Jumping To Conclusions

My gosh, I loved Zell Miller's speech. He was a juggernaut, plowing through his remarks with a passion and sense of determination I haven't heard in a politician since, well, since ever. Of course, I'm not at all surprised that for his troubles, he gets labeled an insane fascist. (Meanwhile, the rabid hate-fest going on daily on the streets of Manhattan is labeled as legitimate and sober dissent. All in good fun, you know.)

Me, I'm inclined to agree with Jim Geraghty:

We (okay, I) want a mean old SOB running things, some tough-as-nails cranky ex-Marine with a mean streak a mile wide whose idea of dealing with threats includes a crowbar, duct tape and a hill of fire ants.

Anyway, from the speech:

No one should dare to even think about being the Commander in Chief of this country if he doesn't believe with all his heart that our soldiers are liberators abroad and defenders of freedom at home. But don't waste your breath telling that to the leaders of my party today. In their warped way of thinking America is the problem, not the solution. They don't believe there is any real danger in the world except that which America brings upon itself through our clumsy and misguided foreign policy. It is not their patriotism -- it is their judgment that has been so sorely lacking.

Waahh, it's *not nice* to say that about the Democratic Party, say the critics. Maybe not about *all* the party leadership, no, but certainly it's an accurate enough charge to make against much of the rank-and-file. (And come to think of it, I don't exactly hear demands on John Kerry to disassociate himself from the more vile of the protestors, do you?)

Well, as expected, the president's speech was good, not great. Still, the wife and I loved this part:

Another drag on our economy is the current tax code, which is a complicated mess -- filled with special interest loopholes, saddling our people with more than six billion hours of paperwork and headache every year. The American people deserve -- and our economic future demands ---- a simpler, fairer, pro-growth system. In a new term, I will lead a bipartisan effort to reform and simplify the federal tax code.

Hooray! Unfortunately, it was later followed by this part:

We will offer a tax credit to encourage small businesses and their employees to set up health savings accounts, and provide direct help for low-income Americans to purchase them.

So much for reforming and simplifying the tax code. And then there's this:

We must strengthen Social Security by allowing younger workers to save some of their taxes in a personal account -- a nest egg you can call your own and government can never take away.

That's nice and all, but what's wrong with simply cutting taxes and letting younger workers keep the difference for themselves?

Well, we also liked this part (which echoes what Dick Cheney said a few months back):

Again, my opponent takes a different approach. In the midst of war, he has called America's allies, quote, a "coalition of the coerced and the bribed." That would be nations like Great Britain, Poland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, El Salvador, Australia, and others -- allies that deserve the respect of all Americans, not the scorn of a politician. I respect every soldier, from every country, who serves beside us in the hard work of history. America is grateful, and America will not forget.

A friend of mine, with whom I was arguing about the war, not only repeated the canard that we're acting unilaterally, but when challenged on it, dismissed our allies as being "bullied and bribed" and thus inconsequential. Just like John Kerry. Hmmm, must have been reading from the same talking points. And theirs is the side who purports to "repair our standing in the world"?

The New York Times changes its mind and now wishes to abolish the Electoral College:

The Electoral College's supporters argue that it plays an important role in balancing relations among the states, and protecting the interests of small states. A few years ago, this page was moved by these concerns to support the Electoral College. But we were wrong. The small states are already significantly overrepresented in the Senate, which more than looks out for their interests. And there is no interest higher than making every vote count.

Translation: we liked the Electoral College until our guy got the short end.

In any case, the best argument against abolishing the Electoral College can be expressed in a mere two words: Nationwide recount.

UPDATE: Opinion Journal agrees, though in many more words...

I have to disagree with Peter's assessment of Zell Miller's speech.

I confess that I didn't watch every minute of the conventions, but I watched all the major speeches -- McCain's, Rudy's, Arnold's, Miller's, Pataki's, Laura Bush's, Cheney's, and the president's. (I tried to sit through the Bush twins' "speech," but it was so execrable that I turned it off after about two minutes.) And of all those speeches that I listened to, I thought Miller's was the worst. It was bad on substance and it was bad on style.

On substance, there's so much to criticize in Kerry's attitude towards national security -- his attitude towards the UN; his attitude towards Iraq before, during, and after the war; his attitude towards Iraq now; his view about America's place in the world. A criticism that Kerry is weak on national defense may well be valid. A criticism that he can't make up his mind is definitely valid. A criticism that he wants to have it both ways is certainly valid. But the criticism that he voted against all those weapons systems has been debunked a long time ago. But, hey, that's politics. If politicians didn't distort each other's records, then a slew of spinmeisters would go bankrupt.

