Limbaugh turns "axis of evil" into jargon (2/7)
By Ben Fritz
How long does it take for a serious declaration from a political leader to be remanufactured into spin by a partisan pundit?
Eight days is the grand total for "axis of evil," the phrase used by President Bush in his State of the Union speech last Tuesday to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Some have criticized the phrase, but all can agree that it was said with deadly seriousness to describe rogue states trying to develop weapons of mass destruction.
By yesterday, however, Rush Limbaugh had already turned it into aggressive anti-Democrat jargon. Following a monologue criticizing Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy for comments about the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots, Limbaugh transitioned into an attack on the entire Democratic Party in Congress:
I've often asked myself, do liberals really know [that they are spreading misery]? … They can't be that stupid; they have to know, which makes them even more evil. (Gasp) "Evil." There's that word. Bush used it and now Rush. Evil. Yeah, the evil axis of the House and Senate Democrats--it has thus been proclaimed on the EIB network. (RushLimbaugh.com subscribers can find the excerpts approximately nine minutes into this Windows Media Player clip.)
Since the public now associates the term "evil axis" with "rogue states" after the President's speech, using this phrase in domestic politics is extremely destructive of rational discourse.
It's also a demonstration of how quickly serious rhetoric can become destructive jargon. In the era of aggressive punditry, it seems that no phrase is safe.
Correction (2/10/02 8:06 PM EST): The title of this post was edited to refer to President Bush's phrase "axis of evil" rather than "evil axis" as originally written.
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Related articles:
-Limbaugh whitewashes his Jennings misquotes (Brendan Nyhan, 11/04)
-Limbaugh smears Clinton with hypothetical (Brendan Nyhan, 10/02/01)
-Limbaugh hypocrisy and ethnic slurs (Brendan Nyhan, 9/25/01)
-The Evolving Jargon of "Clintonization" (Brendan Nyhan, 9/4/01)
-Coordinated Daschle attack admitted (Brendan Nyhan, 7/27/01)
-Limbaugh's Daschle "devil" analogy (Brendan Nyhan, 7/21/01)
-Limbaugh deceptive on Social Security (Brendan Nyhan, 7/10/01)
-The illegitimacy attack / Daschle-bashing (Brendan Nyhan, 5/25/01)
-Limbaugh on the warpath (Brendan Nyhan, 4/30/01)
2/7/2002 10:33:43 AM EST |
Unfair Enron comparisons continue (2/6)
By Bryan Keefer
As failed energy company Enron has become synonymous with corporate malfeasance, pundits and politicians have begun using the company's name to non-rationally discredit policies they oppose.
Democratic Representative Dennis Kucinich suggested that a Bush administration proposal to cut funding for a music education program run by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame amounted to "taking from the children to give to the Enrons of this world". In yesterday's National Review Online, Wendell Cox of the Amtrak reform committee claimed that "If there is an Enron of the public sector, it is Amtrak," failing to show exactly how the rail company's operations were in any way analogous to Enron. And in a particularly jargon-filled piece, Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America's Future claims that the Republican stimulus bill passed by the House is an "Enron stimulus package" and calls the Bush administration's energy policy an "Enron energy plan".
Other have attempted to attach the Enron name directly to their political opponents. Democratic Senator Fritz Hollings suggested in a Monday press conference that "I've given you six advisers that got off all of this Enron escapade, had stock and everything else, were paid by Enron, and now they're in the administration working like the dickens for Enron. . . . We got an Enron government." Meanwhile Andrew Sullivan attacks New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on his web site today as "Paul 'Enron' Krugman" (Krugman served as an advisor to the company in 1998, before joining the Times).
Regrettably, the temptation to convert the word "Enron" into cultural shorthand for negative associations has proven impossible to resist for many in our political system.
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Related links:
-Enron association game continues unabated (Bryan Keefer, 1/16/02)
-The "Enronomics" offensive (Brendan Nyhan, 1/15/02)
-Scandalous Rhetoric Before the Scandal: The Growing Enron Debate (Ben Fritz, 1/14/02)
-Spin works its way into liberal harping on Enron (Ben Fritz, 12/13/01)
2/6/2002 12:07:37 PM EST |
Bush budget trickery (2/5)
By Brendan Nyhan
President Bush unveiled his budget for fiscal year 2003 yesterday. Regrettably, the document contains a number of deceptive claims, including attempts to obscure the effect of the Bush tax cut and an unreasonable assumption that a tax provision will be allowed to raise taxes for millions of Americans.
Efforts to avoid issues that could be politically damaging to the administration are especially frequent in the section called "Budget Implications of the War" (a title that sets the tone for spin to come). For example, in discussing the effect of the tax cut on projected ten year surpluses, the administration makes this tricky claim:
In the 1997 Budget, rising deficits were forecast totaling $1.4 trillion over a 10 year horizon. By the 2002 Budget steadily rising surpluses were projected over a 10 year period, totaling $5.6 trillion. Due to the events of last year, the latest projections are in between these wildly divergent estimates.
The phrase "events of last year" suggests that the terrorist attacks are responsible for the deterioration in the projected surplus, while obscuring the fact that the CBO estimates that 41% of the total surplus reduction is attributable to the tax cut. Notice how carefully this statement is constructed - the tax cut was an "event" that did take place last year, so the statement is technically true.
The administration also claims in the same section that "the budget should be back in surplus by 2004 or 2005," but this too is deceptive. A provision protecting millions of middle income taxpayers from the alternative minimum tax (AMT) expires at the end of 2004, as Glenn Kessler points out in the Washington Post. Virtually everyone acknowledges that this will have to be corrected, but including the $200+ billion cost of this provision would eliminate the projected surplus of $61 billion in 2005. As a result, the budget does not include AMT relief. (In fact, as Robert Greenstein of liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, the assumption that AMT relief will be allowed to expire is just one of many accounting devices used in the budget to obscure the costs of tax cuts.)
The budget is clearly a political document - this year's even comes with a flag on the cover. But that's no excuse for blatantly misleading the public.
Correction (2/7/02 11:58 AM EST): In the paragraph above dealing with ten-year budget projections, a sentence that mistakenly referred to the projected deficit of $1.4 trillion in 1997 as a surplus has been deleted.
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Related links:
-The New Math:
Fudging the Numbers in the Economic Blame Game (Bryan Keefer, 1/28/02)
-Blurring lines in the surplus debate (Brendan Nyhan, 1/11/02)
2/5/2002 01:31:37 PM EST |
By Ben Fritz
An analysis of the rhetoric from presidential spokesperson Ari
Fleischer and Vice President Dick Cheney reveals a disturbing pattern of
dissembling about the GAO's request for information on the Vice President's
energy task force. The two have consistently exaggerated the GAO's request
to make it appear unreasonable and paint the administration as a victim. (read the whole column)
2/4/2002 06:51:45 AM EST |
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