Turkey Chili Summit: Locally Sourced Leftovers?

The president and the not-president meet in the Oval Office

Liberals have been having some fun with the menu for Mitt Romney’s post-Thanksgiving visit to the White House. His lunch with President Obama included grilled chicken salad and white turkey chili, which prompted Dave Weigel of Slate (who did admit to possible trytophan-induced silliness, writing “We probably should have taken this week off, right?”) to snark:

Romney was served white turkey chili, which is funny, because “white” and “turkey” have certain connotations.

New York Magazine’s Joe Coscarelli called the lunch “awkward” and observed:

While the exact details of the meeting remain private, the men dined on Southwestern grilled chicken salad and “white turkey chili,” which is not a dig at the guest, even if it sounds like one, so stop giggling.

Even erstwhile conservative David Frum tweeted:

Obama served Romney white turkey chili? Was that meant to be funny?

Reused ornaments from the Barbara Bush era

Actually, there are more important questions here, given the Obama White House’s well-known dedication to recycling and the First Lady’s victory-garden, waste-not-want-not ethic. As the Washington Post reports in an article on the White House holiday decorations, this year’s “Joy to All” theme incorporates “some things old and some things new, which has been a hallmark of their White House holidays.” The Christmas trees scattered throughout the mansion’s public rooms boast “repurposed” ornaments “unearthed from White House storage” as a tribute to previous first ladies like Pat Nixon (pearl-adorned turquoise foam balls) and Rosalynn Carter (blown-glass peanuts). The Post details Michele Obama’s heavy-on-the-leftovers decorating record:

“Joy” joins the Obamas’ previous official themes in White House holiday history: 2009’s “Reflect, Rejoice, Renew” (trees trimmed in dried root materials from the White House garden); 2010’s “Simple Gifts” (wreaths of recycled newspapers); and last year’s “Shine, Give, Share” (recycled aluminum trees).

So now that we know “more than 60 percent of the ornaments displayed are repurposed,” the real response to the Turkey Chili Summit should be to demand answers from White House chef Sam Kass, who undoubtedly found himself with a refrigerator full of extra stuffing and sweet potatoes. Who knows, maybe that Southwestern chicken salad sported some nice cranberry garnishes. But my number-one question addresses the contents of the main course:

Was it Cobbler or Gobbler?

Sneak Peek – Republican Diagnostic Manual!

Can’t wait until 2013 for the fifth edition of the DSM, the American Psychiatric Association’s catalog of mental health disorders? No need to rely on your old, dog-eared copy of the DSM-IV. Here’s an exclusive taste of the DSM-MMXII, GOP edition, an admittedly incomplete catalog of the party’s post-election pathologies.

Pathological Liar: (n) An individual who habitually tells lies so exaggerated or bizarre that they are suggestive of mental disorder.

OK, maybe these whale-size fibs aren’t quite that bad. But they nevertheless earn a place in the Greatest Political Lies Hall of Fame.

Richard Nixon: “I am not a crook.”

See: Watergate.

Bill Clinton: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

See: dress, blue.

Barack Obama: “You can’t change Washington from inside, only from the outside . . . . That’s how some of our biggest accomplishments like healthcare got done — mobilizing the American people.”

See: Obamacare and Big Pharma, cozy relationship between. See also: Kickback, Cornhusker.

And now, a brand new entry!

John Boehner: “I’m the most reasonable, responsible person here in Washington.”

See: U.S. credit rating, downgrade of. See also: Brinkmanship, esp. as related to debt ceiling increase. See also: Economy, hostage-taking of.

Delusion: (n) A fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority leader, sat down with the Wall Street Journal opinion page for a post-election spin session. One line from the amusingly softball interview puts paid to the notion, advanced by the president, that the Republican “fever” might break after a loss. It’s apparent that McConnell is still deep in the skewed-polls, Romney-landslide haze that prevented the GOP from seeing its own looming rout.

But don’t Messrs. Obama and Reid think they’ve just been given a mandate to raise those tax rates? “Yes, well, we Republicans in the House and Senate think we have a voter mandate not to raise taxes.”

And Senate? I can buy the idea that, by maintaining their House majority, Republicans earned an endorsement from voters to continue their obstructionism. But let’s review what happened in the Senate: The GOP lost nearly every competitive race, including seats in Missouri, North Dakota and Wisconsin that once looked imminently winnable. Tammy Baldwin and Elizabeth Warren, two of the most liberal Democrats to run for office in recent memory, defeated moderate Republicans, while centrist candidates Heidi Heitkamp and Claire McCaskill turned out victories in solidly red states. The GOP picked up a single seat in Nebraska, where Deb Fischer trounced political veteran (and big-city carpetbagger) Bob Kerrey. Democrats increased their majority, leading to a 55-45 split (including two independents who caucus with the Democrats). Where exactly is McConnell finding his Senate mandate?

Similar delusions plague Michael Barone, the Washington Examiner columnist whose descent from reasonable analyst to First Degree Hack has been ably chronicled at New York Magazine and Washington Monthly. Now, a possible explanation for Barone’s ineptitude (Romney wins 315 electoral votes!) emerges: He doesn’t read the news. Or rather, he reads the Washington Examiner and tunes into Fox News. I count two bizarro alternate reality scenarios in three sentences:

Then consider the results for the House of Representatives. Not many people split their tickets these days, but the discontented voters who re-elected a Democratic president also returned a Republican House, probably by a similar popular vote margin. On the latest count, they lost only seven seats, even though Democratic redistricting plans cost them 11 seats in California, Illinois and Maryland.

First, about that popular vote margin . . . . The Washington Post’s Fix blog reports that “Democratic House candidates appear to have won more of the popular vote than their Republican counterparts on Tuesday, despite what looks as though it will be a 35-seat GOP majority.” Aaron Blake writes:

According to numbers compiled by the Post’s great Dan Keating, Democrats have won roughly 48.8 percent of the House vote, compared to 48.47 percent for Republicans. Despite losing the popular vote, Republicans are set to have their second-biggest House majority in 60 years and their third-biggest since the Great Depression.

Mitch McConnell’s “mandate” is complete fantasy, but even John Boehner, the Speaker of the House who last week asserted that Americans “re-elected our majority in the House” and so “made it clear that there is no mandate for raising tax rates,” is on shaky ground. Democrats picked up at least eight seats in the House — hardly, as the equally delusional American Spectator would have it, “a resounding re-election.” The reality is more complicated. “What saved Boehner’s majority wasn’t the will of the people but the power of redistricting,” writes Ezra Klein. “That’s a neat trick, but it’s not a popular mandate, or anything near to it — and Boehner knows it. That’s why his first move after the election was to announce, in a vague-but-important statement, that he was open to some kind of compromise on taxes.”

Which brings us to Barone’s second point. About those “Democratic redistricting plans” . . . . The very next line of Blake’s post undermines that claim, which is particularly strange considering that Republicans have spent the past year touting the advantage their dominance of state legislatures has given them to draw favorable boundaries and protect vulnerable incumbents. Blake again:

The numbers seem to back up what we’ve been talking about on this blog for a while: Redistricting drew such a GOP-friendly map that, in a neutral environment, Republicans have an inherent advantage.

A recent Fair Vote study found Republicans were clearly favored in 195 House districts, compared to Democrats being favored in 166. Some of this is because Democratic voters are more concentrated in urban areas, but it’s also because the GOP drew some very favorable redistricting maps in important states like North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The Post’s Wonkblog points out that Republican-led redistricting essentially handed the GOP 11 newly safe seats in the House. While redistricting can’t account for the entirety of the GOP’s continued hold on the House, it did play a significant role. “Republicans used their control over the redistricting process to great effect,” Ezra Klein writes, “packing Democrats into tighter and tighter districts and managing to restructure races so even a slight loss for Republicans in the popular vote still meant a healthy majority in the House.” Even Barone’s own newspaper admits that “the GOP has locked in its House gains through cleverly-drawn districts that isolate Democratic voters,” and the National Review writes that “one reason they won so many seats anyway is that 2010 was an unusually good Republican year, and Republicans were therefore able to draw the lines of congressional districts following that year’s census.” Most damning: “What the House success demonstrates, in part, is that Republicans can do well when they choose the voters rather than vice versa.”

And just like that, another Michael Barone delusion evaporates. Oh, well. At least Mitch McConnell will have some company in the psych ward.

Projection: (n) a psychological defense mechanism whereby one “projects” one’s own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings onto someone else.

Anti-abortion crusader Charmaine Yoest reflects on the election:

This is not a lesson learned, but it bears repeating as context: It’s an uphill climb against a demagogue with a loose relationship with the truth.

Yeah, Obama did have a tough time running against Mitt Romney and his loose attachment to honesty. Cf. Romney: “Chrysler plans to start making Jeeps in, you guessed it, China.” Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne: “Jeep production will not be moved from the United States to China.” Chrysler’s head of product designer, Ralph Gilles, responding to Donald Trump’s repetition of the inaccuracy: “You are full of shit!”

*****

At the Weekly Standard, Jay Cost blames Obama’s “identity politics” for turning voters against Mitt Romney. (Hey, isn’t that what political advertising is, uh, supposed to do?)

Team Obama worked assiduously on turning Mitt Romney into the “other.”

Cost seems to think Dinesh D’Souza (“Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s”), “Dreams from My Real Father” auteur Joel Gilbert (“My election . . . was the culmination of an American socialist movement that my real father, Frank Marshall Davis, nurtured in Chicago and Hawaii”) and John Sununu (“I wish this president would learn how to be an American”) are all Democrats. Apparently, Mitt Romney (Obama “takes his political inspiration from Europe, and from the socialist democrats in Europe”) never tried to paint the president as the “other.”

*****

Republican strategist and American Crossroads founder Karl Rove, whose $300 million push to boost Republican candidates ended in “colossal failure” on November 6 — his super PAC earned a whopping %1.29 rate of return on the $100 million it spent on the general election, and just 6% of the total went to winning candidates — continued his plunge into the deep end in an interview with Megyn Kelly of Fox News with a novel explanation for Mitt Romney’s loss:

He succeeded by suppressing the vote, by saying to people, ‘You may not like who I am and I know you can’t bring yourself to vote for me, but I’m going to paint this other guy as simply a rich guy who only cares about himself . . . . They effectively denigrated Mitt Romney’s character, business acumen, business experience and made him unworthy.

Pot, meet kettle. This is particularly rich coming from the guru of smear ads himself, the tactical leader of a party that routinely engages in actual voter suppression. It’s tantamount to claiming that Coke engages in Pepsi suppression whenever it runs an ad extolling the crisp, thirst-quenching benefits of merits of its product. It would take a lot of chutzpah for Coke to level such a charge if it was, at the same time, slapping a tax on every can of Pepsi purchased by a non-white consumer or pushing laws that required Pepsi to be sold from behind the counter. As the Huffington Post notes, Rove seems confused about what it means to suppress the vote. He “didn’t actually give any examples of ways in which Obama made it harder for people to exercise their constitutional right at the polls — things like voter ID laws, which have been pushed by GOP legislatures around the country.” Reporter Amanda Terkel continues: “Rove did say that Obama had aired attack ads and painted Romney as out-of-touch with the concerns of ordinary voters, but these are fairly common tactics in politics, and Rove is certainly no stranger to them.”

Want to see some real voter suppression, Karl? Take a look at what your own party has been up to lately. It hasn’t been Democrats sending “poll watchers” from organizations like True the Vote into minority neighborhoods to aggressively challenge “suspicious” voters. In the past year, GOP governors and state legislators have passed laws that:

• Restrict early voting in states like Florida and Ohio, where the process is used disproportionately by African-American and Latino voters.
• Purge suspected “non-citizens” and “felons” from the voting rolls in Florida and Colorado, despite little evidence that anyone on the hit lists are actually ineligible to vote. In Colorado alone, 4,000 voters received intimidating letters demanding proof of citizenship in order to maintain their registration. Hundreds of Floridians — over 60 percent of them Latino — were given 30 days to respond, or face being barred from the polls. Republican officials have pressed on in both states even after repeated and widely publicized errors that threaten to disenfranchise legitimate elderly, minority and military voters.
• Subject voters in 34 states to new or enhanced voter ID laws, even though there have been just 10 instances of in-person voter fraud (out of 2,068 alleged cases) in the past ten years. In Pennsylvania, which passed a photo ID requirement despite the inability by officials to produce a single relevant case of voter fraud, nearly 760,000 registered voters are estimated to lack state-approved photo ID.

Naturally, Rove is hardly the only conservative to see conspiracy theories in the Obama campaign’s advertising and get-out-the-vote strategies. There is irony in the fact that the GOP lost the election in part because of Chicago’s vastly superior GOTV operation. Perhaps Rove would like parties to be required to turn out the other side’s supporters as well. Want to drive a busload of evangelical church-goers to the polls? Sure, as long as you make sure there are a few atheists in the van as well. The National Review’s Yuval Levin, who is usually a more even-keeled writer, accuses the president of “using any low and mendacious tactic required to tell working-class voters (especially white, Midwestern ones) that Mitt Romney was an evil and uncaring plutocrat. Those voters were not going to support Obama, but they could be kept away from Romney, and evidently they were.”

Yeah, because there’s nothing “low and mendacious” about calling President Obama “un-American,” accusing him of waging a “war on religion,” claiming (falsely) that he “gutted” the welfare-work requirement . . . . I could go on.