What bothered me far more was the tone of Miller's speech. I'm certainly not offended by negative campaigns the way reporters profess to be, but there's a time and place for negative, and the convention isn't it. None of the other speakers -- including Cheney, who has an (in my opinion undeserved) reputation for nastiness -- were that negative. More importantly than the fact that it was negative, though, was that it was strident. Some might use the word "angry," but I'll stick with "strident."

And that's bad. I could cite Reagan the optimist, or the ranting and ravings of Pat Buchanan in 1992, for the proposition that tone matters -- but an even more immediate example is at hand: the 2004 Democratic Party. Bush's opponents are enthusiastic -- but it isn't helping Kerry gain traction. Why? In my opinion, it's because Bush's opponents are so vehement in their anger. They're not pulling undecided people towards Kerry; they're pushing them away. When you see someone so upset, and you don't share his anger, it doesn't cause you to change your views; it causes you to question his rationality.

Hell, I questioned Miller's rationality, and I mostly agreed with him. That was a bad speech.

Now, McCain's speech, that was good. Good enough that it made we wish for a moment that he was president -- made me actually forget, for a moment, the horrible McCain-Feingold bill which bears his name. When a speech is good enough to do that, it's a home run.

Things I learned this week: Cows don't have wheels.

This insight comes to us from Ohio, and Justice William Bedsworth, an appellate court judge in California, is upset:

I set my sights on the perfect paragraph. That seemed high enough to keep people from tripping over and low enough to be doable. I figured I had twelve years before the electorate got wise to me and threw me out at the end of my term, and in that time I should be able to write one perfect paragraph.

I may have been right. I’m halfway through my term now and haven’t done it yet, but I’ve written a few I liked that survived the Supreme Court’s scythe. It may be that another six years of honing my skills might have resulted in one perfect paragraph. But I’m afraid my heart’s not in it anymore.

The Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Appellate District in Portage County, Ohio, did it a few months ago. And now anything I wrote would be a pale imitation of their Gatsby paragraph.

Say what you will about me, I know when I’m beat. Here is the first paragraph of Mayor v. Wedding, 2003 WL 22931354 (Ohio App. 11 Dist.) : “In this case we are called on to determine whether a cow is an uninsured motor vehicle under appellants’ insurance policy. We hold that it is not.”

But note this: the insurance company "won" the suit, but only after a lawsuit was filed, motions were made and briefs written in support, a judge issued his decision, an appeal was filed, more briefs were written, and then the appellate court issued its short but humorous decision [Word file], finding that since cows don't have wheels, they can't be motor vehicles. Here's a serious question: how much do you think this cost? How many hours, how many tens of thousands of dollars? (That doesn't even count the time of four judges.)

The insurance company may have "won" the case, but there were no winners there. Except, of course, the attorneys. Tort reform, anyone?

The New York Times had a story this week on the effect of the Bush administration's new overtime rules.

Only two problems with the article. The first is that, due to either very sloppy writing and/or editing, or the reporter's lack of understanding, a key statement in the article is wrong:

But Mr. Ware fears that his inventiveness could cost him dearly, because under new federal labor rules it might cause him to be classified as a learned professional, making him ineligible for overtime pay. Since overtime is often one-third of his paycheck, Mr. Ware is fuming about the new rules, which the Bush administration put into effect last week.

The second problem with the article is that it doesn't say anything. True, the headline -- "Overtime Rules Dispute Is a Numbers Game" -- is, for a change, an accurate representation of the article. But is there really much point in writing an article which has as its theme "People disagree on the effects of these rules, and it's all politics and we don't know the answer"? Are the new rules good or bad? Are they going to cost six million people overtime or just half a million? After reading the article, one is no more informed about the issue than before one read it.

The truth, in fact, may be that the data just isn't there to provide a definitive answer. So what should the Times have said? Well, if it couldn't say what the answer is, it could have at least explained why there's such a wide discrepancy between one set of estimates and another. I've read numerous articles about the subject in the Times, and they've never managed to do that. But it's really not all that complicated, and this article explains better in a few paragraphs what the Times failed to do in several articles: the high estimate comes from counting everyone who potentially loses eligibility, regardless of whether those people actually ever got paid any overtime at all. There, that wasn't so hard, was it? So why couldn't the article say that, instead of throwing around numbers from lots of different people without any attempt to explain anything other than the politics of the issue?

