“Plainly And Demonstrably Wrong”: Bob Woodward’s Unfortunate And Inexplicable Errors
In the world of media giants, the Washington Post‘s Bob Woodward has reached a legendary status with few rivals. If there’s a journalistic award to be won, Woodward has received it, including multiple Pulitzers. His Watergate coverage 40 years ago is, quite literally, the stuff of legend.
But even reporting icons sometimes make mistakes, some of them rather inexplicable.
Over the weekend, there was quite a kerfuffle when Woodward, to the delight of far-right bloggers, jumped into the debate over this week’s sequestration cuts, challenging some of the White House’s key assertions. For one thing, Woodward insists the sequester was President Obama’s idea. For another, Woodward wants the public to believe Obama is “moving the goal posts” by expecting Democrats and Republicans to reach a compromise including both spending cuts and revenue from closed tax loopholes. As far as the Washington Post reporter in concerned, sequestration cuts were supposed to be replaced entirely with different spending cuts, just as GOP policymakers demand.
Let’s take these one at a time. The first point, which Republicans and reporters find needlessly fascinating, is quickly becoming farcical. Tim Noah argued that the White House came up with the sequestration policy “in roughly the same sense that it was Charles Lindbergh’s bad idea eight decades ago to fork over the equivalent in today’s dollars of $840,000 to a German-born carpenter named Bruno Hauptmann…. The sequester was a ransom payment.” Noam Scheiber added that saying the sequester was Obama’s idea is “like saying it was your idea to give your wallet to a mugger when he said, ‘Your money or your life.'”
Republicans were threatening to crash the economy on purpose and Obama was scrambling to satisfy their demands before GOP lawmakers pulled the trigger and shot the hostage (which is to say, shot us). The sequester then became part of the plan that Republicans proceeded to vote for and brag about, before they came up with the “this is all Obama’s fault” talking point in the hopes of winning a bizarre public-relations fight.
After Republicans created a crisis, both sides created the sequester, and both sides now consider it dangerous. The point that matters, even if Very Serious People in Washington are reluctant to acknowledge it, is that only one side is prepared to compromise to resolve the problem.
Which leads us to Woodward’s second, and more dramatic, error.
For the Washington Post legend, Obama is “moving the goal posts,” since everyone realized in the summer of 2011 that the sequestration cuts were supposed to be replaced with a different set of cuts — and no new revenue. It’s unfair, Woodward argues, for the White House to suddenly expect a balanced compromise when that was never part of the original plan.
Woodward is plainly, demonstrably wrong. It’s not a matter of opinion and it’s not an answer found in a fuzzy gray area in which both sides have a credible claim.
When the Budget Control Act became law to end the Republicans’ debt-ceiling crisis in 2011, a “super-committee” was created to find an alternative to the sequester. Was the committee’s mandate to find a cuts-only policy? Of course not — even Republicans accepted the fact that some revenue would be part of a solution. President Obama, when signing the BCA, explicitly said, “You can’t close the deficit with just spending cuts…. It also means reforming our tax code so that the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations pay their fair share.'”
Brian Beutler added that Woodward “is just dead wrong.”
Obama and Democrats have always insisted that a balanced mix of spending cuts and higher taxes replace sequestration. It’s true that John Boehner wouldn’t agree to include new taxes in the enforcement mechanism itself, and thus that the enforcement mechanism he and Obama settled upon — sequestration — is composed exclusively of spending cuts. But the entire purpose of an enforcement mechanism is to make sure that the enforcement mechanism is never triggered. The key question is what action it was designed to compel. And on that score, the Budget Control Act is unambiguous.
First: “Unless a joint committee bill achieving an amount greater than $1,200,000,000,000 in deficit reduction as provided in section 401(b)(3)(B)(i)(II) of the Budget Control Act of 2011 is enacted by January 15, 2012, the discretionary spending limits listed in section 251(c) shall be revised, and discretionary appropriations and direct spending shall be reduced.”
Key words: “deficit reduction.” Not “spending cuts.” If Republicans wanted to make sure sequestration would be replaced with spending cuts only, that would have been the place to make a stand. Some of them certainly tried. But that’s not what ultimately won the day. Instead, the law tasked the Super Committee with replacing sequestration with a different deficit reduction bill — tax increases or no.
