Cheap attacks on patriotism (5/13)

By Brendan Nyhan

During two recent interviews, prominent figures on the right and left have engaged in cheap attacks on the patriotism of their opponents.

First to strike was the editor of the New York Post, Col. Allan, in comments last month to the New York Observer about his competitors at the New York Daily News:

Somebody sure is a propaganda sheet, said Post editor-in-chief, Col. Allan. The folks at the Daily News, he said, "are becoming more and more determined to attack the Bush administration. They are doing so with increasing shrillness."

Mr. Allan said such partisanship reflects poorly on his competition. "Frankly, I think it's borderline disloyal," he said.

Allan's remarks are a classic attempt to suggest that those who offer criticism or critical coverage of the government are traitors who betray the country - a particularly disturbing comment from the editor of a newspaper.

More recently, in an interview with the Spanish language network Telemundo, Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, slammed President Bush and Vice President Cheney for not serving in the Vietnam War. She said, "To have a couple of people, who escaped four, five, six times and deferred and deferred and deferred calling him anything regarding his service is in and of itself unpatriotic. Unpatriotic." (Fox News reported that "She added that she was referring to Cheney's lack of military service and to the attacks from the Bush campaign on various aspects of the Vietnam service of her husband.") But as the Associated Press points out, Bush and Cheney have criticized Kerry's record on defense issues, not his service in the Navy, though Bush advisor Karen Hughes has questioned Kerry's honesty in suggesting that medals he threw at a later protest against the war were his. Heinz Kerry's attack echoes the Kerry campaign's false claims that criticism of his defense record is equivalent to an attack on his patriotism.

Calling someone unpatriotic is an especially serious charge, but lately it has become just another tool for partisans to silence criticism they don't like.

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Related links:
-The misreported jobs projection / Attacks on Kerry's patriotism? (Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan, 2/26/04) [Published in the Philadelphia Inquirer]

5/13/2004 06:02:42 AM EST |

One of these things is not like the other (5/13)

By Brendan Nyhan

In a "Scrapbook" item in the new edition of the Weekly Standard (subscription required), the conservative magazine indulges in the laziest form of guilt by association.

Under the headline "When Men Shall Say All Manner of Evil Against You Falsely," the Standard writes, "Separated at birth?" and then reprints the two following quotes:

I have some reservations about people who have never been in the face of battle, so to speak, who are making cavalier decisions about sending men and women out to die. A person who comes immediately to mind in that regard is Richard Perle, who, thank God, tendered his resignation and no longer will be even a semiofficial person in this administration. . . . I call them utopians. I don't care whether utopians are Vladimir Lenin on a sealed train to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz. Utopians, I don't like. You're never going to bring utopia, and you're going to hurt a lot of people in the process of trying to do it.

-State Department chief of staff Larry Wilkerson, quoted by GQ, May 4

Now when President Bush became the president, many of these people came into government: . . . Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of state . . . Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon. And it's interesting that he had a nickname titled "the prince of darkness" . . . Now, the thinking of these neoconservatives is written of in scripture. In the book of Revelations 2 and 9 it reads, "'I know the blasphemy of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.'"

-Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan at the National Press Club, May 3

Of course, the headline "Separated at birth?" is supposed to suggest that Wilkerson, the chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, is somehow similar to Farrakhan. But the Standard provides no argument for why Wilkerson's comments have anything to do with Farrakhan's anti-Semitic innuendo. Instead, it crudely juxtaposes the two statements based solely on the fact that both criticized Wolfowitz and Perle at approximately the same time. Is this what passes for journalism these days?

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5/13/2004 05:54:58 AM EST |

Abu Ghraib: Abuse from all sides (5/13)

By Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan

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5/13/2004 12:23:03 AM EST |

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