He's a complete loon, and, like Pat Buchanan at the 1992 GOP convention, a car wreck waiting to happen, but at some level, you have to admire a candidate who says exactly what he thinks on controversial issues, even though he has to know that it's going to lead to one of the most embarassing defeats in electoral history.

And credit to John McCain for one of the most diplomatic ways of calling someone a complete loon you'll ever see:

"He made a remark the other day that people who perform abortions are the same as terrorists. That's a very unique take on that issue and one that's very seldom espoused."

I visited Las Vegas for the first time over Labor Day weekend, and call me hokey, but the magnificent Bellagio fountains dancing to Lee Greenwood's "God Bless The U.S.A." were just the antidote to the noisome protests endured here in NYC the week before. I'm no country-music fan, but it was nice to be reminded that there are indeed other ways to express patriotism aside from shouting and carrying offensive signs in the streets.

So what did the protestors accomplish? Well, they changed my brother's mind. He was a Kerry supporter, to the point of actually hanging by his computer a full color picture of Kerry and Edwards thanking him for his donation to their campaign. But while in Vegas, he confessed to me that after encountering the protestors, he now feels he has no choice but to vote for Bush. Confronted with the sheer imbecility of their rants, he simply decided they were not only wrong, but *really* wrong. And dangerous, too. Thus he changed his vote accordingly. Way to go!

I wouldn't have bothered writing about that one data point, except that Reason Magazine's Julian Sanchez suggests that my brother might not be alone:

In March of last year, the American Enterprise Institute's Karlyn Bowman did a roundup of national surveys on Americans' attitudes toward protesters. An ABC News/Washington Post poll found 71 percent unmoved by antiwar protests—perhaps not all that surprising, since debates over war and peace turn on arguments too complex to fit on a placard. Among those who were influenced, however, three times as many said that the protests made them more likely to support the war in Iraq than oppose it.

Perhaps, then, the incessant media coverage of the protests was a contributing factor to Bush's post-convention bounce?

No, not the Whitney. There's another Museum of Bad Art. (My favorite piece: "Sunday On The Pot With George").

Don't let it be said that the New York Times is always pro-federal government. The editors of the paper have finally discovered a state's rights crusade they can get behind, enthusiastically. Sounding like budding Timothy McVeighs, they now rant about people "laboring under the yoke of Congress." Only, this new crusade doesn't involve a state at all, which makes the argument somewhat strange.

The nation's capital city will soon suffer a brazen insult at the hands of the House of Representatives as a legislative majority prepares to vote for the decontrol of guns in the city - that's right, a majority of lawmakers, sworn to "insure domestic tranquillity" for the nation, would make D.C. stand for Dodge City. As far as election year pandering goes, the impending vote to legalize handguns and semiautomatic weapons on the streets - striking down the home-rule wishes of Washington's citizens - may answer the question of how low Congressional politicians will go in bowing to the gun lobby.

The Times has every right to oppose gun rights, no matter how idiotic, immoral, and unconstitutional the laws they support are. The issue here is their hypocrisy of cloaking opposition to the second amendment in the guise of defense of "home rule," when the essence of their position -- on virtually every issue in recent decades -- has been to centralize power in Congress at the expense of "home rule," to treat calls for such "home rule" as naked racism, regardless of the issue. Until now. It's true that DC, unlike the states, does not have an elected representative in Congress -- or at least not one who gets to vote -- and the Times seems to attach great significance to this point. But that's sort of a silly distinction; if 435 members of Congress decide to ignore your one non-voting representative, is that really somehow more tyrannical than 434 members of Congress ignoring Montana's one voting representative?

The Times' editors are hardly the only hypocrites on this score; as Andrew Sullivan has pointed out (ad nauseum), many Republican congressmen who are ostensibly pro-states rights suddenly discovered the wisdom of Washington when it came to the issue of gay marriage (though at least they had the decency to propose a constitutional amendment, instead of the Times' approach of ignoring Constitutional provisions like the second amendment). But that's hardly a defense of the Times' hypocrisy.

I suppose now that CBS has admitted they screwed up, Rathergate will die down as a story and the media feeding frenzy will turn elsewhere. But before it does, I thought this excellent USA Today post (?) mortem deserved to be highlighted, with a few points emphasized.

CBS's source, Bill Burkett, insists he didn't do anything wrong:

"I didn't forge anything," Burkett said. "I didn't fake any documents. The only thing I've done here is to transfer documents from people I thought were real to people I thought were real. And that has been the limitation of my role. I may have been a patsy."

