“Dumber Than A 5th Grader”: President Obama’s Bayonet Analogy Is Just Too Complex For Paul Ryan To Understand
Conservatives have made an admirable attempt thus far to turn President Obama’s “horses and bayonets” zinger in their favor. Mostly, they have been doing this by lying.
What Obama said was that the military uses “fewer horses and bayonets” than it used to, because technology changes over time. Obama was making the point that comparing the number of ships our Navy had in 1916 to the number it has now, as Mitt Romney was doing, is a ridiculous way to gauge military strength, since the ships we do have are vastly more powerful than they used to be.
But some conservatives are pretending that Obama actually claimed that the military uses no horses or bayonets anymore. And the military does use them sometimes, so Obama is a moron! Media Matters gathered some of the more prominent examples:
Immediately following the debate, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace highlighted that a Marine “tweeted Fox News and said the Marines still use bayonets. So it may not be clear who doesn’t understand what the military currently uses.”
Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin complained that “Mr. Snarky Commander McSnark” was “lecturing Romney on how we don’t have bayonets anymore.” At Breitbart.com, Joel Pollak also purported to fact-check Obama, writing that “the military still uses bayonets.”
Fox Nation has similarly posted a story headlined “Mr. President, US Special Forces Rode Horses Into Afghanistan.”
Meanwhile, a guy who sells bayonets to the military tells TMZ that Obama is “ignorant … because our soldiers still use bayonets.” But again, Obama didn’t say that we never use bayonets or never use horses, so all these arguments and criticisms are directed at a straw man.
But Paul Ryan isn’t embracing the straw-man tactic. Instead, on CBS This Morning, he insisted that the whole bayonet analogy was so confusing, he couldn’t even wrap his famously wonky head around it:
“To compare modern American battleships and Navy with bayonets – I just don’t understand that comparison.”
Is it really that complicated? Let’s break down this analogy SAT-style: Outdated ships are to modern ships as outdated weaponry (such as bayonets) are to ____. Now, Ryan might guess something like “horses” or “the ocean,” but the answer is “modern weaponry.” This is a form of logical reasoning that most Americans master around the age of 17.
By: Dan Amira, Daily Intel, October 23, 2012
“A Deeply Ironic Twist”: Conservative Media Ignore GOP Voter Registration Fraud
Republicans passed new voting restrictions in more than a dozen states since the 2010 election that were purportedly designed to stop voter fraud. Yet, in a deeply ironic twist, the most high-profile instances of election fraud this cycle have been committed by Republicans in states with new voting restrictions.
The RNC-funded Strategic Allied Consulting, run by checkered GOP operative Nathan Sproul, is under criminal investigation in Florida for submitting fraudulent voter registration forms to election officials. (Sproul is still running voter-canvassing operations for conservatives in thirty states.) Sproul’s associate Colin Small, who had worked for Strategic Allied Consulting and as “Grassroots Field Director at the Republican National Committee,” was charged last week with eight felony counts and five misdemeanors for trashing voter registration forms in Virginia.
Republicans claim that the voter registration fraud was committed by a few bad apples and pales in comparison to the fraud committed by ACORN in 2008. But ACORN was never funded by the DNC. And the abuses committed by Sproul and Small were far worse than those attached to ACORN. Unlike Strategic Allied Consulting, ACORN never changed the party affiliations on fraudulent voter registration forms and self-reported suspicious materials to election officials. Nor did ACORN ever destroy valid voter registration forms, as Small is accused of doing. (Not to mention that none of the fictitious characters falsely registered by ACORN workers, like Mickey Mouse, ever voted.)
Despite the right’s preoccupation with voter fraud, Sproul and Small have received scant coverage from conservative media outlets. Fox News, which ran 122 stories on ACORN from 2007–08, mentioned Strategic Allied Consulting only three times since the scandal broke in late September and hasn’t aired a single report on voter registration fraud in Virginia. Nor have National Review or The Weekly Standard, the pre-eminent conservative magazines, run an article about either case.
