By Ben Fritz
In separate speeches about the issue of homeland security yesterday, Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry and Dick Gephardt both engaged in unfair attacks on President Bush, with Kerry making a vicious comparison to the Taliban and Gephardt repeating a falsehood that has worked its way through the media.
Speaking at Iowa State University yesterday, Kerry - a Democratic senator from Massachusetts - gave examples of claimed abuses of Americans' civil rights by the Bush administration and then said the following: "A country where you are visited by the authorities for thinking or voicing an unpopular idea smacks more of the Taliban than Thomas Jefferson." The alleged abuses he cited, however, didn't involve the oppression of women, enforcement of a legal code based on fundamentalist religious views, physical abuse, or any of the other horrific practices for which the Taliban was known. The comparison is not a reasonable point of argument, but a cheap attack designed to create irrational associations between President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft (whom Kerry frequently criticized in his speech) and the Taliban.
Sadly, it's not the first time in his presidential campaign that Kerry has used nasty jargon to attack Bush. Last April, he attempted to associate the president with Saddam Hussein by calling for "regime change" in the White House. (Former Vermont governor Howard Dean has also implicitly sought to link Bush with the Taliban, telling a joke earlier this year in which he said, "Title IX is under attack by this administration and I think if one of us doesn't win, next thing girls won't be able to go to school in America, you watch.")
Meanwhile, during a speech in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, yesterday on the same topic, Congressman Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., engaged in some spin of his own, repeating the myth that the Bush administration allowed relatives of Osama Bin Laden to fly out of the U.S. before other aircrafts could fly. "At a time when the Justice Department was rounding up anyone of Middle Eastern descent who seemed even remotely suspicious," the former House Minority Leader said, "the Bush administration was allowing relatives of Bin Laden and other wealthy Saudi Arabians to leave the country on chartered aircraft. The skies were closed to Americans, but not to relatives of Bin Laden."
As we have shown, this claim, which originates in a faulty interpretation of a story in Vanity Fair magazine and has been widely repeated by liberal pundits, is false. While the Bin Ladens were transported by air within the country while other aircraft were grounded, it appears that members of the family were not allowed to leave the country until after limited commercial and private aviation had already resumed.
Homeland security will undoubtedly be a prominent topic of debate in the presidential race. Candidates owe the people a serious and honest discussion of the issues, not cheap attacks and dishonest stories.
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Related links:
-Spinsanity on John Kerry
-Spinsanity on Howard Dean
-Bin Laden family evacuation distorted (Brendan Nyhan, 9/16/03)
An internal memorandum from Democratic staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee to Senator Dick Durbin, D-Ill., is being quoted out of context and, in one case, misquoted entirely.
The memo in question, which deals with the nomination (later withdrawn) of attorney Miguel Estrada to the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, was one of several leaked to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times. (The memos were allegedly improperly obtained from committee computer servers -- an investigation is underway, and Judiciary chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, has placed a Republican staffer on administrative leave after preliminary interviews.)
The excerpt from the memo quoted in the Journal and the Washington Times first states that "liberal groups" who the Democratic staff had met with "singled out three" judicial nominees as possible targets. It then turned to Estrada, citing three reasons why his nomination was considered "especially dangerous." "They [the liberal groups] also identified Miguel Estrada (D.C. Circuit) as especially dangerous," the memo says, "because he has a minimal paper trail, he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment. They want to hold Estrada off as long as possible."
The suggestion that Estrada was "dangerous" in part because "he is Latino" was offensive to many. Durbin's spokesperson claimed it was simply "a list of what the groups saw as dangerous positives," saying that, "[i]n their opinion, Miguel Estrada was especially dangerous from a political standpoint for Democrats because they wouldn't want to vote against him for those very reasons."
Republicans and conservative pundits quickly seized on phrase to attack Democrats. However, in their eagerness to highlight the phrase, they portrayed the "he is Latino" phrase as the sole reason Estrada was portrayed as "especially dangerous." The Journal editorial on the memo, for example, was titled simply "'He is Latino.'" The Washington Times article on the matter claimed Estrada was "singled out as 'especially dangerous' because 'he is Latino'" in the second paragraph before providing the full quote much further down.
Washington Times op-ed page editor Tony Blankley was apparently confused by his own newspaper's misleading phrasing. In his Nov. 19 column (which is also nationally syndicated), Blankley misquotes the memo as advising "that Miguel Estrada be blocked, as he is 'especially dangerous because he is Latino.'" This of course omits much of the actual sentence in question, including the phrase "because he has a minimal paper trail" which appears between "especially dangerous" and "he is Latino." And, almost two weeks later, the error has still not been corrected in the online version of Blankley's column.
Similarly, Rush Limbaugh said on the 19th that the memo "calls Miguel Estrada 'especially dangerous' because 'he is Latino.'" Oliver North's Nov. 21 syndicated column quoted the memo as saying Estrada was "especially dangerous because ... he is Latino," omitting the rest of the sentence in question. And on CNN's "Capital Gang" on Nov. 23, National Review's Kate O'Beirne said that Estrada "was singled out as 'especially dangerous' because he's Hispanic."
In each case, the result was to give a misleading or incomplete picture of the quotation revealed in the memo. Conservatives have every right to criticize the memo, but they also have a responsibility to fully represent its contents.
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Related links:
-Spinsanity on the judicial nomination battles