Unfair liberal counterattack / Guilt-by-association season (5/20)

By Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan

During the past year, a number of liberal groups have begun to move aggressively to counter conservative influence in the media. One of the newest participants in this effort, a group called Media Matters for America, has already demonstrated its willingness to use unfair standards and faulty evidence to attack its opponents.

In the last few weeks, the Bush administration has twice attacked political opponents by connecting them to hated figures. (Read the whole column.)

5/20/2004 05:53:54 AM EST |

The White House association game (5/17)

By Brendan Nyhan

In the last few weeks, the Bush administration has twice engaged in the increasingly popular tactic of unfairly connecting one's political opponents to hated figures.

Most recently, in a letter to the editor published Saturday in the Washington Post, Lawrence Di Rita, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs in the Department of Defense, compared the newspaper to the soldiers accused of mistreating prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison outside Baghdad. His evidence? The fact that in a recent editorial the Post raised questions about the relationship between the administration's policies and what took place at the prison.

On May 12, the Post argued that new US government procedures for "harsh" prisoner interrogation such as hooding, sleep deprivation and forcing prisoners to maintain awkward or painful positions violate the Geneva Conventions and "contributed to the criminal abuse of prisoners in Iraq." The editorial included this passage:

[Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen A.] Cambone made no attempt to reconcile his claim of U.S. adherence to international law with the actual procedures his office has helped to promulgate [in his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee]. Instead he insisted that the crimes at Abu Ghraib -- which, though they went beyond the established practices, were based on the same principles -- were the responsibility of the guards and their commanders, and not the intelligence-gathering system. In this he was contradicted by the witness sitting next to him, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who repeated the conclusion of his own investigation: that the practices were introduced by intelligence interrogators who were improperly placed in command of the guards.

Di Rita responded with a letter that directly likened the paper to those who now face court-martials for their actions:

The Post's continued editorializing on narrow definitions of international laws and whether our soldiers understand them puts The Post in the same company as those involved in this despicable behavior in terms of apparent disregard for basic human dignity.

The Post editorial offers little support for such an extreme characterization. Comparing the paper to prison guards accused of illegal mistreatment of prisoners on the basis of a single editorial is a ridiculous and unfair attempt to silence criticism.

Di Rita's letter echoes a recent statement by Bush advisor Karen Hughes. During an April 25 appearance on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer," she took a question about the importance of abortion in the 2004 presidential campaign and connected support for the right to abortion to the beliefs of Al Qaeda, unfairly suggesting that abortion rights supporters share the values of terrorists:

BLITZER: There is a clear difference when it comes to abortion rights between the president and his Democratic challenger, John Kerry. In your opinion, Karen, how big of an issue will this abortion rights issue be in this campaign?

HUGHES: Well, Wolf, it's always an issue. And I frankly think it's changing somewhat. I think after September 11th the American people are valuing life more and realizing that we need policies to value the dignity and worth of every life.

And President Bush has worked to say, let's be reasonable, let's work to value life, let's try to reduce the number of abortions, let's increase adoptions.

And I think those are the kind of policies that the American people can support, particularly at a time when we're facing an enemy, and really the fundamental difference between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life. It's the founding conviction of our country, that we're endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, the right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Unfortunately our enemies in the terror network, as we're seeing repeatedly in the headlines these days, don't value any life, not even the innocent and not even their own.

These two statements share a common thread - both Di Rita and Hughes seek to manufacture associations between the administration's political opponents and hated groups, thereby tilting political debates in the White House's favor. Such disreputable tactics have no place in American political debate.

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Related links:
-Axing the tough questions (Brendan Nyhan, 5/21/02)
-Closing Down Debate: Ashcroft's Attack on Dissent (Bryan Keefer, 12/10/01)
-Spinsanity on terrorist labels and Taliban/Iraq comparisons

5/17/2004 06:31:37 AM EST |

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