At a certain level, Woodward, despite having written extensively on the subject, seems somewhat confused about the specific details. In his op-ed, he wrote, “The final deal reached between Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2011 included an agreement that there would be no tax increases in the sequester….So when the president asks that a substitute for the sequester include not just spending cuts but also new revenue, he is moving the goal posts.”
But that simply doesn’t make any sense. The sequester didn’t include revenue, so it’s unfair to expect the sequester alternative to have revenue? Why is that, exactly?
What’s especially troubling is that Woodward’s own book is at odds with the argument he presented in the new op-ed.
But wait, it gets worse. Woodward, who for whatever reason doesn’t seem to care for the president, made an unfortunate mistake and got caught. And if Woodward acknowledged his missteps and corrected them, it would have been easy to simply move on. Even journalistic legends make mistakes.
But in this case, after learning of the criticism, Woodward emailed Politico‘s Mike Allen with a defense that made matters worse, flubbing several key, basic details, suggesting he’s even more confused about the debate than was evident from his mistaken op-ed.
Republicans seem thrilled with Woodward’s errors because they reinforce the story they’re eager to tell. But relying on mistakes to bolster a bad argument only makes Woodward and Republicans look worse.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 25, 2013
“The Cruz Litmus Test”: If Republicans Won’t Call This Guy Out, They Haven’t Learned A Thing
Parallel to the ongoing discussion of whether or not the Republican Party has any serious interest in curtailing the right-wing bender it’s been on since at least 2009 (and arguably a lot longer), we have the interesting phenomenon of a new and very loud Republican Senator who stands proudly for the point of view that the bender needs to get a lot crazier. Here’s the most succinct version of his argument that Republicans are losing because they aren’t standing up for “conservative principles:”
“Why did we lose? It wasn’t as the media would tell you: because the American people embraced big government, Barack Obama’s spending and debt and taxes. … That wasn’t what happened. I’m going to suggest to you a very simple reason why we lost the election: We didn’t win the argument,” Cruz said before pointedly lowering his voice. “We didn’t even make the argument.”
Yeah, not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties, as George Wallace used to say back in the day.
But beyond this continuation of the ludicrous proposition that Republicans are too moderate and compromise-oriented (which really hasn’t been a credible argument since 1990, if then), Cruz is already distinguishing himself as the kind of mendacious bully-boy–sort of a smarter version of the Rick Perry who first emerged on the 2012 presidential campaign trail roaring and strutting around and threatening to tear the godless liberals limb from limb–who makes any sort of bipartisan discussion absolutely impossible. And while a few Republicans whisper about him obliquely or off-the-record, he’s mostly been lionized for this behavior:
“Senator Ted Cruz came to Washington to advance conservative policies, not play by the same old rules that have relegated conservatives, and their ideas, to the back bench,” Michael Needham, president of the influential Heritage Action said on Tuesday. “It should come as absolutely no surprise the Washington Establishment – be it the liberal media, entrenched special interests or even wayward Republicans – are now attacking him in the press for following through on his promises.”
Frank Cannon, president of the American Principles Project, said: “It’s about time someone annoyed those who have been complacent in doing what is necessary to get the country back on track. We applaud Senator Ted Cruz’s dedication to conservative principles and being an articulate spokesman for those principles. We are pleased he is shaking up Washington and doing exactly what the people of Texas elected him to do.”
Having brought back memories of Joe McCarthy in his nasty interrogation of Chuck Hagel, Cruz is back in the news right now for smearing left-wing Harvard Law School professors as communist revolutionaries (his effort to back-track on the smear without admitting it didn’t work too well).
As both Steve Kornacki and Greg Sargent have argued today, the acceptance of Cruz by his fellow-Republicans as a hail-fellow-well-met (and perhaps the future face of the party!) shows the shallowness of the talk about “reform” in the GOP (or alternatively, the shallowness of the MSM’s understanding of what conservatives mean when they talk about “reform”).