ACORN was far from perfect, but it did not deserve the witch-hunt treatment it received. In 2009, Peter Dreier of Occidental College and Christopher Martin of Northern Iowa studied the media’s shameful coverage of ACORN during the 2008 election and found:
• 82.8% of the stories failed to mention that actual voter fraud is very rare
• 80.3% of the stories failed to mention that ACORN was reporting registration irregularities to authorities, as required by law
• 85.1% of the stories about ACORN failed to note that ACORN was acting to stop incidents of registration problems by its (mostly temporary) employees when it became aware of these problems
• 95.8% of the stories failed to provide deeper context, especially efforts by Republican Party officials to use allegations of “voter fraud” to dampen voting by low‐income and minority Americans, including the firing of U.S. Attorneys who refused to cooperate with the politicization of voter-fraud accusations—firings that ultimately led to the resignation of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
Republicans, it turns out, have committed the very voter registration fraud they once accused ACORN of perpetrating. Nor did new voting restrictions in states like Florida and Virginia, which could collectively make it harder for 5 million Americans to cast a ballot in 2012, prevent the fraud they were supposedly meant to combat.
By: Ari Berman, The Nation, October 23, 2012
“Reality”: A Product Of The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy
“Reality,” Stephen Colbert once famously said, “has a well-known liberal bias.”
It was one of those jokes that isn’t, one of those barbs that captures something painfully true, allows you to see it with clarity you never could if viewing straight on. It’s worth noting that Colbert said this years before that jump-the-shark moment last week when conservatives accused the Labor Department of conspiring against them. In case you missed it, it happened when the government released figures showing the unemployment rate has tumbled to 7.8 percent.
Most of us considered this good news. Because it validates President Obama’s narrative of a slowly-improving economy, many conservatives did not. They called the figure a fraud — “monkey business,” in the words of Donald Trump. Former GE CEO Jack Welch saw it as evidence of malfeasance from “these Chicago guys.” Fox “News” asked, “Is the number real?”
And so it goes in the conservative War on Reality.
Not that this was the first salvo in said war. Just before the numbers came out, conservatives were working to discredit polls that showed President Obama leading Mitt Romney. “Bogus,” said Rush Limbaugh.
You see, the war goes back a ways. Back to Sen. Jon Kyl saying that 90 percent of Planned Parenthood’s activities are abortion-related and, when called on that lie, issuing a statement that what he said was “not intended to be … factual.” Back to Sarah Palin sounding the alarm about death panels, back to Glenn Beck saying conservatives started the Civil Rights Movement, back to people pretending there is some mystery over the president’s birthplace.
Heck, it goes back to the Bush administration cutting inconvenient facts from government reports, back to Bush brushing aside a pessimistic report on Iraq by saying the intelligence community was “just guessing.”
The point here — this cannot be overemphasized — is not ideology. Rather, it is about the fact that we cannot effectively debate ideology if we do not have a body of facts in common.
Under such circumstances, political discourse must devolve into incoherence. We cannot discuss what color to paint the room if we cannot agree on what constitutes red or green — or the room. We literally have no shared language with which to even have the discussion.
This is the legacy of the War on Reality. Some of us live under a new ethos, fueled and abetted by Fox, the Internet and talk radio, which holds that facts are optional and reality, multiple choice — and that anyone who questions this is part of the conspiracy against you. The results have not been pretty. When, in the history of American political discourse, have conservatives — some, not all — seemed more paranoid, put-upon and ready to believe themselves the victims of outlandish plots?
Hillary Clinton was rightly derided for saying a “vast right-wing conspiracy” was out to get her husband. But if that one-time utterance made her sound ridiculous, what shall we make of this constant drumbeat from the political right? What shall we make of a mindset in which the answer to every criticism, the response to every unwelcome fact, is to point to a conspiracy of bias that exists mostly in their minds?
Now, we reach a sobering watershed. Who knew even the professional numbers crunchers in the Labor Department were part of this vast left-wing conspiracy?
Hearing that, one must believe one of two things: either math also has a liberal bias, or, it is time to ask ourselves what becomes of a country where problem-solving is paralyzed because problem solvers cannot agree on a common reality?