In earlier conversations with USA TODAY, Burkett had identified the source of the documents as George Conn, a former Texas National Guard colleague who works for the U.S. Army in Europe. Burkett now says he made up the story about Conn's involvement to divert attention from himself and the woman he now says provided him with the documents. He told USA TODAY that he also lied to CBS.

And leaving Conn aside, whose name is Burkett giving now?

Burkett now maintains that the source of the papers was Lucy Ramirez, who he says phoned him from Houston in March to offer the documents. USA TODAY has been unable to locate Ramirez.

[...]

By Monday, USA TODAY had not been able to locate Ramirez or verify other details of Burkett's account. Three people who worked with Killian in the early 1970s said they don't recognize her name. Burkett promised to provide telephone records that would verify his calls to Ramirez, but he had not done so by Monday night.

But Burkett's story gets stranger than merely describing a mysterious woman who made him a "patsy."

Burkett said Ramirez told him she had seen him the previous month in an appearance on the MSNBC program Hardball, discussing the controversy over whether Bush fulfilled all his obligations for service in the Texas Air Guard during the early 1970s. "There is something I have that I want to make sure gets out," he quoted her as saying.

He said Ramirez claimed to possess Killian's "correspondence file," which would prove Burkett's allegations that Bush had problems as a Guard fighter pilot.
Burkett said he arranged to get the documents during a trip to Houston for a livestock show in March. But instead of being met at the show by Ramirez, he was approached by a man who asked for Burkett, handed him an envelope and quickly left, Burkett recounted.

"I didn't even ask any questions," Burkett said. "Should I have? Yes. Maybe I was duped. I never really even considered that."

By Monday, USA TODAY had not been able to locate Ramirez or verify other details of Burkett's account. Three people who worked with Killian in the early 1970s said they don't recognize her name. Burkett promised to provide telephone records that would verify his calls to Ramirez, but he had not done so by Monday night.

An acquaintance of Burkett, who he said could corroborate his story, said he was at the livestock show on March 3. The woman, who asked that her name not be used, said Burkett asked if he could put papers inside a box she had at the livestock show. Often, she said, friends ask to store papers in her box that verify their purchases at the livestock auction. She said she did not know the nature of the papers Burkett gave her, and he did not say anything about them.

After he received the documents in Houston, Burkett said, he drove home, stopping on the way at a Kinko's shop in Waco to copy the six memos. In the parking lot outside, he said, he burned the ones he had been given and the envelope they were in. Ramirez was worried about leaving forensic evidence on them that might lead back to her, Burkett said, acknowledging that the story sounded fantastic. "This is going to sound like some damn sci-fi movie," he said.

After keeping the copies for a couple of days, he said he drove to a location he would not specify, about 100 miles from his ranch, to put them "in cold storage." Burkett said he took the action because he believed the papers were politically explosive and made him nervous. "I treated them like absolute TNT," he said. "They looked to me like they were devastating."

In other words, if you believe Burkett's story, he received a mysterious phone call from a woman he had never met and didn't know, who claimed that she had the personal papers of a senior officer in the National Guard which would prove problems in Bush's past. Rather than going to the press with these papers, she decided to call some guest who she happened to see on Hardball. They rushed to arrange a clandestine meeting at a livestock show, but the woman didn't show up; instead, a mysterious man handed him an envelope and left. Then, rather than taking care to preserve this damning evidence, Burkett made a couple of photocopies at Kinkos, burned all evidence of the originals (or were they copies also?) and of his source, hid them in an undisclosed location, and even though they were "devastating," ignored them. Then, five months later -- rather than right when the AWOL story was in the news -- Burkett decided the time was right to release these documents. So he shopped them around to media outlets that would guarantee him anonymity, lied about where he got them, and walked away.

Yeah. Oh, how would you like to buy a bridge? Got one for you, cheap. Oh, sorry; I don't. Dan Rather already bought it.

By the way, you've got to love journalistic circumlocution:

Burkett's own doubts about the authenticity of the memos and his inability to supply evidence to show that Ramirez exists also raise questions about his credibility. Burkett has strong anti-Bush views. He has posted comments on Internet Web sites critical of Bush and has chastised Sen. John Kerry's organization for what he called its inept campaign.

Eugene Volokh laments that Rathergate teaches us that we can't trust the media.

That's what's so sad: Surely the aggregate of Rathergate, the Jayson Blair scandal, the chronic misreporting about assault weapons, or any other individual incident, and everything else we've seen over the last several years — often thanks to the media criticism of blogging (a medium that thrives on media criticism) — has opened our eyes to just how little one can trust what one sees in the news media.