And whatever happened to those pre-election predictions of a massive “enthusiasm gap” favoring Republicans? The inimitable Peggy Noonan, known for “feeling” her way through politics, suggested on the Monday prior to the election that the “joy and intensity” of the crowds at Romney rallies indicated that “maybe the American people were quietly cooking something up, something we don’t know about . . . a Romney win.” She continued: “All the vibrations are right . . . There is no denying the Republicans have the passion now, the enthusiasm.” Michael Barone, whose Hackitude Badge has been previously noted, wrote that “just about every indicator suggests that Republicans are more enthusiastic about voting — and about their candidate — than they were in 2008, and Democrats are less so.” (He then went on to predict Romney would win, uh, 315 electoral votes.) Post-election quarterbacking finds Barone admitting, contra Rove, that “the challenger didn’t inspire the turnout surge he needed.” Well, I guess in the face of such low-down “voter suppression” tactics, Romney was just powerless to inspire. That’s a sharp contrast to two early-November predictions from unofficial Boston surrogate Jennifer Rubin, who — even more than Barone — has become something of a laughingstock even in conservative media:

Romney did have likability problems, that is, until Americans got a good look at him for themselves. He was able to reverse the negative impression left by tens of millions of dollars in ads and hostile mainstream media.

And:

In big and large assaults, some petty and some sweeping, Obama and third-party groups have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to make Romney an unacceptable alternative. It seems to have failed, spectacularly so.

Rove must not have gotten that memo.

Finally, a question for the Rove. Was there really so much “voter suppression” going on that a chunk of that $300 million in Crossroads cash wouldn’t have gone a long way toward combating it? Conservative pundit Byron York complains that “undecideds or weak Republicans were deeply influenced by Obama’s relentless attacks on Romney in May, June, July and August,” to which I would respond: Yeah, in August. What were Rove and Romney doing in the months between August and November? Sitting on their hands? As Jed Babbin of American Spectator writes: “The most basic of political skills — as I wrote back in April — is the reflex to attack when your opponent exposes a weakness. This is so fundamental that no campaign can succeed without it.” By not effectively mounting a counterattack, Rove didn’t perform on the fundamentals. More Babbin: “Rove’s outfits alone gathered about $400 million from donors and simply didn’t do their job.”

This points to Rove’s biggest failure, and to the strongest evidence for my armchair diagnosis. The central talent of Karl Rove — the thing that earned him monikers like “The Oracle” and “Bush’s Brain” — is his ability to run a good (if ruthless) race. He can’t manufacture better candidates – see George Bush – but he can manufacture better campaigns that sell subpar candidates to a wary electorate. In 2000, Rove convinced America that a malaprop-spouting, fact-challenged cowboy from Texas deserved a chance in the White House. In 2012, given what was arguably an easier sell – a turnaround expert running in a year desperate for economic turnaround – Rove couldn’t close the deal. When he blames Obama’s negative advertising, he inadvertently indicts his own. In 2004, he would have explained John Kerry’s by saying that the Democrat’s ads weren’t good enough to combat the Swift Boat “suppression” tactics that aimed to convince swing voters he was a wind surfing, cheese eating surrender monkey. A more intellectually honest man would realize that the explanation for Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012 is no different. The challenger and his allies failed to mount a coherent, timely response. The only difference is, this time, Rove was the one who didn’t measure up.

Wikipedia, take it away “An example of [projection] might be blaming another for self failure. The mind may avoid the discomfort of consciously admitting personal faults by keeping those feelings unconscious, and by redirecting libidinal satisfaction by attaching, or ‘projecting,’ those same faults onto another person or object.”

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results

Variously attributed to Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and a Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet, this definition of insanity certainly applies to a subset of Republicans. While some in the party have called for a post-election reevaluation of the GOP’s hostility toward Latinos, women and the mooching “47 percent,” others have doubled down on the hard-line conservatism that produced Mitt Romney’s dedication to “self-deportation” and Todd Akin’s repellant remarks about rape. There are reasonable voices in the wilderness, to be sure. Charles Krauthammer (OK, semi-reasonable voices) writes that, to win more Latino votes, “Republicans can change their position, be a lot more open to actual amnesty with enforcement.” Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal suggests that demonizing gays is not a winning strategy: “Fellow conservatives, please stop obsessing about what other adults might be doing in their bedrooms, so long as it’s lawful and consensual and doesn’t impinge in some obvious way on you.” And former Bush administration official Karen Hughes slams the party for “Neanderthal comments,” writing bluntly at Politico that, “if another Republican man says anything about rape other than it is a horrific, violent crime, I want to personally cut out his tongue.”

But not everyone is on board. Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer railed that “America is not demanding a second liberal party.” Laura Ingraham, naturally, concurred in a blog post, dismissing the idea that Republicans “now need to pander to minorities and update their platform to make it more appealing.” Instead, the radio host placed the blame squarely on the electorate: “What exactly is wrong with conservative principles? Anything? No. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. We don’t need to change to appeal to voters. We need voters and their mindsets to change.”

Is it really an effective strategy to castigate the very voters you hope will look favorably on your party in 2014? Are minorities and low-income Americans really crying out, Please, alienate me? More Republicans than Ingraham and Bauer certainly seem to think so.

A sampling of the most counterproductive, definition-of-insanity attempts to double down on what didn’t work in 2012 has to begin with the top of the Republican ticket, Mitt Romney himself. Forced in the run up to the election to repudiate his remarks about the 47 percent who “will vote for the president no matter what . . who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims,” with the mea culpa that “I said something that’s just completely wrong,” Romney now blames his loss on the “big gifts” Obama gave to minorities, women and other members of the 47 percent.  Post-election, he suddenly has the chance to express his views without consequences. Freed from accountability to the electorate (and from his own predilection for offering similar gifts to the elderly, coal magnates and hedge fund managers), he essentially repeats the takers vs. makers rhetoric that cost his party the race. His remarks on a conference call to wealthy donors are reminiscent not only of the 47 percent comments but of his tone-deaf assertion to the NAACP that its members should “vote for the other guy” if they’re “looking for free stuff you don’t have to pay for.” Via the Los Angeles Times, some key bits from Romney’s conference call, all of which elaborate on his theme that the president employed “a proven political strategy, which is, give a bunch of money from the government to a group and guess what? They vote for you.”

The Obama campaign was following the old playbook of giving a lot of stuff to groups that they hoped they could get to vote for them and be motivated to go out to the polls, specifically the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people.

The president’s campaign focused on giving targeted groups a big gift — so he made a big effort on small things. Those small things, by the way, add up to trillions of dollars.

As if speaking in generalities about large chunks of the electorate isn’t bad enough, Romney digs the hole deeper, articulating exactly which perks each demographic group was bribed with.

With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest, was a big gift. Free contraceptives were very big with young college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents’ plan, and that was a big gift to young people. They turned out in large numbers, a larger share in this election even than in 2008.

With regards to African American voters, ‘Obamacare’ was a huge plus — and was highly motivational to African American voters. You can imagine for somebody making $25—, or $30—, or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free healthcare — particularly if you don’t have it, getting free healthcare worth, what, $10,000 a family, in perpetuity, I mean this is huge. Likewise with Hispanic voters, free healthcare was a big plus.”

With regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for the children of illegals — the so-called Dream Act kids — was a huge plus for that voting group.

Nothing like using Numbers USA-approved language like “illegals” to win over Latinos!

The funny thing is, the voters Obama supposedly bribed with health care, “amnesty” and welfare make up a larger portion of the electorate than the millionaires whose capital gains tax breaks Romney wanted to preserve. African Americans, Latinos, college students, middle class families who will now have access to health care — these are not just a handful of Americans. In painting a picture of a country divided between two types of people — Romney voters, who are worthy producers, and Obama voters, who are shiftless grifters — the former candidate outlines a vision of America that Ezra Klein characterizes as “so ugly as to be bordering on dystopic.” And in implying that Obama’s supporters are moochers whose votes can be bought, Romney – the bloodless CEO for whom every human interaction is a transaction and every neighborly impulse has a price – misses the lesson that others in his party seem to be learning. The greatest gift Obama gave his constituents carried no price at all: respect.

Indeed, the swiftness with which other Republicans – who will face voters in 2014 and 2016 – have distanced themselves from Romney’s remarks is notable. As The New Republic’s Alec MacGillis quips, Republicans are “fleeing” from Romney “at such a high clip that the United Nations Refugee Agency may need to step in to regulate the flow.” Running fastest is Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who lectured that”we have got to stop dividing the Ameriacan voters. I absolutely reject that notion, that description. I think that’s absolutely wrong.” Florida Governor Rick Scott called the comments “inappropriate” and “not true,” while former Virginia Representative Tom Davis opined that “it shows a huge misreading of the electoral landscape. A rather elitist misread. Where does he think his votes came from in rural America?” Even Republicans who defended Romney in the wake of his “47 percent” gaffe are ready to throw him under the bus now that he is no longer the nominee. Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a top Romney surrogate who excused the previous remarks as “an analysis to donors,” said that “our mission should not be to deny government benefits to people who need them” and that “I don’t believe that we have millions and millions of people in this country that don’t want to work.”

As James Fallows, the left-leaning Atlantic writer, notes: “If you’re running for elected office and find yourself in the business of blaming the voters, stop. Odds are, you’re losing. Or you’ve just lost.”

*****

Though Romney managed to insult all the GOP’s trouble demographics in one incident, other conservatives have stuck to denigrating one interest group at a time. First up, women. It bears repeating: If you don’t like being called sexist, stop saying sexist things. And that goes double for sexist, misogynist things. None of these right-wing commentators are helping the GOP out with female voters.

Here’s Emmett Tyrell, the editor-in-chief of the American Spectator, writing about the liberal half of America:

For instance, there are the delusional women (usually single) who apparently see themselves as luscious targets of libidinous ecstasy from the male of the species and occasionally from the female of the species. They must have, as a matter of rights (thitherto overlooked in the Bill of Rights), free contraception devices of all kinds. It is a very serious matter. In fact, it is a matter of national security.

Tyrell must be really fascinated with these allegedly egotistical females because he comes close to self-plagiarism in a column for the Washington Examiner. Though he is ostensibly discussing General Petraeus’ downfall, he manages to work in another tirade against “delusional women.”

They seemed to see themselves as irresistible to the male of the species, and thus it was a matter of national security that they receive all manner of free birth control from intrauterine devices to extra-uterine devices to ad-hoc ergo-propter-hoc uterine devises.

Classy! The Daily Caller’s Mark Judge also goes all-in on the misogyny:

The truth is that America is now a leftist country. It’s Rachel Maddow and Jeremiah Wright’s country. You know that divorced fortysomething female neighbor of yours? The one who’s not half as bright as she thinks she is, and doesn’t know much about Libya or the national debt, but watches Katie Couric’s new show and just kind of didn’t like Romney because she, well, just kind of didn’t like him? America is now her country. It’s Dingbatville.

Really, why did we ever give those dingbats the right to vote in the first place? Or perhaps Judge would just prefer to restrict the franchise to those fortysomething Hannity and O’Reilly watchers who likewise know little about Libya or the national debt.

*****

Moving on: Despite vocal urging by high-profile Republicans like Susana Martinez, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, plenty of other conservatives are discouraging the party from “pandering” to the Hispanic vote. Felon (and National Review contributor) Conrad Black certainly isn’t pandering:

In the last 40 years, as many as 20 million unskilled peasants have illegally entered the U.S. while 60 million low-paying jobs have been outsourced from it. For the first time, a coalition of pigmentational minorities and government employees and other benefit recipients outvoted the bulk of the traditional white majority. If this is the template for America’s electoral future, strains unimaginable since the Civil War will result.

Peasants? Yikes. Also at National Review, Rachel Campos-Duffy, a self-described “Mexican-American wife and mother of six,” offers a piece for the National Review in which she lambastes “racially motivated Latino groups such as La Raza”:

All of these activist groups and institutions have a common ideology and an affinity for big and centralized government, and of course, entitlements. They go out of their way to sign folks up and to begin the cycle of government dependency. Once hooked to the IV of government handouts, a steady drip of ideology, and a heavy dose of raunchy pop culture, the once vibrant American Dreams and traditional family values of Hispanics drift into a slow, deep coma.

Somehow, I doubt implying entire racial groups are handout-addicted druggies who can be swayed by something as trivial as dirty MTV videos is going to play well with Campos-Duffy’s fellow Mexican-Americans.

*****

Government assistance in general continues to come under fire from some conservatives, who apparently did not grasp the damage done by Romney’s “47 percent” blunder. David Catron is not heeding the advice from Florida Governor Rick Scott, whose prescription for the GOP — “what we’ve got to do is say we want every vote, we want to take care of every citizen in our state” — at least pays lip service to the idea that not every single mother on food stamps is a Cadillac-driving welfare queen:

More than half the electorate had morphed into a collective vampire determined to suck the lifeblood out of the shrinking and besieged cadre of producers.

Columnist Cal Thomas doesn’t much like 21st century America either — a little strange, considering how conservatives are always nattering on about American exceptionalism and cities on a hill:

Great nations and proud empires have always collapsed from within before they were conquered from without. President Obama’s re-election mirrors the self-indulgent, greedy and envious nation we are rapidly becoming.

What ever happened to “love your country”?

Let’s not forget the ritual, if more subtle, gay-bashing that has become second-nature for social conservatives. The Times reports today on a new study suggesting that the LGBT vote was enough to tip states like Florida and Ohio — where Romney narrowly won the straight vote — to President Obama. This isn’t exactly a surprise, but it does demonstrate the way in which “traditional” ideology has driven away growing sections of the electorate. In a piece about General Petraeus’ resignation, Earl Tilford gives us this blithely bigoted gem:

Conduct unbecoming? Maybe, but again spare us the self-righteous indignation. Just last June, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta effusively praised the initial celebration of “Gay Pride Month.” The Obama administration has hardly set the bar high when it comes to sexual conduct.

*****

Finally, a guy who may not technically be crazy, but whose actions — yes, that’s a real tattoo — suggest something may be a little off. Was the $15,000 (coughed up by an anonymous Republican on eBay) worth it?

The Kook Gap

A billboard in Georgia funded by the Camden County Republican Party. Image by John S. Myers via Mother Jones.