Math, should it need saying, has no liberal bias. So give that question some hard thought. After all, we have only the one country. We may not share the same reality, but we will certainly share the same fate.
By: Leonard Pitts, The National Memo, October 10, 2012
“Follow-Up Questions”: Unlike The Fawning Coverage He’s Received In The Past, Paul Ryan Shows His Thin Skin
Paul Ryan, we are discovering, does not always handle follow-up questions that well.
The latest evidence came yesterday afternoon, when an interview with a local television reporter in Michigan turned testy and was ended by Ryan’s aide.
The dispute was ostensibly over gun control. Asked by reporter Terry Camp of WJRT in Flint if America has a gun problem, Ryan responded that the country has a crime problem. “Not a gun problem?” Camp asked. “No,” Ryan replied, arguing that existing laws should be enforced and that “the best thing to help prevent violent crime in the inner cities is to bring opportunity to the inner cities” – for “charities, and civic groups and churches” to teach people “good discipline, good character.”
“And you can do all that by cutting taxes – with a big tax cut,” Camp replied.
“Those are your words, not mine,” Ryan said, at which point his aide stepped in to end the interview.
“That was kind of strange – trying to stuff words in people’s mouths,” Ryan told Camp as he took his microphone off.
As Erik Wemple points out, it’s unclear what Camp’s intent here was. Ryan interpreted his words about tax cuts as a rude expression of skepticism and editorializing, but Camp and the station insist he wasn’t trying to make any kind of political statement and was merely asking another question. It’s certainly possible that Camp was just trying to prompt Ryan to expand his thoughts, and that he used some clumsy short-hand to do it.
The way Ryan chose to handle this seems noteworthy, though. Several times in the past few months, he’s been pressed by reporters and has had trouble deflecting lines of questioning that make him uncomfortable.
When he first joined the GOP ticket, for instance, Ryan sat for what everyone assumed would be a friendly interview with Fox News’ Brit Hume, who asked him about the long amount of time – not until 2040 – that it would take his fiscal blueprint to produce a balanced budget. Ryan replied that he wasn’t running on his budget plan – he was running on Romney’s. OK, Hume replied, well how long will it take Romney’s plan to bring about a balanced budget.
“I don’t know exactly when it balances,” Ryan conceded, “because we have – I don’t want to get wonky on you, but we have to run the numbers on that specific plan.”
More recently, there was Ryan’s sit-down with Fox’s Chris Wallace, who quizzed him about the Romney tax plan’s lack of specificity. Romney proposes a 20 percent across-the-board tax cut and insists he’ll make it deficit neutral by closing loopholes and deductions, but he hasn’t specified which ones. Wallace challenged Ryan to explain how the math would work.
“Well, I don’t have the time,” Ryan replied. “It would take me too long to go through all the math.”
That answer won Ryan no shortage of ridicule. It points to the steep learning curve he’s faced since being tapped as Romney’s No. 2. As a congressman, Ryan has been unusually visible, but the press coverage he’s received has tended to be rather fawning – reporters, columnists and television hosts giving him a chance to outline his plan and the hailing him as the rare adult in DC who’s willing to produce serious ideas.
It’s easy to get accustomed to that kind of treatment. But since August (and particularly since his vice presidential acceptance speech), the media has treated him with more skepticism, demanding that he and Romney fill in the blanks on their plans. Ryan doesn’t always seem used to aggressive scrutiny and follow-up questioning in interviews, and it’s shown on several occasions now. The interview with Camp isn’t a huge deal, but Ryan probably could have handled it in a way that didn’t create a big story. It’s a reminder that he’s still learning. And it makes this week’s VP debate that much more interesting, since Ryan figures to come in for some aggressive questioning from his opponent, Joe Biden.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, October 9, 2012
“Liberals Need To Get A Grip”: While Others Push Opinions To Extremes, Feel Free To Stop Rending Your Garments
As a liberal who writes about politics for a living, I’ve spent the last few days talking to increasingly panicked Democrats, who have begun to overreact to the fact that President Obama had a poor debate performance, which then produced a movement in some polls toward Mitt Romney. I think David Weigel put it well yesterday: “The first presidential debate has come to remind me of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Democrats walked out of the theater/turned off the TV saying ‘huh, well, I wanted it to be better.’ After a few days of talking to friends, it changes from a disappointment into the worst piece of crap in human history.” Andrew Sullivan kind of went nuclear after seeing the Pew poll I discussed yesterday, writing a post titled, “Did Obama Just Throw the Entire Election Away?” I can answer that: No.