So I propose a litmus test for all those Republicans who say they learned their lesson and want to build a GOP that is free of the rancor and extremism of the recent past. Let’s ask them: what do you think of Ted Cruz? Because if they won’t call this guy out, then they haven’t learned a thing.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, February 25, 2013
“Sequester Of Fools”: We Should Be Spending More, Not Less, Until We’re Close To Full Employment
They’re baaack! Just about two years ago, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the co-chairmen of the late unlamented debt commission, warned us to expect a terrible fiscal crisis within, um, two years unless we adopted their plan. The crisis hasn’t materialized, but they’re nonetheless back with a new version. And, in case you’re interested, after last year’s election — in which American voters made it clear that they want to preserve the social safety net while raising taxes on the rich — the famous fomenters of fiscal fear have moved to the right, calling for even less revenue and even more spending cuts.
But you aren’t interested, are you? Almost nobody is. Messrs. Bowles and Simpson had their moment — the annus horribilis of 2011, when Washington was in thrall to deficit scolds insisting that, in the face of record-high long-term unemployment and record-low borrowing costs, we forget about jobs and concentrate exclusively on a “grand bargain” that would supposedly (not actually) settle budget disputes for ever after.
That moment has now passed; even Mr. Bowles concedes that the search for a grand bargain is on “life support.” Let’s convene a death panel! But the legacy of that year of living foolishly lives on, in the form of the “sequester,” one of the worst policy ideas in our nation’s history.
Here’s how it happened: Republicans engaged in unprecedented hostage-taking, threatening to push America into default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless President Obama agreed to a grand bargain on their terms. Mr. Obama, alas, didn’t stand firm; instead, he tried to buy time. And, somehow, both sides decided that the way to buy time was to create a fiscal doomsday machine that would inflict gratuitous damage on the nation through spending cuts unless a grand bargain was reached. Sure enough, there is no bargain, and the doomsday machine will go off at the end of next week.
There’s a silly debate under way about who bears responsibility for the sequester, which almost everyone now agrees was a really bad idea. The truth is that Republicans and Democrats alike signed on to this idea. But that’s water under the bridge. The question we should be asking is who has a better plan for dealing with the aftermath of that shared mistake.
The right policy would be to forget about the whole thing. America doesn’t face a deficit crisis, nor will it face such a crisis anytime soon. Meanwhile, we have a weak economy that is recovering far too slowly from the recession that began in 2007. And, as Janet Yellen, the vice chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, recently emphasized, one main reason for the sluggish recovery is that government spending has been far weaker in this business cycle than in the past. We should be spending more, not less, until we’re close to full employment; the sequester is exactly what the doctor didn’t order.
Unfortunately, neither party is proposing that we just call the whole thing off. But the proposal from Senate Democrats at least moves in the right direction, replacing the most destructive spending cuts — those that fall on the most vulnerable members of our society — with tax increases on the wealthy, and delaying austerity in a way that would protect the economy.
House Republicans, on the other hand, want to take everything that’s bad about the sequester and make it worse: canceling cuts in the defense budget, which actually does contain a lot of waste and fraud, and replacing them with severe cuts in aid to America’s neediest. This would hit the nation with a double whammy, reducing growth while increasing injustice.
As always, many pundits want to portray the deadlock over the sequester as a situation in which both sides are at fault, and in which both should give ground. But there’s really no symmetry here. A middle-of-the-road solution would presumably involve a mix of spending cuts and tax increases; well, that’s what Democrats are proposing, while Republicans are adamant that it should be cuts only. And given that the proposed Republican cuts would be even worse than those set to happen under the sequester, it’s hard to see why Democrats should negotiate at all, as opposed to just letting the sequester happen.
So here we go. The good news is that compared with our last two self-inflicted crises, the sequester is relatively small potatoes. A failure to raise the debt ceiling would have threatened chaos in world financial markets; failure to reach a deal on the so-called fiscal cliff would have led to so much sudden austerity that we might well have plunged back into recession. The sequester, by contrast, will probably cost “only” around 700,000 jobs.
But the looming mess remains a monument to the power of truly bad ideas — ideas that the entire Washington establishment was somehow convinced represented deep wisdom.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 21, 2013
“Undermining Democracy”: The GOP Plot To Steal The 2016 Election Continues
Michigan’s Republican Party approved a resolution Saturday that would change the way the states award electoral votes from the winner-take-all system that has existed since the state’s admission to the Union.