With the election upon us, the supposed “enthusiasm gap” between Republican and Democratic voters has garnered lots of attention. But politics is full of “gaps,” including the Wonk Gap (Jonathan Cohn’s term for the paucity on the right of serious analysts and intellectuals willing to put dispassionate evaluation over the party-line gospel of revenue-raising tax cuts and nonexistent global warming) and the Hack Gap (the proliferation of conservative intellectuals eager to abandon all previously held principles – say, foreign policy hawk William Kristol, who enthusiastically supports third-debate peacenik Mitt Romney). The real divide between conservatives and liberals, however, is the Kook Gap. It breaks with the traditional media policy of false equivalence — show me a crazy Republican, and a similarly nutty Democrat can’t be far behind — to suggest that the right has become inherently more detached from reality than the left, but it’s the truth.

Those on the left take it as accepted wisdom that the standard bearers of the Republican Party, whether official or unofficial, increasingly suffer not from “Romnesia” but from Obama Derangement Syndrome, a condition which predisposes the patient to see Kenya-born Muslim socialists behind every tree. From ad hoc spokespeople of the GOP brand (Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage) to elected officials who ought to know better (Michele Bachmann, Steve King), the accusations lobbed at the president would be humorous if they weren’t made with such deadly seriousness. No less a Republican standard bearer than vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan joined a tele-hall conference with Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition (more on that outfit later) to tell thousands of dialed-in evangelicals that November 6 will determine “whether or not people turn out and take their country back” from a president who has put us on a “dangerous path that grows government, restricts freedom and liberty, and compromises those values, those Judeo-Christian, western-civilization values that made us such a great and exceptional nation in the first place.” Ryan’s depiction of the president as the Evil Other whose un-American beliefs threaten the United States is depressingly common among conservatives. He truly believes that Obama threatens our freedoms, asking his audience to “imagine what he would do if he actually got reelected. It just puts a chill down my spine.” Is this sort of noxious rhetoric, especially coming from a campaign that regularly accuses the president of divisive and “small” politics, really appropriate for one of the headliners of the Republican ticket? It’s only a hair’s breadth away from the conspiratorial slime peddled by the supposedly reputable Washington Examiner:

As has been noted before, for all those misinformed people who have been incorrectly identifying Obama as a Muslim for years, the man is a Christian. Or at least he claims to be. I don’t know how a person squares being a devout Christian with the near-fanatical devotion that Obama has to infanticide — he would call it being pro-choice — but who am I to judge? The fact is, the man has identified himself as a Christian, not a Muslim.

A Florida billboard from the American Power Super PAC highlighted in a recent NYT article.

The racism here is thinly disguised, if it is disguised at all. One right-wing website, the ironically named American Thinker, opines in a post subtitled “The Affirmative Action President Exposed” that “Obama has been groomed to be the left’s perfect teleprompter-controlled front man for its Socialist/Progressive agenda.  His black-skin suit of armor protects him from all opposition.” And that’s hardly the worst the right has to offer. Enough supposedly reputable Republican politicians and media outlets have accused the president of supporting infanticide — see Newt Gingrich’s recent distortion that Obama “voted three times in favor of allowing doctors to kills babies in the eight or ninth month that they were born, having survived late night abortion” — that fact-checkers like the Post’s Glenn Kessler feel compelled to devote stand-alone articles to whether Obama longs for the fetal “victims” of botched abortions to die on the floor. Florida Rep. Alan West, in one of his more temperate statements, alleged that the Democratic caucus is filled with Communists. Mitt Romney surrogate John Sununu darkly declared that “I wish this president would learn how to be an American,” and, though forced to walk back the statements half a news cycle later, continued to function as a respected mouthpiece for Boston. Michele Bachmann abuses her position on the House Intelligence Committee to defame Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin as a terrorist sympathizer, garnering credulous media coverage of the McCarthyite vision of a State Department infiltrated by Islamists. A Texas judge makes headlines for predicting that Obama “going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the U.N.” – which is really only a shade worse than NRA vice president Wayne LaPierre’s contention that “all that first-term lip service to gun owners is part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term.”

The Republican media machine is, if anything, far worse. Advertising attacks on the president, paid for by the same job creators (TDAmeritrade’s Joe Ricketts, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson) whose moral fiber Mitt Romney holds up as unimpeachable, have become so “strident,” in the blandly understated language of the New York Times, as to feature Photoshopped images of Obama bowing to Saudi royalty and cartoonish depictions of mushroom clouds over Israel (message: “Friends Don’t Let Friends Get Nuked. STOP OBAMA.”) Taking the nuclear holocaust theme even further, Slate’s Dave Weigel finds a Florida radio host asking “What has caused more long term destruction – the A-bomb, or Government welfare programs created to buy the votes of those who want someone to take care of them?”

The Ralph Reed mailer. Image via Mother Jones.

Ralph Reed, the once-disgraced evangelical comeback kid who heads the Faith and Freedom Coalition to which Ryan was making his election-eve pitch, financed a ten-page mailer claiming that Obama is running for reelection so that “he can complete America’s destruction,” presumably on the orders of his pals Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, who are also name-checked in the packet. (No less than the Romney campaign itself recently released an ad boasting that Castro and Chavez would vote for Obama.) Reed’s effort would be laughable if he weren’t so straight-faced and earnest about it. The “Voter Registration Confirmation Survey” that landed in thousands of Republican mailboxes asks, in all seriousness, whether the threat posed to “liberty” by President Obama’s policies is a) more serious than the threats we faced in World War II from Nazi Germany and the Japanese, b) more serious than the threat we faced from the Soviet Union during the Cold War, c) more serious than the American Civil War or d) all of the above. With choices like these, it’s a relief to know respondents can “mark as many answers as you think appropriate.” Frankly, I’d say that Obama poses a bigger threat than the 2012 End of the Mayan Calendar and the Black Plague combined, but hey — that’s just me.

Featured prominently in an NYT article about sleazy anti-Obama campaign tactics is the video “Dreams From My Real Father,” which alleges an even greater conspiracy theory than Donald Trump “birthers” usually advance: the president’s real father was not a Kenyan socialist but card-carrying Communist Frank Marshall Davis, who snapped bondage shots of Obama’s mother and raised the future president as what the American Spectator (whose pages have been graced by none other than potential VP Paul Ryan) a “red diaper baby.” The Daily Beast reports that the video’s narrator pretends to quote from a fictional Obama autobiography: “My election was not a sudden political phenomenon. It was the culmination of an American socialist movement that my real father, Frank Marshall Davis, nurtured in Chicago and Hawaii, and has been quietly infiltrating the U.S. economy, universities, and media for decades.” Other ads tie the president to Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, intoning that Obama “has the dictator vote . . . does he have yours?” “Uncovered” or “newly discovered” videos that are in fact neither surface regularly at the Drudge Report, where conservative mud-throwers feign horror at statements by the president they label racist or redistributionist. A new “bombshell” seems to surface every week; the latest and perhaps most bizarre is the theory that a Republican victory would lead to race riots instigated by Obama supporters spurred by “fears about a Romney administration withdrawing or limiting government handouts.” (This doomsday scenario is peddled by none other than Thomas Sowell, “one of America’s greatest living thinkers” and a widely syndicated columnist who is inexplicably considered an intellectual light of the mainstream right.)

National Review thinks billboards like these are a positive development: “In my town of Milford, Conn., local businessman DeForest Smith flexes his First Amendment muscle on a billboard he owns. Kudos!”

Liberal critics aghast at the craziness of conservative thought leaders are usually more charitably disposed toward the rank-and-file Republican voters who go about their everyday lives without much discussion of UN conspiracy theories and socialist takeovers. Viewed from the liberal coastal bubble, it is hardly surprising that an electorate plied with blockbuster movies like Dinesh D’Souza’s “2016,” which explores the alleged roots of Obama’s anti-colonial, anti-American worldview, would harbor dark thoughts about a president with a foreign-sounding name. Yet no GOP elites are forcing Republican butts into the seats at AMC or Cinemark, just as no elites are forcing red-state voters to elect such homophobic and misogynist representatives as Michele Bachmann and Todd Akin. The Republican masses have done that of their own free will. The partisan gap has never been wider, as demonstrated by any number of the serious-sounding and chart-filled studies by left-leaning political scientists quoted ad nauseam by MSNBC talking heads, but it’s mostly the result of the GOP’s march rightward, not a similarly sharp swerve to the left by the Democrats. Nowhere is this discrepancy clearer than in a recent Washington Post article about Ohio’s Jefferson County, which reporter Joel Achenbach describes as “highly contested territory in what may be the most important swing state in the presidential race.” The county, home of working-class Steubenville, is “a good place to plumb the divisions in American political life,” yet the article ends up plumbing the cesspool-like depths of right-wing smears. The piece epitomizes everything wrong with today’s Republican Party. The left may have its share of crazies, but it has nothing on the GOP. There is simply no comparison, even among the party faithful. The worst conspiracy theories about Mitt Romney deal not with salacious inventions — there are no “sister wives” hiding in Ann’s closet, no secret Mormon plot to take over the White House — but with the candidate’s bank account. Imagine if the worst the right lobbed at Obama were accusations about improper royalty payments from The Audacity of Hope.

Achenbach takes us on a tour of the Ohio electorate, and it’s a stunning picture. His interactions with Republican voters are worth quoting in full:

“If they had Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama running, Barack Obama would be my last pick,” says Ray Morrison, 70, a retired steelworker who lives on a country road west of the city. “If you want to know the true story about Obama, you have to watch Fox a little bit. I hate him.”

Al Fenner, 68, a bishop in the Shepherds Walk mission downtown, doesn’t think the president is “all-American” and believes that Obama once said that “he would stand more with the Islamic rather than with the American way.” Asked to cite a specific instance of Obama saying that, Fenner answered: “Go on YouTube and find it. I would not quote it if it were not true.”

Herb Barcus, 81, is a Democrat who votes Republican. He doesn’t like the way the government has been raiding the Social Security trust fund. Thinks Romney is a just and honest man. Thinks Obama is “unqualified.”

But he’d rather not talk politics, preferring to talk religion and the end of days.

“I think the time’s running out,” he says. “You have to read prophecy. You ever hear of the Rapture? Soon to be coming, I believe.”

Lest you think I’m selectively highlighting the worst of one party, let’s see what Steubenville’s Democrats have to say to Achenbach. There’s the benign, from a retired millworker who says of Romney, “He wants to take everything from the poor and the middle class to pay for his tax cuts for the rich.” The most radical comment from a liberal is in fact a bit of sarcasm; unlike Barcus, this voter doesn’t seem inclined to take Biblical prophecy or the potential Rapture literally:

Here’s Cheryl Doran, 50, a waitress at the family restaurant Naples, speaking of Romney: “I think he’s the devil. I have no use for him.”

Calling the Republican nominee “the devil” isn’t civil, but if an allusion to Satan were the worst that Rush Limbaugh had said about President Obama, the kook gap wouldn’t be nearly so wide. Instead of nasty metaphors, the right delivers its zingers with absolute seriousness. Jerome Corsi, who could be dismissed as a Swift Boat nutjob were his anti-Obama screed “The Birth Certificate” not a certified bestseller (and were he not awarded a plum place in the Romney private-jet press pool), genuinely thinks he’s dropping a bombshell when he alleges that the president is a closeted gay man. “Not only is he gay,” writes Neal Gabler in the left-wing magazine The Nation, “he frequented gay bath houses in Chicago along with his former chief of staff and current Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel . . . . Plus, he was ‘married’ to his Pakistani roommate while attending Occidental College (one theorist says that the ring he wore at the time was a “homosexual symbol for ‘women stay away’).”

Despite the fact that “the devil” is most bilious liberal sentiment Achenbach encounters, false equivalence — “a lot of voters are lukewarm about the guy they support, but they are white hot about the guy they loathe” — permeates the piece. And Achenbach is hardly the first journalist to only permit discussion of conservative craziness when couched in even-handed “but the left does it too!” rhetoric. When he writes that Obama and Romney “represent parties that have become internally more homogeneous, with distinctly different philosophies,” he is certainly correct that Democrats and Republicans have philosophical differences. The problem is, it’s Plato vs. Howard Camping (of May 21 Judgment Day fame).

It is the ultimate exercise in such attempted equivalence to to equate the mainstreamed, constant lunacy of the right with some garden-variety, mildly offensive crankiness on the left, but Politico inexplicably (as conservatives will brand the site “left-wing” until the cows come home) gives it the old college try. In an article titled “Election Doomsday Scenarios Abound” reporter Ginger Gibson labors mightily to draw parallels between wild conspiracy theories unmoored to reality (Obama is coming for your guns!) and worst-case scenarios based on actual policies (Republicans really do want to overturn Roe v. Wade). Comparing the “doomsday scenarios” described by each side’s nuttier elements, we have this from the right:

One of the most frequently invoked signs of the end times has come from conservative bloggers arguing that unruly Obama supporters will riot if Romney wins — prompting a declaration of martial law that keeps the exchange of power from taking place.

Politico feels compelled to note that Democrats predicted a similar scenario for George W. Bush supporters in 2008, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in 2012 warning that Romney’s backers are planning to marshal the Klu Klux Klan to take down a newly victorious Obama. What evidence does Politico find to bolster its assertion that both parties engage in equally ludicrous doomsday prognostication? Scraping the bottom of the malice barrel, Gibson has this to offer:

Democrats have been worked into the most fervor over claims that Republicans will employ widespread voter suppression at the polls on Nov. 6.

Gee, do you suppose that “fervor” may have something to do with the very real “voter fraud” laws — 24 restrictions in 17 states in the past year alone — implemented by Republican state legislatures across the country, despite a paucity of actual cases of fraud? Reasonable people can disagree whether these laws are explicitly designed to suppress the Democratic vote, but it’s a fact that strict ID requirements disproportionately affect minorities and youth, two traditionally liberal constituencies. And when Republican officials are on record as stating that voting “should not be easy” — in the words of Florida state Sen. Mike Bennett, “I don’t have a problem making it harder. I want people in Florida to want to vote as bad as that person in Africa who walks 200 miles across the desert” — is it really conspiracy-mongering to suggest that “suppression” is exactly what the GOP has in mind? Though supporters of voter ID laws in Pennsylvania were unable to cite even one occurrence of in-person voter fraud that the legislation would address, the House Republican leader did make YouTube history by crowing that voter ID laws would “allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” Yet Politico suggests that Attorney General Eric Holder’s description of such voting laws as “poll taxes” is somehow equivalent to the conservative description of Obama as a martial-law-implementing, violence-stoking tyrant. Huh.

