An E for Effort

Not to take on the tired role of the conservative iconoclast decrying the idiocies of political correctness, but check out this news item from the U.K. Telegraph. It mostly speaks for itself. My personal favorite line:
"...if pupils don't reach that target it does not mean that they have failed; it means they have nearly reached the target".

The spokesman of the National Testing Board (the QCA) in England used this argument to defend eliminating the "F", or failing grade, and replace it with an "N".

- posted by Mark at 9:35 PM; link

 
When God gives you AIDS...

Here are several short stand-up clips from www.bobanddavid.com starring Bob (Odenkirk) and other Mr. Show regulars Brian Posehn and Sarah Silverman. They're all funny, but see especially Posehn's "Sweet F*ckin' Rack" and Silverman's "Some Deep Thinking."

- posted by Mark at 10:44 AM; link

 
Good News from the Western Front

"In addition to its current military involvement in Afghanistan, the Balkans and elsewhere, Germany is willing to provide humanitarian aid, to assist in the civilian and economic reconstruction of Iraq and to train Iraqi security forces." --German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in today's New York Times.

Is this a commitment to help in the reconstruction of Iraq even if nothing can be decided on in the U.N.?

- posted by Mark at 10:29 AM; link

 
re: Harry Pregerson's Conscience

I've posted the Pregerson transcript here. I think it's worth a read. Once again, Pregerson is a Carter appointee to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He was one of the three on the panel that decided to cancel the constitutionally mandated election.

- posted by Carney at 1:00 PM; link

 
Re: The Boy Who Cried...

Three quick things about the Cheney quote concerning Atta:

1.) Cheney uses the past tense: "the Czechs alleged..." This seems to me to be an acknowledgement that the Czechs do not allege this any longer (or are confused about it, as Novak says).
2.) Cheney mentions the Atta/Iraq episode in the context of his explanation as to why we do not know if there was any connection between Iraq and Sept. 11, not as some kind of illicit support for the connection thesis.
3.) By prefacing his statement with "With respect to 9/11, of course you've had the story that's been publicly out there:" Cheney implicitly acknowledges that there has been a public discussion of the Atta incident--that doubts have been raised about it.

The worst thing you can say about this is that Cheney has a higher standard for what it would mean to develop or disconfirm an alleged incident like this than most people. Most people, I agree, would think that we have at least moved toward a disconfirmation. Cheney can thus legitimately be queried as to what he meant by "develop" or "disconfirm".

A Cheney sympathizer (not me) might claim that Cheney's prefatory sentence (see #3) qualifies what goes after it--that what Cheney means to say is that we have not been able to develop or confirm this story beyond what you've already publicly heard. We've got no new information, either to confirm or deny that the incident happened. This perhaps overgenerous interpretation would only be impossible if it had been proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that Atta could not have gone to Iraq--which as far as I know has not yet happened.

- posted by Mark at 11:04 PM; link

 
Re: The Boy Who Cried Wolfowitz

I think the Milbank/Pincus horse is thoroughly dead, thanks to their inexcusably creative use of quotations, but that's to the side of whether Cheney bent the truth. From the transcript: "The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we’ve never been able to develop anymore of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it." This last clause sidesteps the Czechs' edging off their claim, the FBI reporting that Atta was probably in the U.S. at the time, and the fact that we've captured the supposed interlocutor. Surely we've developed something more towards confirming or discrediting it.

Bush joined Rumsfeld today in backing off the 9/11 connection: "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th." Here's one of our employers on the subject from a while back.

- posted by Bob at 8:58 PM; link

 
Re: The Boy Who Cried Wolfowitz

Bob, It would take me a lifetime to list and detail every misrepresentation of fact in the Milbank and Pincus article you linked to. Almost every paragraph in the piece has a dialogical structure: first, "Cheney says..." then "but the truth is..." and almost every "response" seriously distorts the meaning of the Vice President's words, providing a response to something he never said or indicated. I could go on forever, instead I'll limit myself to one claim that has gotten some attention in the blogosphere (see www.crookedtimber.com or www.selfmadepundit.blogspot.com). From Milbank and Pincus's Washington Post article:

"Asked about his earlier dismissal of Gen. Eric K. Shinseki's prewar view that an occupation force would have to be "on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers," Cheney replied: "I still remain convinced that the judgment that we will need, quote, 'several hundred thousand for several years,' is not valid.
In fact, Shinseki had not mentioned "several years" in his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Feb. 25."