And yet no matter how skeptical one tries to be, one can't double-check everything. We have to trust outside sources. But the same sources that claim to be so trustworthy are, it turns out, often untrustworthy, sometimes in huge ways (falling for outright frauds) but also often in many small ways (media bias, whether political, social, or personal, that repeatedly leads to erroneous and misleading information).

I suspect this has been true all along — it's just that we can't ignore it any more. We have to learn to live with a world of extraordinarily imperfect information. And that's a lot more work than assuming that the media (or at least certain media) is highly accurate.

Still, it's not quite as bleak as Eugene portrays it; there may be con men who are so slick that we never detect them, but most of the time there are warning signs. Here's a good rule of thumb -- for both news reporters and news consumers -- which can help us avoid the sorts of problems revealed by Rathergate: anonymity is a bad idea.

This entire Rathergate story turned into such a mess because it was based unnecessarily on an anonymous source. I don't suggest there are never reasons for anonymity. Sometimes a valuable source would be too afraid of losing his job or even his life if he came forward publicly. There are legitimate whistleblowers out there; there are people who testify against mafia defendants. There are alleged CIA agents whose husbands are lying ambassadors. But Bill Burkett was none of those. There was no rational reason why Bill Burkett should have been granted anonymity by CBS. The only reason he needed it was if he wanted to lie with impunity. (Oh, there could be innocent reasons why someone would want anonymity-- perhaps the simple desire to avoid being in the media spotlight, which admittedly can be overwhelming. But (a) that's just not a good enough reason, and (b) that doesn't apply to Bill Burkett, who has been all over the news in his campaign against Bush.)

If CBS had refused to grant Burkett anonymity, one of three things could have happened:

1. He could have agreed to go public, in which case we have the ability to judge for ourselves whether he has any credibility, and CBS is off the hook even if the documents are forged. (Not that it absolves them of their responsibility to vet a story before putting it on the air, but they're no longer covering anything up.)
   
2. He could have refused, and the phony documents never get publicized.
   
3. He could have shopped the story to some other, less scrupulous, news outlet. In which case CBS is again off the hook.
   

End anonymity. It's not a panacea for all that ails journalism -- Jayson Blair, media bias, dumb reporters who don't understand guns will all still be issues -- but it will eliminate at least one type of problem.

James Taranto takes note of a recent John Kerry speech:

In his speech, Kerry also complained that "by one count, the president offered 23 different rationales for this war. If his purpose was to confuse and mislead the American people, he succeeded." That's quite an argument coming from someone who's taken 57 different positions on the war.

Never mind Kerry's confused and shifting positions on the war; I don't understand this particular criticism of his on its face. So the president has "23 different rationales" for going to war - that's supposed to be a bad thing? Evidently, William Raspberry thinks so:

Heard any good rationales for the war lately? If not, maybe you ought to talk to Devon Largio, a new graduate of University of Illinois, who says her research turned up 23 different rationales offered by the Bush administration in the year following 9/11.

[...]

Many of the key rationales she knew already – the weapons of mass destruction, Iraq's treatment of weapons inspectors, the administration's interest in "regime change." Others seemed to ebb and flow – setting an example for other tyrants, protecting Iraqis (or the region or the world) from Saddam, completing the work of Desert Storm, spreading Western-style democracy and compensating for international institutions so ineffectual as to render the phrase "United Nations resolution" an oxymoron.

Well, you can't really judge from that excerpt, but trust me, Raspberry finds this surplus of rationales quite problematic. (And so do other lefty pundits). The main arguments seem to be either that Bush doesn't give every possible reason for going to war every time he opens his mouth, or that goals such as regime change, spreading democracy, and setting an example are somehow mutually exclusive. Devon Largio herself isn't much impressed, either, but for a simpler reason: 23 reasons (and counting) are too many:

"I didn't include this in my paper," she said, "but I'm as torn now as I was when I started. I tend to accept the good intentions of the president, and it's tempting to say that if they have 23 reasons for going to war, we probably should have gone. On the other hand, I find myself thinking that if they had to keep coming up with new reasons for going to war, we probably shouldn't have done it. It's almost like the decision came first, then the rationales."

And I'm just not understanding any of this. Since when does having too many arguments in favor of doing X turn into an argument against doing X?

According to NOAA:

Sept. 16, 2004 — The contiguous United States experienced its 16th coolest summer (June-August) on record and seventh coolest August, according to scientists at NOAA Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. While much of the West, including Alaska, remained warmer than average, the majority of the nation had a cool summer, with Minnesota having its coldest August on record.