In the wake of 2000-recount hyper-awareness and paranoia on both sides, I don’t see how allegations of “voter suppression” fundamentally any worse than those on the right of massive voter fraud (a 2009 survey found that 52 percent of Republicans attributed Obama’s victory to ACORN’s “stealing” the election) or continually accusing Democrats of registering Big Bird and Mickey Mouse. Perhaps the sides are equally as conspiratorial on this count . . . and yet. The evidence for voter fraud is exceedingly slim – Mother Jones observes that there are more annual UFO sightings than fraud convictions, and a News21 analysis found 10 voter impersonation cases out of more than 2,000 mostly baseless accusations of fraud over 10 years, which would affect roughly one out of every 15 million voters – while voter ID laws are predicted to affect 700,000 ID-less minority youths in Pennsylvania alone. Again, like the fears of a Romney reversal of Roe v. Wade, at least to my partisan mind the left’s concerns seem more based on actual policies articulated by the opposition itself.

I’m not saying that liberals don’t exaggerate the effects of so-called voter suppression. That it rises to the level of conspiracy mongering is an accusation with at least some legs, as I recently read a long Harper’s “expose” of the GOP’s attempts to rig the vote via ballot counting technology. It’s the Diebolt suspicions resurrected, albeit in a dry way, heavy on the faux statistics, that will gin no one into rioting or attract the salacious pull quotes about Barack Obama’s mother being a fat white porn model. Reports that Romney’s son Tagg has financial connections to a company that builds voting machines have less substance, but what is really notable about such tenuous theories is the degree of pushback they receive from more sensible people on the left. While conservatives of all stripes, from talk-show hosts and National Review writers right up to RNC officials, embrace unproven stories of voter fraud, no less a lefty outlet than AlterNet felt compelled to publish a story titled“5 Reasons Karl Rove Is NOT Going to Electronically Steal This Election,” in which Steve Rosenfeld writes:

Most of these scenarios are not just far-fetched or worse, but they distract from more visible and widespread issues that could impact the 2012 results . . . . There are things to worry about, but they’re not what’s breathlessly flying around in the lefty media.

The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates offers this analysis:

On the right, voter fraud is an actual issue, and voter-ID laws are endorsed by basically every organ of the conservative movement. On the left, the notion that Bush stole Ohio was debunked by Mother Jones. The difference between left and right isn’t the lack of appetite for intrigue and conspiracy. It’s that the left has a partisan press, whereas the right has a partisan press office.

While you can legitimately apply the term “doomsday scenario” to a fantasy about Obama ordering legions of blue-hatted UN soldiers into the streets, it’s a stretch to characterize the potential rollback of women’s rights as apocalyptic. Here’s the worst Politico can find on the left:

Democrats — some of them candidates and Obama surrogates — have concentrated on stoking fears among a key constituency: women. Some officials have pushed a post-Romney election world in which women are forced to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

“They would drag us back to the failed policies of the past and take women to a time when we were not even considered on equal footing with men,”Debbie Wasserman Schultz told volunteers in North Carolina. “Mitt Romney would take us back to a time before I was born and shut the clock that much for women.”

It’s one thing to map out the extreme implications of stances articulated by a party itself; though it may border on reductio ad absurdum to conclude that outlawing abortion translates to chaining barefoot housewives to the oven range, it at least begins with something that exists in the real world: the GOP platform, which states that “the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed,” and thus “we support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.” It’s quite another to pluck out of thin air the idea that Obama wants to establish shariah law in America or that he would bulldoze all suburbs in favor of inner-city development. The liberal predictions of a rollback of women’s rights is premised on the 92 laws restricting abortion passed by state legislatures in 2011 — the most of any year since the Guttmacher Institute began tracking such laws in 1985. It is rooted in the declaration by the Republican nominee that he would be “delighted” to sign a bill banning all abortions (though he did lament that “that’s not where we are right now”) and the willingness of GOP officials to subject women seeking abortions to vaginal probes and a gantlet of third-degree questioning about the “forcible” and “legitimate” nature of their rape. Direct from Romney’s own website is this statement:

But while the nation remains so divided, he believes that the right next step is for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade – a case of blatant judicial activism that took a decision that should be left to the people and placed it in the hands of unelected judges.

Sure sounds to me like the candidate would be completely OK with women in entire regions of the country — the South, much of the Midwest — being denied reproductive rights. He refers to Roe v. Wade as “one of the darkest moments in Supreme Court history” — apparently even worse than, say, Dredd Scott. This is not the position of  a moderate; neither is his support for a “personhood” amendment with the potential to criminalize not only abortion but some forms of birth control, including the morning-after pill (an “abortifacient,” in conservatives’ scientifically dubious argot).

Politico notes in a separate article that, “at the national level, Democrats insist, Republicans no longer call for simple restrictions on abortions anymore, like parental notification laws. Instead, they’re fighting over women’s access to contraception — by opposing the Obama administration’s requirement for most employers to cover birth control without co-pays — and targeting Planned Parenthood.” Contrast Romney’s plainly stated preference for overturning Roe v. Wade to Obama’s stance on gun control as articulated to a left-leaning, anti-gun MTV audience: “Obama said he favors an ‘all of the above approach,’ including better enforcement of existing gun laws, strengthening background checks, and working with law enforcement and local groups to better combat the sources of violence.” If this inconsequential, wishy-washy position is enough to draw the ire of the NRA conspiracy theorists, imagine the explosions that would ensue if the president followed in Romney’s footsteps and proclaimed himself “delighted” to sign a ban on every firearm from pistols to hunting rifles. Overall, Politico’s attempt to draw parallels between the supposedly apocalyptic visions of each party ends up doing just what the reporter tried to avoid: it cements the impression that the right is populated by nutcases.

The invaluable David Weigel of Slate has spent the election season bouncing between swing states, and he returns from Florida with an anecdote that, like Achenbach’s Washington Post piece, exemplifies the differences between the parties. The Miami-area radio dial is filled with competing political ads, but only one side specializes in crazy political ads. Flipping between a hip-hop station and a talk radio channel, Weigel notes the contrast:

On 99.1, I hear an Obama campaign ad consisting of 30 seconds of Michelle Obama speaking, 15 seconds of another black woman speaking, and the Obama disclaimer.

“We have to ask ourselves: Are we going to go back to the same policies that got us into the first place?” asks the first lady.

“Show President Obama we’ve got his back,” says the second woman.

“This election will be even closer than four years ago,” says the first lady. “Don’t ever understimate the impact you can have.”

Punctuating the hot air from the talking heads is another sort of ad altogether, one which emphasizes the dangers to the Romney campaign of aligning itself with religious fundamentalists and other popular conservative figures. Though the right’s network of outside groups, from super PACs to faith-based non-profits that supposedly focus on “issues,” gave Romney financial cover before the candidate was able to tap his general-election warchest, the independence of such organizations also enables them to go dangerously off-message. Romney may want voters to believe this election is all about the economy, but his more extreme boosters have a different idea. Weigel again:

On 610 am, every other commercial break, I hear this ad from Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition, spoken by a baritone narrator:

Barack Obama forced Christian charities and colleges to pay for health services that violated their faith. He waffled on support for Israel. Obama claimed, in a Muslim country, that America is not a Christian nation. Obama lobbied for same-sex marriage, removed the name of God from his platform — reinserting it as delegates booed. Said Congress had better things to do when it reaffirmed that “In God We Trust.” Better things than trusting God?

The Reed spot may rile up the base, but I’ll take the dull Obama ad any day.

A sampling of the anti-Obama bestseller list. Image via the Daily Beast.

Such ads may seem ridiculous, but it’s impossible for listeners not to absorb some of the sentiments. If this is what everyone in Radio Land tunes in to hear every morning from 6:00 to 9:00, it’s no surprise that they share Reed’s worldview. John Avlon of The Daily Beast explicitly links the conspiracy theories of the professional right-wing to the prevailing Obama-as-Satan sentiment among average voters. Under the headline “The Obama Haters Book Club,” Avlon rounds up an astounding panoply of anti-Obama tomes, from comparatively respectable NYT bestsellers (Newt Gingrich’s To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular Socialist Machine) to independently published, pamphlet-esque paperbacks (Andrew McCarthy’s How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda) to shock-doctrine bile from conservative talking heads (Michael Savage’s Trickle Down Tyranny: Crushing Obama’s Dream of the Socialist States of America). One has to ask: if Obama’s socialist dream is crushed, what on earth will these folks write about? Defeating the president may be their stated goal, but a Romney victory would undoubtedly kill the golden goose. Avlon eviscerates any Politico-style tendency to declare the two parties equivalent on “the sheer tonnage of hate and lies” directed at an unfavored occupant of the Oval Office:

Two years ago, when I put together the first Obama Haters Book Club list, the number of titles was at 46, roughly half the current total.

Compare that to the literature of Bush Derangement Syndrome, which totaled just 5 at the midterm elections of 2002 and rocketed up to 46 by November of 2004. Obama Derangement Syndrome shares some of the same qualities—truthers and birthers are in some respects mirror images of each other; obsessed with their targets alleged tyrannical ambitions and core illegitimacy—but they are not remotely equivalent.

There have been twice as many Obama Derangement Syndrome books as specimens of Bush Derangement Syndrome. The cycle of incitement has gotten worse and more widespread because it’s been semi-legitimized. Some of the same folks who called BDS treasonous see ODS as part of a patriotic resistance. This is more insidious than simple hypocrisy.

Most insidious of all is the way such poisonous hyperbole manifests itself in the body politic as “the harvest of that hate.” Avlon describes an encounter with Republican voters that could have been plucked from Achenbach’s Post article:

Talk to otherwise decent, well-intentioned citizens on the campaign trail and these themes keep creeping up in conversation: “Obama is a socialist” and “He wants to make us more like Europe” are among the most benign; “Muslim” and “Marxist” are not uncommon. This past Wednesday, I spoke with three tipsy middle-aged women who helped put on an Ann Romney rally in wealthy Winter Park, Florida, who did not hesitate to repeatedly describe the president of the United States as “evil.” Members of Congress even repeat lines straight out the Obama Haters Book Club, talking about Obama’s “Gangster Government,” “Thugocracy,” Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of his administration, his Communist influences and tyrannical ambitions. One Romney campaign ad even spoke of the president’s “War on Religion.

Which raises the question: Can anyone so eager to slur the first black president with the label of “foreigner” really be considered decent or well-intentioned? These sort of people may be perfectly pleasant outside of politics, but they are hardly “well-intentioned.” The subjects of Achenbach’s article are neither stupid nor naive; they know exactly what they are saying, and they “intend” every word of it. Hatred is not hard to spot, and to give the peddlers of such hatred a pass by suggesting they’re simply worried yet misguided patriots is to infantilize them. We’re talking about adults who are fully capable of taking responsibility for their parroting of Rush Limbaugh’s race-baiting rhetoric and their internalization of the very “rage” they accuse the president of harboring (see: Dinesh D’Souza’s The Roots of Obama’s Rage.)

Particularly astounding is the assertion from conservatives — from the man on the street right up to Mitt Romney himself — that President Obama is the one who has turned the 2012 race into “a campaign of uncommon nastiness and stupidity.” How can the editors of the National Review, who produced that little slam, say this with a straight face? Are they unaware that the pundits they employ routinely accuse the president of sympathy toward terrorists, of wanting to destroy America, of being too stupid for his office? “Uncommon nastiness” is NR contributor Michele Malkin’s middle name; she refers to female Obama supporters as “the Peggy the Moochers and Henrietta Hugheses of the world . . . the nanny-state grievance mongers” and Democratic officials as “the lying liars and the crap weasels, like Debbie Wasserman Schultz out there. And she really is in a classlessness all by herself.” (Pot, meet kettle.)

When National Review’s Yuval Levin opines that the president is a “man of nasty pettiness,” one wonders how he would characterize the behavior of his own writers, whose election-night directives to Republicans are “crush them!” and who call Obama “the most anti-American of American presidents” who “has run the most un-American of campaigns.” Is it not “nasty” to suggest that the Commander in Chief is a fan of gay bathhouses? Is it not petty to refer to Michelle Obama as “Moochelle” and make rude comments about the size of her rear end? For all the supposed religiosity of Ralph Reed and his minions, they seem blissfully ignorant of the Biblical prescription to the hypocrite to “first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” Republican elected officials are even worse, as Eric Cantor feels compelled to preach that “the president is full of negativity, character assassination, and attacks.” In the skewed conservative reality, labels like “communist” and “affirmative action baby” evidently do not count as character assassination.

Where does this leave us? We’re mere hours from an election pitting a center-left president against a challenger that channels all the worst impulses of the “severely conservative” right. We’re faced with a national media that hears in Paul Ryan’s denunciation of President Obama as a dangerous man from whom we must “reassert our Constitution” little more than, as the Washington Post describes it, “unusually harsh” language. It is telling that, as the Times notes, the remarks were delivered in a conference call “sandwiched between public rallies in which he often spoke of the Romney-Ryan ticket’s promise to bridge partisan divides if elected.” The faux umbrage and utter hypocrisy of Eric Cantor is contagious. If America elects Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan on Tuesday, 50.1% (or whatever plurality ultimately tips the race), of its people will get exactly the kind of president they deserve.

The Third Presidential Debate in Maps

Tonight’s final presidential debate was only about foreign policy only so much as “foreign” is defined as “a handful of countries in the Middle East . . . and maybe China.” The headline of a Josh Barro headline at Bloomberg sums it up: “Foreign Policy Debate Omits Most of Globe.” Ezra Klein noted prior to the debate that the foreign/domestic policy divide breaks down in an interconnected world, leaving the term (and the topic) with an anachronistic specificity: “‘Foreign policy’ means, broadly speaking, our policy towards the countries we are already at war with, or are considered likely to eventually go to war with.” Writing for the Times, former State Department official and Atlantic publicity-monger Anne-Marie Slaughter observes:

This really wasn’t a debate about foreign policy or world affairs. It was the projection of the American electoral map onto the globe. All discussion of Israel and Islam was targeted at Florida; all discussion of China was targeted at Ohio.