A total of 14 votes would be awarded to the candidate with the most votes in each congressional district and two would go to the overall winner of the state’s popular vote.
Under this scheme, Mitt Romney would likely have won 10 of the state’s electoral votes to President Obama’s six — despite the fact that Obama carried the state by nearly 10 percent.
The resolution was introduced by Rep. Pete Lund (R), who offered electoral college reform legislation in 2011 that would have given Romney the state, but which state Republicans rejected because they assumed the GOP nominee, a Michigan native and son of a former governor, would win the state.
Lund will likely reintroduce the bill in 2013. Republicans have majorities in both state houses and Republican governor Rick Snyder is supportive of the plan, but questions its timing.
“The right way is to talk about it in a bipartisan way … just prior to a census,” Snyder said.
Snyder’s approval rating has declined rapidly since he signed anti-union legislation during last year’s lame-duck session. He’s since tried to move back to the center by saying he’d like the state to accept Medicaid expansion.
Michigan’s shift of 10 electoral votes to Romney would not have swung the 2012 election for Romney. However, if all the states that have suggested changing the way they award their electors — Michigan, Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — had done so, Romney would likely be in the White House now, which is why Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus endorsed the scheme.
The idea has been rejected by a few top Republicans — like Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Virginia governor Bob McDonnell (R-VA) — and thus faded from the agendas in Virginia, Ohio and Wisconsin.
But in Pennsylvania — the state where voter ID was supposed to give the election to Romney — the effort continues.
A new bill that would rig the state’s electoral votes has been introduced by 13 Republican state senators. That support represents half the total votes the bill would need to pass the Senate. The bill could be on the desk of Governor Tom Corbett — who would sign it — this week.
Pennsylvania, like Michigan, has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1992.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, February 25, 2013
“The Elderly And The Infirm”: Scott Walker’s Latest Victims Are The Most Vulnerable
When Governor Scott Walker faces Wisconsin voters in 2014, he’ll be running on a record of confronting public worker unions, turning down Medicaid expansion that would have covered 181,000 Wisconsinites and creating far fewer than the 250,000 new jobs he promised.
And if that isn’t enough, he can run on the Wisconsin Omnibus Tort Reform Act of 2011.
One of the first bills Walker signed into law, these reforms were taken almost entirely from the Koch-funded legislative warehouse of the Billionaire Rights Movement, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
The legislation prevents state health investigation records from being admitted as evidence in any civil or criminal cases against long-term care providers, including nursing homes and hospices.
Sarah Karon of the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism looked into the impact of the reform and found that the families of patients who often cannot testify on their own behalf are powerless to redress abuse and neglect.
In one case, Joshua Wahl — a paraplegic patient with spina bifida and brain damage — had a bedsore left to fester for months before he was finally hospitalized, according to a state investigator.
“It scares me for those who put their trust in a facility,” said Karen Nichols-Palmerton, Wahl’s mother. “It scares me to think of things that could be brushed aside. I don’t rest so easy anymore.”
Nichols-Palmerton is suing the facility, but the investigator’s report will not be heard in court, thanks to the Wisconsin Omnibus Tort Reform Act of 2011.
Why did Walker and Wisconsin’s Republicans decide records documenting such abuse shouldn’t be admissible in court?
It isn’t good for business.
“Each of these (proposals) is aimed at one thing — jobs,” said Brian Hagedorn, Walker’s chief legal counsel, during a hearing for the bill. “These changes send a symbolic and substantive message that Wisconsin is open for business.”
State investigators’ reports are published online. But a Department of Justice spokeswoman told Karon that the law makes it difficult to prosecute abuse and neglect cases at early stages, when severe injuries or death can be prevented.
Nursing homes that accept Medicaid or Medicare must be investigated every 15 months. Non-federally certified facilities are investigated by the states every two years. Wisconsin has cut its staff of nursing home surveyors by more than 30 percent, even as complaints about such facilities have risen by more than 100 percent since the year 2000.
Walker’s record of opening Wisconsin “for business” and turning away from its grand tradition of progressivism hasn’t had such a great effect on job creation. And the cost, especially for those forced to rely on long-term care, is falling squarely on the most vulnerable.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, February 22, 2013
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