The insinuation that Milbank and Pincus make here is that Cheney misquoted Gen. Shinseki in his interview with Russert.

Obvious point 1: Shinseki is never explicitly mentioned in Russert's interview with Cheney.

Then why do Milbank and Pincus assume Cheney is trying to quote Shinseki? Let's look at the transcript. (Emphases are mine.)

"RUSSERT: Let's go through some of those things, because there have been suggestions of misjudgments by the administration.
When you were on the program in March, I asked you about troop levels. Let's watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
RUSSERT: The Army's top general said that we would have to have several hundred thousand troops there for several years in order to maintain stability.
CHENEY: I disagree. To suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict ends, I don't think is accurate. I think that's an overstatement.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
RUSSERT: We, in fact, have about 140,000 troops, 20,000 international troops as well. Did you misjudge the number of troops necessary to secure Iraq after major combat operations?
CHENEY: Well, you're going to get in a debate here about -- talking about several years, several hundred thousand troops for several years. I think that's a non-starter. I don't think we have any plan to do that, Tim. I don't think it's necessary to do that... But I don't think there's been a major shift in terms of U.S. troops levels, and I still remain convinced that the judgment that we'll need, quote, "several hundred thousand for several years" is not valid."

Obvious point 2: Cheney is trying to quote Russert, who did explicitly say "several years."

But how could Pincus and Milbank miss this? Maybe it's because they are surprised that Russert would assert such an obvious falsehood about Shinseki. Perhaps it is grossly implausible to suggest, as Russert did, that Shinseki thought that there would be several thousand U.S. troops in Iraq for several years. And yet...that is exactly what every other news source who reported on Shinseki's testimony took away from it. Some random examples from google:

"The mayhem that has followed the precipitous collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime validates pre-war warnings by U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki that restoring law and order would require “several hundred thousand” U.S. troops for several years."—Mark Sommer, www.newsreview.com

"It is this kind of straight talk that helped put Shinseki on the Rumsfeld enemies list. He told Congress earlier this year that the U.S. would need several hundred thousand troops in Iraq for at least several years after the end of the war. Even though this now seems prescient, Rumsfeld dismissed this public departure from the party line."--Daniel Sneider, Mercury News, 7-13-03

"That has led the chief of the Army, General Shinseki, to suggest to a Congressional committee earlier this month that it might take 100,000 troops several years to secure Iraq."—Steve Schifferes, BBC News, 3-18-2003

Obvious point 3: Whatever General Shinseki's explicit words, everybody who reported on his testimony attributed to him the belief that the U.S. troops would need to be in Iraq for several years.

Summary: Contrary to what Pincus and Milbank imply; 1) Cheney never tried to quote Shinseki, 2) Cheney correctly quoted the person he was trying to quote (Russert), and 3)--and this is the thing that makes the Pincus and Milbank "correction" so perverse—even if Cheney were trying to quote Shinseki, "several hundred thousand troops for several years" would be a relatively accurate statement of Shinseki's position.

I simply do not know of a better example of an article in a major American paper where so much journalistic sloppiness was combined with so much self-righteousness.

I'm going to respond to the Atta in Iraq thing as well, but if you want to save me the time, just look at the transcript.

- posted by Mark at 8:07 PM; link

 
Harry Pregerson's Conscience

Folks who are surprised by the Ninth Circuit's ruling, suspending a constitutionally mandated popular election, should do some more homework.

Specifically, they may find interesting the confirmation hearing of Judge Harry Pregerson, who served on that three-judge panel. Pregerson was nominated by President Carter and confirmed in 1979.

Basically, Pregerson said his conscience takes precedence over the law. An excerpt, and I'll post the rest later:

Senator Simpson: "If a decision in a particular case was required by case law or statute, as interpreted according to the intent that you would perceive as legislative intent, and yet that offended your own conscience, what might you do in that situation?"

Mr. Pregerson: "... I have to be honest with you. If I was faced with a situation like that and it ran against my conscience, I would follow my conscience . . . . [I]f I were faced with a situation like that, that ran against my conscience, disturbed my conscience, I would try to find a way to follow my conscience and do what I perceived to be right and just. Not that, I would hope not, it would mean I would act arbitrarily. I was born and raised in this country, and I am ste[e]ped in its traditions, its mores, its beliefs, and its philosophies; and if I felt strongly in a situation like that, I feel it would be the product of my very being and upbringing. I would follow my conscience."