Slaughter runs through the (long) list of topics unmentioned by either candidate, and it reads like a seventh-grade tour of world geography: NATO, Europe, Asia, India (“a mere billion people,” snarks Slaughter). Climate change and the continuing economic meltdown in the Eurozone received zero airtime, and issues that would top the agenda for most countries — poverty, hunger, energy — didn’t even warrant a throwaway line from the men contending to lead the world’s richest nation. Among the many perks of superpower status, it seems, is the ability to ignore the pressing concerns of 90% of the “foreign” world that the “policy” portion of the debate was meant to address. The debate, scolds the editors at Bloomberg News, “left five of the seven continents — most of them populated, and at least one in dire crisis — barely mentioned.”

Ezra Klein provides this infographic on how the conversation stacked up:

At Slate, Matt Yglesias publishes a hastily Photoshopped map that reminds me of the classic New Yorker “Flyover Country” cartoon. His caption: “Those are all the countries out there, as I understand it.”

The Internet has unfortunately swallowed up the aforementioned New Yorker (at least I think it’s from the New Yorker) cartoon of a map of America, as seen from the East Coast: blue regions, like New York and the west coast (Los Angeles, San Francisco), are sharply delineated, while the vast middle of the country is shrunken to an empty red strip in the center of the country. The closest I can find is this 1976 New Yorker cover:

It’s not nearly as funny, but it’s close. The debate’s geography also brought to mind this 2006 map, attributed only to “grog,” from the liberal website DailyKos:

George W. Bush may no longer be in the Oval Office, but the American worldview is hardly more complex than that Dubya-era stereotype. There’s the U.S., and then there’s everyone else. If we want to get more specific, “everyone else” can be divided into the good guys who are “with us” and the bad guys (think Axis of Evil) who are “against us.” The trope still holds today, as Romney in particular classifies mildly hostile countries like Russia as “our number-one geopolitical foe” and lumps even ostensibly copacetic nations like the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Egypt together with the Islamist radicals of Iran.

Riffing on Romney’s geographically challenged remark that Syria provides Iran with “a route to the sea,” New York Magazine’s Dan Amira offers his own poke at the Republican:

Iran, of course, has 1,500 miles of its own coastline, so it’s hardly dependent on Syria for beach access. Alec MacGillis tweeted: “Let’s just agree on the good news that the night brought: Iran lacks a route to the sea. We can stop worrying about the Straits of Hormuz.” The Washington Post’s fact-checker calls the claim “puzzling,” observing that “a puzzling claim, considering that Syria shares no border with Iran — Iraq and Turkey are in the way.” Romney has made this Iran-Syria link before, and to be fair, his campaign notes that it’s not as outlandish as it seems: “It is generally recognized that Syria offers Iran strategic basing/staging access to the Mediterranean.” However, despite knowing little about the Middle East, I would wager that the ties between Iran and Syria likely rely less on any oceanfront property than on the two nations’ shared support of terrorists, common Shiite heritage (Syria’s Bashar Assad is a member of the Alawite heterodox Shiite sect), and mutual hostility toward Sunni-majority countries like Saudi Arabia.

Besides, as Amira writes, “Americans are bad enough at geography already; they don’t need a presidential candidate confusing them even more.”

Then again, if you were hoping for any level of clarity, the third presidential debate was surely the wrong place to look. Matt Yglesias bluntly laments the myopic perspective: “Foreign policy is all about angry Muslims.” He goes on to say that “these days, the various conflicts in the Middle East often seem to have eaten the entire field of vision of American foreign policy.”

Throughout the encounter, the president accused Romney of being “all over the map” on foreign policy. Actually, the one thing the debate was not was “all over the map.” Romney’s positions may be Etch-a-Sketchy, as Joe Biden would say, but the larger problem with last night is that neither Obama nor his opponent expanded the map beyond Israel, Iran and Libya. To the rest of the world, the message was plain: Wait your turn.

Someday, the rest of the world will get tired of waiting.

Numbers Don’t Lie, But Do They Fib?

Nate Silver’s election forecast (NYT)

Few things in politics are as simultaneously fascinating and frustrating than the horse-race polls. Part of me is interested enough in how the country sees the candidates to scroll through the cross-tabs, parsing which income levels throw their support to Romney and which age groups break for the president, but part of me wants to roll its eyes and wonder, What’s all the fuss? Between the polls themselves and the endless analyses that they produce, a lot of energy is wasted on a question that could best be answered simply by waiting until November 6. This time of year, the polls come fast and furious; National Journal counts 82 in the last 12 days alone — and that doesn’t even include state-level surveys for down-ballot races for the Senate and House. Unsurprisingly, the media wastes more ink on spinning the numbers, or at least reporting on the spin, than on the actual results themselves. There are, after all, only so many lead articles one can write about President Obama’s three-point lead, or about the swing vote in Wisconsin and Ohio. Discussion of those points and percentages, however, could fill books.

Thus we are treated to the spectacle of Fox News contributor and Wall Street Journal columnist Karl Rove declaring that Obama is “in desperate shape in territory he carried with ease in 2008” while his employers provide evidence directly to the contrary: “Headwinds for Romney in Latest Poll Results,” the Journal writes, offering a laundry list of states in which the Democrat is topping the Republican, including a surprisingly large eight-point margin in Iowa. “Obama has edge over Romney in three battleground states,” Fox reports, and even admits that the president’s lead is more than a paltry percent or two: “Obama tops Romney by seven percentage points among likely voters in both Ohio (49-42 percent) and Virginia (50-43 percent). In Florida, the president holds a five-point edge (49-44 percent),” roughly the same margins found by the WSJ. (Don’t give Fox too much credit. The next line: “The good news for Romney is that among voters who are ‘extremely’ interested in this year’s election, the races are much tighter.”

Though Romney likes to accuse President Obama of making excuses for a poor economy, his backers come up with an astounding number of their own excuses for Romney’s lagging numbers. And the longer the Republican trails in the polls, the more strained and unbelievable the excuses become. Success is defined down; now Romney is winning simply by virtue of running anywhere close to the incumbent — an incumbent, you’ll remember, that in the Republican worldview has done such a horrible, incompetent job that he should just resign tomorrow. His game plan “doesn’t need a turnaround,” Romney said in a CBS interview. “We’ve got a campaign which is tied with an incumbent president to the United States.” Republican pollster Whit Ayres makes the case that Obama’s steady lead is too narrow to say anything about Romney. “Ayres said Obama’s average lead in the public polls was 2.3 percent in June, 2.5 percent in July, 2.4 percent in August, and has been 2.6 percent in September,” National Journal reports, quoting Ayres as saying (a tad defensively, I’d imagine): “It is a flat line…. That doesn’t strike me as a done deal, a race that is over.”

So why aren’t the American people seeing through the Obama facade? A sampling of the grasping-for-straws logic: blame it on the convention bounce, the Bill Clinton “sugar high,” the food stamps that the president is ostensibly doling out to buy the votes of the poor. “This year’s DNC was the latest incumbent convention in American history!” exclaims Jay Cost at The Weekly Standard. “That absolutely has to be taken into account when examining the president’s standing in the polls, and it means we would be wise to discount his margin by a little bit.” Admirably reaching beyond the worn-out (and ultimately inaccurate, as Reagan actually led in the polls after the convention) Reagan-Carter comparison of a late-breaking challenger, Cost argues that “historically speaking, this president is in weaker shape than any postwar incumbent who went on to victory, with the possible exception of Harry Truman.” Sean Trende, a conservative analyst whose association with Real Clear Politics and its reputable daily poll averages gives him a veneer of neutrality, makes the case that the polls just aren’t registering the dire state of the economy. “So if the election were held today, President Obama would probably win comfortably,” he writes. “But the election isn’t today. In the next seven weeks, the economy, the president’s tepid job approval ratings, and Romney’s spending campaign will continue to exert gravitational forces on Obama’s re-election efforts.” For Romney to overcome the president’s current lead is “not a particularly tall order.” The Washington Examiner, which runs at least one article per day discounting Obama’s edge in the polls as fabricated by the liberal media, tries to put a positive spin on Romney’s status, opining that a poll of 12 swing states “shows Obama up by just two points over Romney 48 percent to 46 percent” and immediately adds a caveat: “That same poll showed 22% of voters could change their mind before election day.” Considering that conservatives spend an inordinate amount of time pointing out “fishy” percentages in mainstream polls, it’s curious that no one at the Examiner found it notable that every other survey puts undecided voters around a mere six percent of the electorate. Of course, this is the same outfit that describes a poll conducted for the flagship Murdoch broadsheet thus: “A new NBC/WSJ poll purports to show that Obama is beating Romney 50 percent to 45 percent.” Well, a poll either shows something or not. You can argue over its accuracy, but a poll can’t purport to show a result any more than the SAT can purport to give Junior a score of 1425.

For as closely as both sides watch the polls for any hint of an uptick for their candidates, partisans actually spend the majority of the time trying to discredit numbers they don’t like.  Conservatives are almost uniformly more hostile to polling (and more hostile, I’d note, to anything that smacks of science – evolution, climate change – or academia in general). Not coincidentally, such hostility spikes when the data is unfriendly, as it has been for Romney over the past week or two. Don’t like the results? Quibble with the methodology. Before most surveys shifted to a likely voter screen in the past month, Republicans complained that the universe of registered voters favored Democrats who wouldn’t actually turn out to vote. Now that the likely screen is in place and the results are equally as dismal — Romney indeed does better among likely voters, but not well enough to erase the president’s edge of one to eight points — conservatives have fallen silent about this particular argument. Predictions that Romney would swamp Obama once polls switched to a more favorable pool didn’t pan out (somewhat improbably, the Fox News and UPI polls actually have Obama doing better among likely voters), so they’ve gone back to their standard whine about polls in general: Like the rest of the media, pollsters are unavoidably biased toward liberals and are doing their part to boost the president’s reelection chances.

The most common “evidence” for such bias is that pollsters – everyone except for the vaunted Rasmussen, who self-identifies as conservative and pens opinion pieces about the dangers of giving government bureaucrats control over health care – routinely oversample democrats. “It is hard to imagine more pro-Obama turn-out being devised by either Marist or Quinnipiac,” wails radio talker Hugh Hewitt in the Washington Examiner. (He ironically faults the methodology of polls “paid for by the MSM.” Apparently Fox News, which gives Obama a larger lead than nearly any other poll, is now mainstream media.) The argument contains a grain of truth, though the impact of such alleged oversampling is almost certainly exaggerated. There are legitimate reasons that more respondents identify as Democrats, beginning with the simple fact that more people simply identify as Democrats. The Pew Research Center’s national numbers put Dems at 32 percent of the electorate, Republicans at 24 percent, and Independents at 38 percent. Elections are close-run things, dividing the country almost exactly down the middle, but it is a fallacy to assume that party identification precisely tracks voting patterns. (If you believe 50 percent of the country must be Democrats and 50 percent Republicans, what happens when one party registers hundreds of thousands more new voters, as Dems did in 2008?) Sean Trende writes that “the same thing has occurred in every election. The losing side objects to the partisan composition of polling. The polls then proceed to get the final result roughly correct.” In 2004, it was Democrats doing the complaining; this year, it has become “a consistent theme among Republicans this cycle: looking at the party ID numbers and discounting polls that show substantial Democratic advantages.”

Polls do indeed include more Democrats, but this is due less to conspiracy than the edge the party has held for decades in voter identification and turnout. Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government site, which sees conspiracies behind more trees than the John Birch Society, flags a poll from Marquette University that shows an unusual uptick in respondents identifying as Democrats — and immediately concludes that “the University inflates their sample and lifts Obama into a 14-point lead.” When “reporter” Mike Flynn wonders, “Why did the school only radically change its sample after Romney began erasing Obama’s lead in the polls?” he showcases his ignorance. Most reputable pollsters can’t “change” their samples because they don’t choose their samples to begin with, at least not on the basis of party ID. With the exception of Rasmussen, polling outfits treat party ID as a response — something they are asking people, the point of conducting a survey in the first place — rather than as an intrinsic characteristic, like race or gender, for which the sample should be weighted. The Pew Research Center, a frequent target of conservative attacks, supplies this explanation: “Party identification is one of the aspects of public opinion that our surveys are trying to measure, not something that we know ahead of time like the share of adults who are African American, female, or who live in the South.”

There are far more mundane explanations for a seeming excess of Democrats than Marquette’s liberal academic cabal. Even if 2010 (when Tea Party fervor prompted a surge in Republican turnout that gave the parties parity at the polls) is used as a reference point instead of 2008 (a year of unprecedented liberal enthusiasm), the party ID numbers, with their steady increases in Independents at the expense of Republicans, still favor Democrats. In other words, even in a year in which Republicans voted in above-average numbers, they barely equaled the depressed number of Democrats. 2012 is not 2010 — most obviously, it is a presidential election, not a low-turnout midterm — and the partisan breakdown at the exit polls should land somewhere between 2008 and 2010. Andrew Hacker, writing in the New York Review of Books, observes that Republican confidence in a 2010-esque electorate may be “misplaced.” Forty-five million invigorated Republican voters turned out for the Congressional election, “well below the some 67 million they will need this year for a presidential majority.” In addition, “The 2010 electorate was also older, conspicuously white, and invigorated by its Tea Party allies . . . But 2012 will bring a much larger and more varied number of voters to the polls.” The question, of course, is how many “more varied” voters will show up. Will anti-Obama grievances produce an electorate that more closely resembles 2010, or will the president’s 2008 coalition of minority-educated-female voters reassert itself?

