.
Throughout the 90’s the Republicans cried wolf on average of once or twice a week. Clinton was the anti-christ. A corrupt, murdering, philandering communist was running the country. When he was finally caught with his pants down (literally), the American people were fascinated but unmoved. His approval rating remained strong even through impeachment procedings. And that, of course, is what saved him.
And it was because they believed what they saw with their own eyes — a competent president caught in an entertaining political spectacle that didn’t affect their lives.
Bush is dumb. People can see that with their own eyes, too, and Fred Barnes knows it. That’s the real subtext of that whole “the grown-ups are back in charge,” nonsense. Most people thought that Bush was a middle of the road fella who would listen to his Dad if anything big came up and would calm the partisan waters. After all that wild sex with Clinton he was supposed to be the cigarette in the afterglow. But, they knew he was dumb. Times were so good that quite a few people didn’t think it mattered all that much who was president.
After 9/11, people wanted to believe that Bush had risen to the occasion because it was too frightening to think otherwise. The GOP successfully framed criticism as lack of patriotism. And, as with Clinton’s TV soap opera, the press liked the big budget war movie. So, for a short time Bush was seen as bold, resolute, strong, decisive, whatever. Unfortunately for him, he then made the huge mistake of selling a war on a demonstrably false premise. They can try to ignore that big fat GOP elephant in the middle of the room, but it isn’t going away. There are no weapons of mass destruction and Bush is babbling about turkey farms and mustard gas. He can’t testify before the 9/11 commission without Vice President Gepetto. Republicans are writing tell all books about his failures even before his first term is finished. Everyone is being reminded that he never was very bright.
Now, candidates and their surrogates can’t go around saying that too obviously because people will begin to feel sorry for him. But, they should be constantly talking about the complexity of the problems we face. They should discuss what leadership really is and tie it in to experience, maturity, trust and brains.
And the rest of us should use humor to hammer the point home. I’ll never forget Jon Stewert’s countdown of the biggest stories of 2000. The top story of the year was Florida, naturally. We’d been watching footage from the state for one reason or another for the entire 12 months. He ran down the story of the recount and the supreme court decision and then said something like “and at the center of the storm that was Florida this year was one small frightened little boy.” At which point he showed a picture of George W. Bush.
It was obvious then and it’s obvious now that Bush is in over his head. And Fred Barnes’s protestations to the contrary are as phony as Bush senior chomping on that bag of pork rinds.