- posted by Carney at 4:44 PM; link

 
Re: The Boy who Cried Wolfowitz

The track-record test is a negative one: it can only tell you with confidence if their errors are not due to bias (i.e. if the Times corrections are evenly split, or if the administration errs equally on both sides, the bias claim is clearly on weak ground). When there's an imbalance (as there may be with the Times [surely someone's keeping track] and as there certainly is with the administration), you still can't rule out wishful but honest thinking. My point was only that Wolfowitz is not helped in this regard by his administration's record of rigor.

Of course you've ultimately got to look to the confidence-of-competence test, which is what Drum originally did ("Wolfowitz is both a smart guy and a very experienced and media-savvy official, and it's hardly plausible that he was just caught off guard by a morning TV host."). Whether they know this or not (and, come on, they know this), every falsehood the administration has put forth has taken them two steps forward with public sentiment; every uncovering of error has only taken them back a small fraction of a step. If they're smart, and they are, they'll make use of this, and each convenient error I hear makes me more and more suspicious that they it's part of their gameplan. I don't know that anyone (maybe Drum) is saying what you're arguing against (every Wolfowitz mistake is a devious, intentional deception).

Is Cheney's reinvocation of the discredited Atta-in-Prague nonsense not a perfect example of your own criteria? Rumsfeld finally came clean.

- posted by Bob at 3:28 PM; link

 
Re: The Boy who Cried Wolfowitz

Bob, if we say that the New York Times is a biased paper, we mean that it prints more news items which support its agenda than items which detract from it. If all news items are equally prone to being mistaken, the New York Times will thus inevitably have to print more corrections concerning items which support its agenda than those which do not. There is no need to infer a conspiracy to abuse their corrections policy.

Further, there is a psychological phenomenon which exacerbates this imbalance. If a reporter is biased, he will be less critical of apparent facts that support his agenda than of facts which contradict or detract from his agenda. That's pretty much what we mean by bias in reporting. A conscientious newspaper with biased reporters will thus have to issue corrections for "convenient" facts more often than "inconvenient" facts—even if both kinds of facts are printed in the same quantity, which as I have said, they will not be.

In the above case, you can accuse the paper of bias and the reporter to bias and wishful thinking (Adesnik faults Wolfowitz for this), but it would be too much to assume that such bias has degenerated or inevitably will degenerate into deliberate deception.

Consequently, if you're going to accuse someone of deliberate deception you need additional evidence—like repeated attempts to say X after it has been incontrovertibly shown that X is false. You might have this evidence with Cheney (although the WaPo article certainly didn't make the case sufficiently for me). But I do not think you have it with Wolfowitz, unless, that is, you find him "guilty by administration".

[add.: In retrospect, I realize the above does not address your "confidence in competence" argument. But it has left that argument to do battle alone, and it is unclear to me that such "confidence in competence" alone could justify saying that every time Wolfowitz makes I would call a wishful mistake, it is because of a devious plan to decieve the American public.]

- posted by Mark at 12:38 PM; link

 
Re: Re: Why France is Alright with Me

Andrew Sullivan posted an article from L'Express which characterizes French demands about Iraq in power-political terms: i.e., as an attempt to use the U.N. as a weapon, with the success of power determined by United States concessions. I made a similar claim here, and am glad to see a little evidence to back it up. Sullivan, of course, takes the higher moral ground on these "latest grotesqueries from perfidious Paris". But again, despite the despicable nature of this particular power play, I wonder whether national interest in preserving some sort of international power doesn't justify this kind of thing. For if political power is the condition for doing any good (for yourself or others), sacrificing power for a particular good is a kind of political irrationality. This is especially true if you have a different "moral vision" of what you want the world to look like than the reigning power (the power play doesn't make the moral claim hollow, but is in fact required by the moral claim).

Of course, my argument doesn't hold if there are other avenues of power besides manipulating the U.N. open to the French. Brynhild Storset, in letter to the Crux full of good advice, suggested that: "Concerning France, you might want to reconsider what kind of power you think they’re reaching for—they are, afterall, trying to build a European military independent of NATO."