Regardless of the exact numbers, when conservatives complain that a poll has Democrats at +8. they ignore the fact that even the most tentative turnout estimates have Dems at +4 to begin with. A look at the responses to Pew’s long-standing question of “what would you call yourself?” shows that the country’s percentage of Democrats has held steady over the past two decades (from 33 percent in 1990 to 32 percent in 2012), while Independents have made major strides (29 percent to 38 percent) almost entirely at the expense of Republicans, who have lost eight percent of voters (31 percent to 24 percent). Conservative critics ignore the surge in people identifying as Independents, who are obviously voting for one candidate or the other – and to keep the near fifty-fifty split, it must often be the Republican. In an ideal conservative poll, party identification would be weighted in the same manner as other demographic characteristics like age or income. Indeed, Rasmussen employs just such weighting, which is one reason its results diverge from practically every other survey, giving Romney a one- or two-point edge that is seen nowhere else. (Rasmussen also has other issues with its methodology — see below.) Rasmussen’s tactics are a solution in search of a problem, as Sean Trende points out: “The problem is that party identification is not an immutable characteristic, such as race, age, or gender. It fluctuates.”

Another weakness in the conservative oversampling argument is its focus on party identification rather than ideology, which Trende notes tends to be “more consistent over time and . . . less susceptible to question wording and ordering.” A sample that is heavily Democratic is not necessarily heavily liberal. A Washington Post poll that talked to 25 percent Republicans, 34 percent Democrats and 34 percent Independents found that a whopping 39 percent actually identified as conservative, while only 29 percent described themselves as “liberal” and 20 percent as “moderate.” This is hardly a new trend, as the electorate has contained far fewer self-described liberals for years. Presumably, as most presidential elections are nearly 50-50 affairs, some of those “conservatives” vote for the Democrat, just as some of the people registered as Democrats in the surveys criticized by the right obviously vote for the Republican candidate. Such discrepancies are particularly evident in the South, where many older people in bright-red states are still registered as Democrats, a relic of the years in which the party still had a lock on white voters in the region. Even National Review, in its more sober moments, admits that Democrats have an advantage. Katrina Trinko offers “another possibility” to the usual accusation of bias:

At this particular point in the race, a higher percentage of voters may be identifying themselves as Democrats. That doesn’t mean they will still see themselves as Democrats on Election Day, but for whatever reason (such as excitement over the convention) they do now.

Interestingly enough, even center-right analysts like Sean Trende note that party registration is not the same thing as party loyalty; in a CBS/NYT poll of swing states much criticized by conservatives, the Florida breakdown was 27% Republican, 36% Democrat, and 32% Independent — ratios slightly more favorable to Democrats than the 2008 exit polls (34 R/37 D/29 I) showed. But when the survey asked about party registration, the Republican numbers actually started looking closer to the parity conservatives insist should exist: fully 42 percent were registered as Democrats, with 36 percent as Republicans and 20 percent as Independents. How a person is registered is clearly not the same as how that person votes. Trende dismisses the idea that Romney’s poor poll numbers can be attributed to an oversampling of Democrats. Because the ideological sample tracks more closely with the 2010 exit polls that conservatives prefer over the 2008 polls that reflect an energized Democratic Party, “this suggests that the ideological orientation of the surveys isn’t particularly skewed, but that Romney is doing unusually poorly among self-identified moderates.” Conveniently, Romney backers never mention that, while the electorate may officially skew Democratic, it also skews heavily conservative.

By far the most bizarre and deliberately mendacious conservative objection to standard polling methodology comes via Republican pollster John McLaughlin, who tells National Review that “the Democrats want to convince [these anti-Obama voters] falsely that Romney will lose to discourage them from voting.” It’s worth unpacking his “argument” point by point to see just how off-base it is, and just how damaging such an analysis should be to McLaughlin’s business prospects. Would you hire an expert who can’t even get the facts straight on his own field?

So they lobby the pollsters to weight their surveys to emulate the 2008 Democrat-heavy models. They are lobbying them now to affect early voting. IVR [Interactive Voice Response] polls are heavily weighted.

IVR polls (which use robo-calls — press one if you like Romney! —  instead of live interviewers) are indeed heavily weighted. But the only major robo-poller who weights its samples for party identification is . . . Rasmussen, which routinely puts Romney ahead of the president and hardly uses “Democrat-heavy models.” Nate Silver reminds us that “automated polls, like those from the Rasmussen Reports, have had lukewarm results for Mr. Obama. A Rasmussen Reports poll released on Thursday, for instance, put Mr. Obama three points behind in Iowa.” Despite reservations about robo-poll methodology, Rasmussen’s dubious weighting technique, and the exclusion of cell-phone owners, “Mr. Romney would much prefer the robopolls, warts and all.” So much for that lobbying.

You can weight to whatever result you want. Some polls have included sizable segments of voters who say they are ‘not enthusiastic’ to vote or non-voters to dilute Republicans. Major pollsters have samples with Republican affiliation in the 20 to 30 percent range, at such low levels not seen since the 1960s in states like Virginia, Florida, North Carolina and which then place Obama ahead.

You could weight to whatever results you want. But legitimate pollsters don’t. Only Rasmussen does. As for Republican affiliation in the 20s and 30s being “low” . . . . in 2012, 24% of Americans identified as Republicans.

The intended effect is to suppress Republican turnout through media polling bias. We’ll see a lot more of this. Then there’s the debate between calling off a random-digit dial of phone exchanges vs. a known sample of actual registered voters. Most polls favoring Obama are random and not off the actual voter list. That’s too expensive for some pollsters.

This is perhaps the weirdest criticism of all. Polls that call random digits still only speak to registered voters. In fact, the very first question on the survey — and I gave out lots of them as an interviewer at a push-poll outfit in 2004 — is a screen: “Are you registered to vote at this address?” The polls favoring Obama have never talked to “random” people. Earlier in the year, they spoke with all registered voters; as the election years, they have narrowed their sample even further to “likely voters,” a change which helps Romney put which still leaves him trailing the president by one to two points. And how interesting that McLaughlin should prefer the “actual voter list,” considering the efforts his party has made to kick Democrats off voter lists across the country . . . only to find out, as in Colorado, that the vast majority (around 99 percent) of those suspect names were legitimate Americans, not illegal immigrants itching to get deported by showing up at the voting booth.

Of course, liberals have their own critiques of poll methodology, many of which I – naturally – find more convincing than the fallacies trotted out by the right. They are certainly arguments made by a higher number of experts, as opposed to pundits whose only knowledge of statistics comes from twisting them to fit a thesis. While not every argument is as tinged with partisanship as the Huffington Post’s contention that Gallup undersamples minority voters, Nate Silver’s questions about the validity of polls (like Rasmussen) that rely on robo-calls (which aren’t allowed to dial cell phones) instead of live interviews or that fail to include cell phones in their samples are reasonable concerns at a time in which approximately one-third of Americans don’t have or regularly use landlines. Such Americans, of course, are disproportionately minority and low-income, which suggests that pollsters who don’t include them are employing the same logic behind the Republican argument that voter ID requirements are “fair” because they only disenfranchise a small slice of the electorate . . . . a slice that happens to vote nearly 100% Democratic. (For what it’s worth, Rebecca Rosen makes an interesting, though neither particularly persuasive nor fully fleshed-out, counter-argument at The Atlantic that the cell phone gap is meaningless because most well-off people have landlines, and the well-off are much more likely to vote.) Indeed, the surveys that exclude cell phones routinely lowball Obama’s lead in comparison to the live-interview consensus. Given that robo-poller Rasmussen also weights its surveys by party identification, which liberals would argue creates a sample with a higher percentage of Republicans actually exist, Nate Cohn observes at The New Republic that “it’s not hard to envision how [robo-polls] could systemically underestimate Obama’s standing. In a certain respect, it’s surprising that Obama ever took a lead in Rasmussen’s tracker after the DNC, since it required Obama to hold an unrealistically large advantage among independent voters.”

Some of the complaints are flimsier, like the Obama campaign’s objection to a New York Times “panel-back” poll that re-surveyed people previously contacted for an earlier poll. “The usual complaint is that the respondents who agree to be reinterviewed are different from those who don’t,” political scientist John Sides writes at The Monkey Cage. Re-interviewees are obviously more willing to talk to pollsters, with all the free time and affability such willingness implies, and may have been more motivated to seek out information about politics in the interim. Why this is a disadvantage for Obama is not entirely clear; why, for example, would the opinions of such a sample, even if affected by the initial survey experience, necessarily be cooler toward the president?

The left also engages in its own version of data cherry-picking, delving into the crosstabs of polls to find hopeful signs buried below more neutral or negative top-line results. Professional spin doctors like top Chicago strategist Jim Messina downplay positive numbers to avoid a sense of complacency in campaign volunteers. “I think you will see a tightening in the national polls going forward,” he predicted on a conference call with supporters. “Ignore the polls . . . . None of that matters. What matters is your voter contacts in your state.” Liberal blogger Greg Sargent cites a National Journal survey that gives the president good top-line numbers (50-43) but focuses on details he finds particularly encouraging:

Crucially, though, Obama holds a commanding 57 percent to 34 percent advantage among those who say their finances are unchanged. One reason for that critical tilt in his direction: Voters who say their finances are unchanged also say, by a resounding 53 percent to 33 percent margin, that they believe the country has been better off over these past four years because Obama, rather than another candidate, won in 2008.

It wouldn’t, after all, be as convenient to quote from the National Journal’s own analysis of the poll, in which Ronald Brownstein offers the caveat that “the saving grace for Republicans is that even as these surveys show Obama opening a consistent advantage, the president has not been able to push his support much past the critical 50 percent level, even after several difficult weeks for Romney that began with a poorly reviewed GOP convention.”

Often, the same numbers produce opposite interpretations from the two parties. While Republicans offer rough parity in the daily tracking polls as a sign of success — Romney pollster Neil Newhouse’s famous “sugar high” memo touted “a margin-of-error race with an incumbent President” — liberals see the glass as half-empty for Romney. “Obama has pulled into a tie with Romney on the economy in the last eight national polls,” Sargent crows in another post. “That’s after Romney led on the issue in many polls for nearly a year.” The sheer number of polls, especially unreliable push-polls conducted on a state level by a candidate’s own campaign or by a partisan lobbying outfit (e.g. the Chamber of Commerce), also enables contrasting versions of reality. CNN reports “good news” for swing-state incumbents, writing that “Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio holds a seven-point lead over Ohio state Treasurer Josh Mandell, the GOP candidate, in two surveys over the past two weeks.” Meanwhile, over at National Review, we’re told that “Mandel is down four points, but it remains a competitive race.” Interestingly enough, while CNN only reports on numbers from reputable outfits like Quinnipac and the WSJ/NBC poll and often cites its sources, the National Review only offers the nebulous “down four points” formulation. Four points in what, the internal polls ordered by Mandel’s strategists and used (as all candidates use internal polling) to bolster one’s case among supporters? The best way to deal with such “data” is to brush it off, as the Post’s “Fix” blog does with a similar claim by liberals: “Democrats insist they have data that shows Arizona to be a low single-digit race, but we remain unconvinced Obama can win there after losing it in 2008.”

Because there are only so many ways to spin a single set of “for whom would you vote” numbers, and because the candidates are running roughly even in the daily tracking polls, both sides turn to the more specific (and often more touchy-feely: which candidate would you rather invite to dinner?) questions to “prove” their frontman’s superiority. Andrew Sullivan highlights the liberal focus on Romney’s unfavorables: “Has a major-party Presidential candidate ever had to focus so much energy on getting his own party to be willing to vote for him?” Indeed, Romney’s favorability ratings actually slipped five points in September, despite the unflagging attempts by everyone from Ann Romney to former Bain co-workers at the Republican National Convention to “humanize” him. “Romney ranks as the first challenger in memory to have higher unfavorable than favorable numbers this late in the race,” reports National Journal, providing gleeful Chicago strategists with an irresistible hook for the next morning’s e-mail blast. Strangely, the Republican rebuttal amounted to this: “The fact is that while Obama was driving Romney’s negatives up, Obama’s own negatives were going up.” It’s not clear which polls supposedly showed a dip in Obama’s approval ratings; over the last month, his numbers across multiple surveys, as collected at Pollster.com, have either increased or held steady in the low fifties.

While Republicans talk up Romney’s advantage on the economy and the deficit, Obama’s supporters point to the president’s massive lead in favorability and likability ratings, as well as the edge voters hand him on helping the middle class and understanding the problems of average people. Romney’s edge on the economy and job creation is in fact evaporating; the president outpolled him on this question for the first time in the latest NYT/CBS survey, leaving “handling the federal budget deficit” the only issue on which the Republican led. Foreign policy, Medicare, the middle class, even honesty and trustworthiness: on none of these questions did Romney garner the better ratings. Nevertheless, Boston insiders continue to insist that high unemployment and low consumer confidence will ultimately sink the incumbent, bragging that “voters already believe Romney has a better chance of fixing the economy. We have to tell them just how it will be better for them.”

Cataloging the various partisan attempts to pick apart or promote friendly poll results is a never-ending exercise. Analyzing the minutiae of the polls themselves could (and has) filled books. To come up with his 538 election forecast, Nate Silver runs 25,001 simulations each day. Most of this math is, needless to say, over my head — and over Romney’s and Obama’s as well. But it all boils down to who’s ahead. The New Yorker’s John Cassidy extracts perhaps the most relevant — and, for Romney, perhaps the most damning — nugget from all the noise:

According to the Real Clear Politics poll-of-polls, which averages out all the most recent surveys, Obama is leading by more than three points. Since the start of the year, Romney hasn’t led the poll-of-polls. He has only drawn level once—immediately after the Republican convention.

Of course, Romney could stage a comeback. (And if you believe Rasmussen and Gallup, he’s doing well enough to not even need a comeback.) There are still 40-odd days until the election, which is why there is such a gap between Silver’s November 6 forecast, which puts the likelihood of an Obama victory at 77.6 percent, and his “Now-cast” (if the election were held today), which favors Obama a whopping 95.6 percent of the time. None of the poll results or favorability ratings will matter one whit in November, when it comes down to a single figure: 270, the number of electoral votes required to win the White House.