For many years, psychologists and sociologists have known that in small groups, a uniformity of opinion can push opinion to the extremes. For instance, if you get a group of liberals together and tell them to talk about military spending, by the time the discussion is over, each individual will end up favoring spending cuts even deeper than they favored before the discussion began. There’s an analogous movement in the opinions liberals have undergone since last Wednesday, but here conservatives and the mainstream media play a role as well. There’s no question that reporters, eager for a new storyline and an invigorated race, have seized on the idea that the debate changed everything. And as Kevin Drum explains, conservatives benefit from their large stable of hacks:
Here’s how things would have gone if liberals had their fair share of hacks. Obviously Obama wasn’t at his best on Wednesday. But when the debate was over that wouldn’t have mattered. Conservatives would have started crowing about how well Romney did. Liberals would have acknowledged that Obama should have confronted Romney’s deceptions more forcefully, but otherwise would have insisted that Obama was more collected and presidential sounding than the hyperactive Romney and clearly mopped the floor with him on a substantive basis. News reporters would then have simply reported the debate normally: Romney said X, Obama said Y, and both sides thought their guy did great. By the next day it would barely be a continuing topic of conversation, and by Friday the new jobs numbers would have buried it completely.
Instead, liberals went batshit crazy. I didn’t watch any commentary immediately after the debate because I wanted to write down my own reactions first, and my initial sense was that Obama did a little bit worse than Romney. But after I hit the Publish button and turned on the TV, I learned differently. As near as I could tell, the entire MSNBC crew was ready to commit ritual suicide right there on live TV, Howard Beale style. Ditto for all their guests, including grizzled pols like Ed Rendell who should have known better. It wasn’t just that Obama did poorly, he had delivered the worst debate performance since Clarence Darrow left William Jennings Bryan a smoking husk at the end of Inherit the Wind. And it wasn’t even just that. It was a personal affront, a betrayal of everything they thought was great about Obama. And, needless to say, it put Obama’s entire second term in jeopardy and made Romney the instant front runner.
Kevin is absolutely right about this, and it shows not only that there’s a difference between the conservative and liberal media worlds, but between MSNBC and Fox specifically. While MSNBC made a decision a while back that it would go ahead and become the liberal cable network, particularly in prime time, the individuals who appear on those shows have limits to how hackish they’re willing to be. On Fox, there really are no limits. It’s not as if Steve Doocy and the rest of the crew at “Fox and Friends” are going to say, “Wait, we’re supposed to say the jobs numbers are manipulated by a White House conspiracy? I really don’t think that’s supported by the facts.” I guarantee you that even if Obama performs spectacularly in the second debate and Romney stumbles terribly, Sean Hannity will still get on the air immediately afterward and tell everyone watching that Romney was fantastic and Obama was terrible. This will not only help buck up conservatives, it will encourage reporters to discuss the debate in the way Kevin describes.
Some people have said that Obama’s performance was the worst in history, but that’s just ridiculous. George W. Bush was much worse in all his debates in 2004, Bob Dole was terrible in 1996, George H.W. Bush was awful in 1992, and the worst debate performance was without question Ronald Reagan’s in his first debate in 1984, where he was barely coherent and, in retrospect, probably showing some initial signs of Alzheimer’s. You’ll note that two of the people I just mentioned ended up winning. Obama didn’t do particularly well last Wednesday, it’s true. But he’s a very competitive guy, and I’m sure he’s going to show up next week with plenty more focus and vigor. There are a lot of other factors—a recovering economy, the fact that it now looks like he’ll have more money, a superior ground operation—that continue to make him the favorite. So liberals can feel free to stop rending their garments.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 9, 2012
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