That might be so, but the obstacles that need to be overcome before France or the U.N. have a military that could even be compared with ours are immense. It is unclear that any state in the E.U. would be willing or able to make the financial sacrifices involved in paying for such a military. And there are more than economic barriers. For a good discussion of American military supremacy you can look at American Primacy in Perspective by Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth in Foreign Affairs. On the political difficulties of assembling such a military, this is what they say:

"Whatever capability the EU eventually assembles, moreover, will matter only to the extent that it is under the control of a statelike decision-making body with the authority to act quickly and decisively in Europe's name. Such authority, which does not yet exist even for international financial matters, could be purchased only at the price of a direct frontal assault on European nations' core sovereignty. And all of this would have to occur as the EU expands to add ten or more new member states, a process that will complicate further deepening. Given these obstacles, Europe is unlikely to emerge as a dominant actor in the military realm for a very long time, if ever."

- posted by Mark at 6:06 PM; link

 
Rock You Like A...

The Department of Homeland Security protects us from all invaders, including those with just one eye.

- posted by jay at 4:59 PM; link

 
re: The Boy Who Cried Wolfowitz

Oh, irony.

Note that it's WaPo's policy to post the correction right on the page with the original article.

- posted by Bob at 10:20 AM; link

 
re: The Boy Who Cried Wolfowitz

When guessing motives behind a misstatement, like Kevin Drum is doing and like Mark is discouraging, you've got to rely on patterns and your confidence in the competence of the speaker. If the Times' corrected errors were evenly split between those that promoted their supposed agenda and those counter to it, it would be hard to accuse them of deviously using the difference between front page readership and correction page readership to their advantage. If Wolfowitz and the administration erred as often on the side of underselling the Hussein/al-Qaeda connection as they have in the direction of overselling it, it would be easy to write off Wolfowitz's blunder as an innocent mistake. But, as Tim Russert told Dick Cheney this weekend, 69% of Americans think Hussein was involved in 9/11, and this is largely due to what Cheney then demonstrated, rather than said: this administration has consistently compromised the truth only when it serves to overstate the Iraqi threat to American security.

Bush can spout ridiculous falsehoods (like that the war was fought because Hussein wouldn't "allow the inspectors in") and get away with it, probably because everyone has always written him off as an inarticulate boob. But Wolfowitz? Accidentally saying "a great many of bin Laden's key lieutenants" when he meant "one of bin Laden's associates"? Enough to raise an eyebrow, no?

This WaPo article nicely lays out Cheney's numerous innocent misstatements from his Meet the Press performance.

- posted by Bob at 9:45 PM; link

 
Re: More Polling Data

This comes in from Patrick Findler, via the mailbag:

"The poll the article summarizes:

[link]

A very interesting analysis of the poll, quite different from the summary in the article:

[link]"

The latter link provides a pretty thorough analysis of the poll, the article about it, and the shortcomings of both.

- posted by Erik at 9:17 PM; link

 
Buruma

This article has been linked to a good deal (through ALDaily and Andrew Sullivan) and for good reason: Ian Buruma on neo-liberal isolationism.

- posted by Mark at 12:52 PM; link

 
Err Jordan

In Pat Jordan's uninspired piece on the 100-m.p.h. fastball in this Sunday's Times Magazine, he engages in a bit of armchair kinesiology:

Contrary to popular belief, a 100-m.p.h. pitcher doesn't put any more strain on his arm than an 85-m.p.h. pitcher does. Both are throwing the ball as hard as they can, so neither is more susceptible to an arm injury.

Think this through: that two men throwing as hard as they can achieve different maximum speeds is a product of a number of factors, but the big two are their arm strength and the mechanics of their deliveries. The 100-m.p.h. pitcher is exerting more force on the ball than the 85-m.p.h. guy (assuming equal times of delivery: the other option is that he's exerting less or equal force for a longer time, which is equivalent for our consideration of "strain"), and Newton III says that the ball therefore exerts more force on the 100-m.p.h. pitcher. Now this greater force is not merely absorbed by those parts of the pitcher's anatomy that generated the greater force on the ball (namely, the skeletal muscle): it is also absorbed by the tendons, ligaments, cartilage and bone of the arm and shoulder, components that are critical for healthy functioning but difficult to condition and basically independent of how well-trained the force-generating muscle is. How do fastball pitchers usually hurt their arms? They blow out their ulnar collateral ligaments and require Tommy John surgery (like Kerry Wood, the star of Jordan's article). They develop arthritis in their pitching joints (like Sandy Koufax). They tear the tendons of their rotator cuffs, or those tendons become inflamed (like Pedro Martinez, to name one of hundreds).