 

Dispatches From the “War on Women”

Cartoon by Matt Wuerkler for Politico

In the wake of Rep. Todd Akin’s comments about “legitimate rape,” the Republican National Convention featured a parade of X chromosomes in the form of female governors like Susana Martinez and Jan Brewer, as if Democrats had attacked the GOP for a lack of women rather than an attack on women. (Note that none of those women happened to be moderate Republicans; instead of Susan Collins of Maine or Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, the RNC chose hard-right stalwarts who endorse draconian restrictions on abortion, like Arizona’s ban on the procedure after 20 weeks that invokes dubious “fetal pain” rhetoric, measures the 20 weeks from the nosy criteria of the woman’s last period, and would throw doctors who violate the ban in jail for six months).

Unfortunately, the problem with the Republican Party lies in its ideas, which are universally hostile to reproductive freedom, not its gender breakdown. One need look no further than Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin to see that bad ideas are not an exclusively male phenomenon. Polls show that more women consider themselves “pro-life” (49 percent) than “pro-choice” (44 percent) and groups like the Independent Women’s Forum pride themselves on denying the very existence of a wage gap. Women who agree with Republican dogma are perfectly happy in the Republican party; it’s the party’s attempt to impose its conservative values on the rest of us that constitute the much-ballyhooed “war on women.” Likewise, plenty of women belong to the Catholic Church, but no amount of Marian worship is going to convince me that a religion that bars women from the priesthood and considers virginity the highest virtue is female-friendly.

At the Washington Examiner, it is not one of the paper’s pantheon of old white male columnists (a step away from the “dead white guys” of English Lit) but one of its few female reporters who is clueless enough to deem Paul Ryan a “pro-female Republican” and to characterize Rush Limbaugh’s slander of Sandra Fluke (a “slut” who is “having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception”) as mere “mocking.” It would be more accurate to say that Ryan is “pro” Republican females; he may be great if you’re a right-to-lifer, but his belief that “The freedom to choose is pointless for someone who does not have the freedom to live . . . so the right of ‘choice’ of one human being cannot trump the right to ‘life’ of another” isn’t doing much for the rest of us. Beyond the Examiner’s right-wing audience, I suspect many women are rolling their eyes at the suggestion that Ryan — who opposes abortion even in the case of rape or incest and who has repeatedly pushed legislation to declare embryos “persons,” with all the 14th Amendment protections that entails — is remotely pro-female.

In Tampa, Mitt Romney’s biography-heavy acceptance speech addressed women primarily in terms of motherhood. Various forms of the word “mom” came up 14 times, Lisa Belkin notes at the Huffington Post, which “was one more time than he said the word ‘Obama’ or ‘future’ and ten more times than the word ‘economy.'” He did toss some crumbs to working women, though his claim that, “in business, I mentored and supported great women leaders who went on to run great companies” was somewhat undermined by the fact, as reported by Bloomberg, that private equity has a horrible record on, uh, gender equity. Only 8 percent of Bain Capital’s managing directors and senior executives are women (right on track with the 8.1 percent average for the largest PE firms), a sharp contrast to the 30 percent at large investment and commercial banks. After this sop to the employed, Romney jumped feet-first into the motherhood rabbit hole. The candidate name-checked his own mother, suggesting that her 1970 Senate run schooled him in the importance of giving women a voice in politics, and made the improbable claim that his wife’s “job” as a full-time mother was “harder than mine” and “a lot more important” than anything Romney himself accomplished in the private or public sector. (Health care for all in Massachusetts? Heck, that’s nothing compared to wrangling a passel of tots.) Matt Yglesias calls B.S.:

After all, he’s the one running for president, not the spouse who purportedly did the harder and more important work. And the content of the GOP convention was overwhelmingly about the need to unchain the job creators, emphasizing over and over again that entrepreneurship and paid market labor are more important than childrearing and housekeeping. Romney even bragged that as governor of Massachusetts he appointed lots of high-ranking women to office—something he presumably did because he thought helping him govern a medium-sized state is actually more important than raising a handful of children.

Yglesias highlights the fact that it is not only Romney’s personal actions but his party’s policies that undermine his claim to value traditional “women’s work.” After all, there is nothing more appalling to Paul Ryan than the pre-reform welfare system, which supported low-income mothers without requiring them to work outside the home. If conservatives truly think raising children is a job unto itself, why are they running ads attacking Obama for supposedly “gutting” the welfare work requirement? It is this discrepancy that prompts Yglesias to title his post “Romney’s Incoherent View of Mothers.”

When Ann Romney herself took the stage, she too talked incessantly of motherhood. “It’s the moms who have always had to work a little harder to make everything right,” she confessed to the audience, before giving a bizarre shout-out — “I love you women!” — so transparent that I wondered whether a page from the Boston strategy binder had been slipped into the teleprompter feed. The speech may have appealed to the married women who constitute the Republican Party’s share, albeit meager, of the female vote, but it failed to speak to singles or women concerned with life outside the domestic sphere. (Contrast that to Michelle Obama’s response to a question from Parade Magazine about women “having it all”: “We have fought so hard for choice and options with our lives, and we’re just getting to that point where we’re willing to embrace all the different facets of woman­hood.”) Sally Kohn, the token liberal commentator on Fox News, snarks that Ann Romney “asked women to trust that Mitt and the GOP care about them, since their policies and statements show anything but.”

Ironically, though conservatives regularly accuse Democrats of reducing women to biology, the GOP’s motherhood obsession does just that. At the Weekly Standard, Meghan Clyne contends that Democrats of “view women as incapable of concerns beyond childbearing” and alleges that, to the liberal mind, “womanhood is thus defined by the desire for unrestricted abortion and free birth control.” What conservatives fail to realize is that, by elevating maternity to the pinnacle of female existence, they are no less obsessed with ovaries than the pro-choicers and femi-nazis they condemn. There is nothing more dehumanizing than being regarded as a glorified egg incubator. Take, for example, the synecdoche of “the womb,” as in erstwhile preacher and present-day talk show host Mike Huckabee’s allegation that President Obama “believes that human life is disposable and expendable at any time in the womb or even beyond the womb.” Slate’s Amanda Marcotte has few kind words for such sentiment:

Setting aside the usual annoyance at the way anti-choicers reduce women with arms, legs, and brains to “the womb,” this is just a risible and obvious lie. But it’s not one that Huckabee made up out of nowhere. Like Todd Akin and “legitimate rape,” this anti-choice myth that Obama hates babies so much he wants to smother them at birth has a long pedigree within the woolly world of anti-abortion activism.

Cartoon by Joel Pett of the Lexington Herald-Leader

Republicans love to make the case that women care less about niche issues like abortion than everyday, bread-and-butter things like the state of the economy. Political strategist Mary Matalin declares that “the presumption that all women are as obsessed with their ‘reproductive rights’ is retro, liberal tripe. Women are concerned about their jobs — or lack thereof, their bills, their families, the nation’s debt.” But that formulation still reduces women to single-issue voters who lack the ability to hold two thoughts in their mind at once or to have more than one priority. Newsflash: women, like men, can chew gum and walk at the same time. Matalin contends that “women are way more concerned about the kids they have, or hope to have, than the ones they may or may not abort.” This ignores the fact that reproductive choice is inextricably linked to economic well-being. Even as conservatives like Charles Murray lament the breakdown of the nuclear family and politicians like Rick Santorum denounce single mothers who mooch off welfare, Republicans seem unable to acknowledge the connection between giving women power over unplanned pregnancy — via contraception and, yes, abortion — and keeping women out of poverty. In the conservative worldview, women simply shouldn’t be having sex unless they’re ready to pop out a baby in nine months. For all the talk of “agency” and “independence” from government interference, there is very little debate about giving women agency over their own reproductive organs. Mary Curtis of the Washington Post’s “She the People blog” laments that “speaker after speaker deconstructed the category of ‘women’s issues,’ placed into its own category, separate from the grown-up stuff like the economy” — when women’s issues and economic issues are not separate at all. It’s a refrain that reminds me of the old feminist bumper sticker: Women’s rights are human rights.

Despite the GOP’s professed commitment to economic issues above all, their actions speak louder than words: In 2011, state legislatures passed a record number of restrictions on reproductive rights, according to the Guttmacher Institute. If Republicans really think the firestorm over Todd Akin’s comments are a Democrat-manufactured “distraction” from the lousy economy, they sure have a funny way of showing it. Far from focusing laser-like on job creation and middle-class finances, conservative legislators found time to enact 92 restrictions on abortion, a number which “shattered the previous record of 34 adopted in 2005.” More than 1,100 reproductive health provisions, mostly restrictions, were introduced in state legislatures last year, including attempts to ban all abortions after 20 weeks and force women seeking the procedure to undergo ultrasounds. “If conservatives do indeed want a ‘truce’ on issues like abortion,” writes Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly, “that’s fine with me: let them start observing one.” What Republicans have no right to do, he continues, is to “complain at this late date that when he [Akin] says something that reminds people of the underlying radicalism of the entire GOP’s position on reproductive rights, progressives are trying to “distract attention” from other issues by pointing it out.”

Obama on the RNC: “It was a rerun . . . . You might as well have watched it on a black-and-white TV.” Cartoon by Clay Bennet of the Chattanooga Times Free Press

Interestingly enough, even if Republicans are going to argue that women vote their economic interests, they still have to contend with the gender gap. Those economically concerned women are apparently voting for Democrats; Obama received 56 percent of the female vote (and won 70 percent of unmarried women) in 2008 and currently maintains an 8-point lead over Romney, according to Gallup. Married women tilt slightly more conservative — but you’d expect an edge in this category for the party of the cult of motherhood. For women in general, and single women in particular, the GOP’s policies hold little appeal. And right-wingers admit as much. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard does some mind-reading and reveals that liberals think the gender gap is due to the fact that “the pro-life position of Republicans causes women more than men to vote for Democrats.” (Actually, liberals can read polls as well as anyone else, and they too can see that a plurality of women identify as pro-life. The Republican stance on abortion is only one of many conservative policies that are, as Obama puts it, “better suited for the last century” or are, as Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa would have it, “from another century, maybe even two . . . It looks like the platform of 1812.”) Barnes continues: “This is untrue. That gap is based on other issues—Social Security, the role of government, domestic spending, financial security. The proof: It occurs in races where the Republican candidates are pro-choice, not just where they’re pro-life.” Did a conservative just admit that, when women take Sarah Palin’s advice and vote their pocketbooks, they vote . . . Democratic? So much for the theory that Romney will win in a landslide if he can only make this election a referendum on the economy.

Romney frequently attacks the president with the misleading (though statistically accurate) claim that “over 92 percent of the jobs lost under this president were lost by women,” and Rae Lynne Chornenky, the president of the National Federation of Republican Women, said in her RNC speech that “If there is a war against women, it is President Obama who has waged it.” Of course, the policies outlined by Romney and his running mate would slash funding for the very professional fields — teaching, government, health care — in which women are disproportionately represented. Without Obama’s stimulus package, thousands more teachers — female teachers — would have lost their jobs. Romney asks women to vote their economic interests, yet he advocates a dismantling of the social safety net that would leave women poorer, sicker and less able to provide for their families. Once Paul Ryan’s “hammock” of poverty programs and Medicaid coverage is eviscerated, where do Republicans think struggling women will turn? Kathleen Parker writes that “You have to have food on the table . . . . before you can start contemplating the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin,” but the financial implications of having a child hardly constitute ivory-tower philosophy. The ability to choose whether to give birth at 19 or 29 has a lot to do with securing a job that can put food on the table.

Another portion of Matt Yglesias’s superb Slate post on Romney’s attitude toward motherhood is so relevant here, and sums up the situation so much better than I could, that it’s worth quoting at length:

But there really is a profound difference here. The Obama administration, more or less, wants to encourage women’s full participation in the American economy. They’re advancing that goal through legislation barring pay discrimination and through legal abortion and subsidized contraception. They’re reforming the individual health insurance market so women will no longer pay higher premiums than men, so women will have an easier time switching jobs and launching businesses. They’ve proposed doubling the child care tax credit, one of several working-class tax benefits that would be eliminated under the Romney/Ryan plan.

By contrast, Romney has nothing. He doesn’t say women should go back to the kitchen, stop working, and instead do the much harder and more important job of raising kids full time. But he doesn’t want to spend any money or burden any business with any kind of rules or programs that would push us to a new more egalitarian equilibrium. Nor does his lip service to the values of full-time childrearing seem to have any content. He thinks the idea of paying poor women to stay at home and raise kids is outrageous and certainly doesn’t encourage fathers to engage in the much harder and more important job of full-time homemaking. He’s a guy who loves his wife and wants to say something nice about her when given the opportunity to talk on a national stage, and he’s a guy who doesn’t want to do anything to address the challenges that parents face in an economic environment shaped around the obsolete expectation that behind every working man there’s a full-time homemaker. But he’s not a guy who in any way acts as if there’s any content to his belief that full-time parenting is harder and more important that entrepreneurship or market labor.

It’s no coincidence that Newsweek chose last week to roll out a provocative article — “What the *#@% Is Wrong With Republican Men?!” — by Kathleen Parker, a reliable conservative who has been surprisingly direct in her recent critiques of the Romney-Ryan ticket. Her latest column slammed Ryan for his distortion-filled convention speech, and the observation I made in my last post bears repeating: If you’ve lost Kathleen Parker . . . . When the author of “Save the Males,” a 2008 book which insists that “men, maleness, and fatherhood have been under siege in American culture for decades,” writes that “Akin simply provided the exclamation point at the end of a Faulknerian paragraph of Republican offenses,” you know the “war on women” meme has penetrated the national consciousness further than the liberal blogosphere. Parker is still a partisan — she maintains that the war narrative was “carefully crafted” by Chicago to “divert attention and allow Democrats to change the subject” — but she also admits that, “hackneyed and contrived as this ‘war’ is, there’s a reason it has gained traction.” The reason, according to Parker’s interviews with young conservatives? “Because it’s true.” While she tends to make excuses for the GOP’s clumsy handling of women’s issues, attributing offenses like Paul Ryan’s attempt to limit Medicaid-funded abortions to cases of “forcible rape” to poor messaging skills, she is also quite damning in her assessment of her party’s “suicidal” tendencies. She asks,

To whom, then, are these Republicans talking? Apparently not to women, whom they treat not as equals but as totemic and unknowable. Which is to say, they don’t “get” women. As such, they risk losing not only independents and moderates, whose votes they desperately need come November.