- posted by Bob at 12:23 PM; link

 
The Boy Who Cried Wolfowitz

CalPundit reports of a recent retraction by Wolfowitz of a statement he made on ABC's Good Morning America that "key lieutenants of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden are plotting with Saddam Hussein loyalists to kill Americans in Iraq." From the fact that the misstatement was made on national television, and the fact that the retraction had a much more exclusive audience, CalPundit infers an insidious design. This is an argument that has also been frequently made about the New York Times correction policy—it enables them to put the convenient lie where people will see it and the inconvenient retraction where they will not.

In neither case is this accusation necessarily well-grounded, though. For what are the other possibilities? Could Wolfowitz get a second interview on Good Morning America to make a clarification about his misstatement in the previous interview? But if he had made the mistake before a tiny audience, would he even have needed to officially correct his statement? The only time it makes sense to issue a correction is after you've made a mistake to a significant audience, and the only place it makes sense to run a correction is before the smaller audience of people who care about corrections.

That might be a convenient arrangement for a strategic liar, but one cannot infer merely from the arrangement that every original misstatement is a strategic lie.

David Adesnik at oxblog offers a more modest criticism of Wolfowitz.

- posted by Mark at 11:11 AM; link

 
Specter Update

Here's my letter in today's Wall Street Journal

September 15, 2003
Specter Fails to Persuade He's Right for the Job

Sen. Arlen Specter, in his Sept. 9 Letter to the Editor, did not attempt to rebut anything in my Sept. 4 editorial-page commentary "Stop This Man." More importantly, he failed to make the case that he would be an acceptable chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Unable to deny that he has been working behind the scenes to scuttle the judicial nomination of J. Leon Holmes, as credible sources inform me he is, he instead resorts to self-defense by non sequitur -- addressing instead the committee's vote on Mr. Holmes.

The senator's defense of his own record on judges -- that he voted for five conservative or moderate high-court nominees -- is insufficient. Mr. Specter's memoirs make it clear he supported Justices Rehnquist and Scalia only grudgingly (while noting no objections to liberals Souter, Ginsburg or Breyer).

Mr. Specter blocked Robert Bork for fear he may have "tipped the court's balance." It is precisely Mr. Specter's idea of balance that is so troubling. Having a Judiciary chairman who backs most conservative nominees is not a risk the Republican Party can afford to run.

Timothy P. Carney
Washington

- posted by Carney at 9:59 AM; link

 
Atheists of the World, Unite!

Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, claimed that in revolutionary France a new kind of atheism had arisen—political atheism. Atheists had, of course, existed as far back as antiquity, but only as wholly unconnected individuals. Up to that point, “they kept the common nature of their kind and were not gregarious. They never acted in corps, nor were known as a faction in state, nor presumed to influence, in that name or character, or for the purposes of such a faction, on any of our public concerns.”

Daniel Dennett, a modern philosopher of some repute, and Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, have recently taken up the banner of political atheism again. In articles in the New York Times and The Guardian, they've announced a joint effort to try to encourage atheists, agnostics and scientific rationalists to put aside their political apathy and form a new movement of what they call “brights”. You can visit www.edge.org for a history of the bright movement. (It came out of "the Reality Club", etc.)

I find the Dennett/Dawkins proposal unappealing. You see the worst side of modern rationalism when you see what it becomes when it is translated into a popular philosophy. It becomes smug anti-religiosity (the reality club?—what, again, is everyone else talking about?). But even aside from my aesthetic or moral distaste for the movement, I’m not sure why anyone would assume that “brights” (which, by the way, is a sickeningly cutesy term) have any specific shared political agenda. How many policy questions are really decided on whether or not you believe in "ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny – or God"? Further, it seems to me that it would be counterproductive to support the most obvious "bright" cause through an explicit social movement. I.e., if their cause is promoting the separation of church and state, would it really benefit the debate to begin seeing it as a conflict between atheists and Christians rather than a debate about the just limits of state power (an issue on which atheists and Christians could agree as easily as disagree)? Without any obvious political relevance, the project seems little more than a sort of self-esteem builder among nerds (see especially Dawkins article). But perhaps some of you think the proposal might make sense—or find it more appealing for reasons that elude me.

[ed.: The worst thing I can say is that this seems like the kind of thing Leonard Piekoff would have thought of.]

- posted by Mark at 6:36 PM; link