Conservatives, who delight in accusing Democrats of waging wars on everything from Christmas to the Second Amendment, are hardly in a position to cry foul about the “war on women” narrative — especially since their presidential nominee is himself on record saying of Obama, “His policies have been, really, a war on women.” Often, the right-wing pundits who complain the loudest about being tarred with the anti-woman label are the ones who do the most to further the argument. Like Parker, they whine that Democrats “equate the pro-life position with being anti-female,” yet their words and actions repeatedly confirm liberal suspicions that, no matter how many female governors the RNC shuffles onto the conventions stage, a disturbing strain of misogyny persists at the heart of the conservative worldview. And for the record, being pro-life is not anti-female; attempting to legislate that every other woman obey your pro-life views is.

Eugene Robinson writes that there is a simple way to combat the liberal accusations; unfortunately, it’s one that Republicans don’t seem to consider an option (or perhaps aren’t able to force their rank and file to do): “The GOP refuses to do the one thing that would neutralize the “war on women” issue: Stop the misogynistic attacks. Stop them now.” In the same vein, I would advise that, if you don’t want to be accused of sexism, perhaps you shouldn’t say sexist things. Off-hand, nasty remarks about women surface so often in the right-wing media, bubbling up not only from expected places like the Rush Limbaugh show but from respectable legacy publications like National Review, that I occasionally find myself cutting and pasting them into a Word document just to . . . what? To create a record, I suppose; to quiet my outrage by attempting to assure myself that, hey, they’re not getting away with it. Someone — even if it’s just me — is noticing! If you’re looking for proof that Todd Akin is no sui generis off-the-ranch renegade, look no further than the following examples, helpfully annotated with suggestions for conservative writers. Sample advice to the WSJ’s James Taranto, who takes Chris Christie — that raving liberal GOP governor! — to task for “poor grammar” and “feminist pandering” for saying that the ACA “put[s] those bureaucrats between an American citizen and her doctor”: the term “feminist supremacists” is not OK outside of Pat Schlafly’s house.

First up, one of the most offensive things I’ve seen yet from the American Spectator, a magazine which is so over-the-top in its “Obama the Marxist” rhetoric that it would be easy to dismiss as fringe craziness if conservatives did not actually regard it as a reputable, worthy source of journalism. (Paul Ryan, who could potentially be a heartbeat away from the presidency, has written for the Spectator four times in the past year, and chose the Spectator to publish an anti-Obama screed alleging that the president harbors “a vision of a collective, government-centered society” and has turned America into “a welfare state in decline.”) The writers at the Spectator give Taranto’s “feminist supremacist” nonsense a full buy-in, seeking to link any Democratic woman those hairy-legged, bra-burning femi-nazis of the 1970s. At least, that’s what I think they’re doing; it’s not really clear what Larry Thornberry is getting at when he mocks Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s name, though I’m assuming he’s trying to imply that all liberals use words like “womyn” and “riot grrls.”

South Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserperson-Schultz, chairwomanperson of the Democratic Party, gave up a howler this morning on Fox News Sunday (along with her usual garden-variety nonsense). She said, with a straight face, that she didn’t know if the people who put together that infamous ad accusing Mitt Romney of causing a steelworker’s wife to die of cancer were Democrats.

“I have no idea of the political affiliation of folks who are associated with that super PAC,” our Debbie crooned. I wonder if Debbie has any opinion on whether or not the Pope is a Catholic.

“Crooned” is particularly classy here. I suppose Thornberry would describe anything President Obama says as “shucking and jiving.” Misogyny seems to be a pattern for Thornberry; more recently, he referred to Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s deputy campaign director, as “Mz Cutter.” (Does he think feminists also don’t believe in punctuation?)

Another gem from the Spectator comes in the form of a reaction to a New York Times op-ed by Greg Hampikian about the growing irrelevance of men. The op-ed, by a biology professor at Boise State University, is standard liberal Times fare; it offers some musings on how inconsequential males are to most species’ reproduction and young-rearing, but it’s not particularly offensive. The Spectator’s William Tucker detects a nefarious “progressive trend to declare women self-sufficient save for an occasional trip to the sperm bank” and somehow comes to the conclusion that writing about the limits of the Y chromosome “questions the very existence of people like myself.” He puts Hampikian in the category of “men who don’t want to be men.” Tucker obviously thinks the Times piece is over-the-top, so naturally he responds with something even more outrageous and ridiculous. He thinks the Times diminishes men, so he takes a hatchet to women. What sets humans apart from the animals is, he Tucker asserts, is men. “In terms of reproductive behavior, female chimpanzee and human females are not very different.” The clincher:

By concentrating only on the act of reproduction, Professor Hampikian has also missed out on something else — what we might call “civilization.” Here the shape and form of our public life — the rules and regulations by which we live, the trade and cooperation, conflict and war — have all essentially been crafted and created by men. Women are getting very good at participating and in some cases even exceeding the performance of men. But despite what feminist historians will tell you, civilization — in both its positive and negative aspects — has essentially come out of the male gene.

Well, gee, I guess passing along culture to the next generation and instilling the very values of “trade and cooperation” that Tucker extolls doesn’t count as contributing to civilization. How nice to know that women are now allowed to participate in civilization! The domestic, female-driven economy may not receive as much attention in the history books as Adam Smith or the Battle of Hastings, but it’s doubtful that civilization could have stumbled along without it. Conservatives talk a good game about the importance of motherhood — it’s a “a lot more important” than the presidency, after all — but when they reveal their true colors, it’s clear they have no respect or interest in women at all.

Then we have this lovely description of the author of “Prozac Nation,” which, in addition to mischaracterizing her Atlantic article (it was neither hysterical nor contemptible toward anyone), is just a crass ad hominem attack. Note to self: if you wish to be taken seriously by conservatives, pop out a few children first. And heaven forbid you ever visit a psychiatrist.

Elizabeth Wurtzel, the childless, manic-depressive attorney-writer who recently revived the Mommy Wars with an hysterical piece in the Atlantic charging that stay-at-home moms are contemptible and cultish, and helping to kill feminism, is on the fringe of the fringe.

The next outrage-of-the-week comes from Thomas Sowell, who is himself an outrage wrapped in an insult surrounded by an affront to civility. Sowell tosses out misogyny as a sort of afterthought; more typically, his worst remarks are related to the evils of affirmative action and his belief that every other African American in the country hates white people. Sowell is to race what Michelle Malkin or Ann Coulter is to gender; because he is a member of the group that once suffered the very discrimination he now engages in, he feels he should get a free pass to speak supposedly uncomfortable, Bill Cosby-esque “truths.” (Why talk of the “Democrat plantation” is any less offensive coming from someone whose ancestors were once enslaved on actual plantations is beyond me. It devalues the horror of slavery in the same way that anyone, even concentration camp survivors, who uses the term “Holocaust” to refer to killing animals for fur or the Iranian nuclear threat diminishes the tragedy of six million deaths.) Just as Ann Coulter is shocked, just shocked, that anyone would consider her sexist, Sowell bristles at being called racist . . . and yet he continues to say racist things. But I digress. In this case, what offends is his sense that he is entitled to comment on the appearance of any woman in the public sphere. Sandwiched between other “random thoughts” on entitlements and the Tea Party, he volunteers this question out of the blue:

Does anyone seriously believe that short dresses, exposing bony knees, make women look more attractive?

In another piece for National Review, Sowell offers this sentiment:

A political term that had me baffled for a long time was “the hungry.” Since we all get hungry, it was not obvious to me how you single out some particular segment of the population to refer to as “the hungry.”

Eventually, over the years, it dawned on me what the distinction was. People who make no provision to feed themselves, but expect others to provide food for them, are those whom politicians and the media refer to as “the hungry.”

Yes, a single mother working two jobs in order to put food on the table for her kids — the same woman the GOP believes should be voting Republican — is making no provision to feed herself. Thanks.

Rounding out the stable of nasty male writers at National Review is Kevin Williamson, who feels compelled to insert a dose of misogyny into a story that has nothing to do with gender. Describing budget troubles in San Bernardino, California, he writes:

A phalanx of pant-suited she-bureaucrats and the city attorney explained that in addition to filing for bankruptcy, the city needed to declare a fiscal emergency.

What do pant suits have to do with anything, other than to resurrect the 1990s conservative caricature of Hillary Clinton as a pant-suit-wearing, sexless battle-axe? And why is it relevant that the “bureaucrats” are female?

National Review also loves to publish screeds against abortion, usually in the form of interviews in which Kathryn Jean Lopez (who fashions herself as some sort of ambassador from the Vatican) pretends to ask reasonable questions while passive-aggressively encouraging the interviewee to make the truly bomb-throwing statements. Of course, this particular subject probably doesn’t need to be encouraged to say repugnant things. David Gelernter, whose book “America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered In the Obamacrats)” Lopez calls “alarming yet cautiously exuberant,” discusses what he terms a “cultural revolution” in higher education. (I think Chinese dissidents might take umbrage at such characterization.) He believes intellectuals “became contemptuous of biblical religion, of patriotism, of the family, of American greatness” and laments,

American culture had its throat slit and bled to death at our feet. Isn’t that revolutionary enough? The blood is only metaphorical, but to the 40 percent of [all] infants [who are] born to single mothers this year, the consequences will be real.

Did no one at National Review see something wrong with featuring an author who compares single parenthood to murder?

A final hint for the right: If you’re really so upset at being called sexist or misogynist, perhaps you shouldn’t do things like put scare quotes around the term “dating violence,” (“Biden, White House Take on ‘Dating Violence,'” the Weekly Standard reports), as if violence that happens in a relationship isn’t real violence at all. (Shades of “legitimate rape” — remember, it wasn’t so long ago that society considered rape within marriage to be a husband’s prerogative.) Frankly, even the appearance of the dating violence item on the Weekly Standard’s blog is suspect, given that the Obama administration is only ever mentioned in the context of embarrassing incidents (Solyndra! Joe Biden’s gaffes!) or wrong-headed policies (Israel, spending, Israel). That a PSA about dating violence warranted an entire post strongly suggests someone on the Standard staff sees domestic-abuse prevention as a waste of taxpayer dollars.

I could go on. There doesn’t seem to be an end to this sort of bile, and the perpetrators never learn — or never try to learn. Conservatives deride the “war on women” as nothing more than “a cynical political ploy hatched up by Axelrod and Plouffe at Obama HQ in Chicago,” but then strap on their armor and march into battle. You tell me there’s not a war on women? Fine. Put down your weapons and prove it.

The Inconvenience of Truth

Banksy takes on the Goebbels quotation

Last week, Garance Franke-Ruta at The Atlantic offered a good suggestion for journalists faced with the myriad untruths trotted out by the Romney and Obama campaigns. She praises fact-checking websites like PolitiFact and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, but concludes that “one-off fact-checking is no match for the repeated lie.” Political junkies read fact-check websites, but casual consumers — especially people who get most of their news from cable TV — may never venture into the weeds of a true-and-false listicle. The standard media practice of separating fact-checks, which are often written as short blog posts or hidden below the digital fold, from anchor articles necessarily limits their reach. Even if the New York Times runs an entry on its Caucus blog headlined “In Ryan Critique of Obama, Omissions Help Make the Case” and tucks a moment of editorial-page outrage away on Andrew Rosenthal’s “Taking Note” blog, the article splashed across its home page is a more traditional collection of quotations from Paul Ryan’s distortion-filled convention speech: “Rousing GOP, Ryan Faults ‘Missing’ Leadership.” Though Franke-Ruta sees a continued role for stand-alone fact checks, she advocates a more interventionist strategy in mainstream news stories:

The solution now as then lies in repeated boilerplate, either inserted by editors who back-stop their writers, or by writers who save it as B-matter (background or pre-written text) so they don’t have to come up with a new way of saying something every single time they file. Basic, simple, brief factual boilerplate can save an article from becoming a crutch for one campaign or the other; can save time; and can give readers a fuller understanding of the campaigns, even if they haven’t had time to read deep dives on complex topics.

She offers an example from the 2008 campaign as a precedent. To combat rumors that Barack Obama was a closet Muslim, writers regularly used language like “”Obama, who is a Christian” and “”the false allegation that Obama is Muslim.” Franke-Ruta acknowledges that such journalistic detail did little to disabuse the 18 percent of Republicans who still believe, despite four years of media scrutiny and Rose Garden appearances, that the president is socialist Kenyan devotee of Islam. But the boilerplate at least allowed journalists to report on the rumors without being so complicit in their promotion.

Franke-Ruta continues:

The underlying approach is not that different from using the terms “anti-abortion” instead of “pro-life,” “abortion-rights advocacy” instead of “pro-choice advocacy,” or calling Obama’s health-care law an “overhaul” rather than a “reform,” because of the implication that the result is an improvement. It’s basically an editorial decision that the news outlet in question gets to control the terms of the debate on its own pages, rather than outsourcing it to partisans, even as it seeks to fairly inform readers what those partisans are saying.

She would apply the boilerplate to, for example, the oft-repeated Democratic claim that Paul Ryan’s current Medicare proposal would increase costs for beneficiaries by $6,400, when the figure actually applies to a previous version of the Ryan plan. (The current version, as even Ryan admits, was deemed “unscorable” by the CBO.)

Use of a quote like this could be followed by a graf such as: The voucher system Obama is campaigning against was proposed by Ryan in his 2011 budget, but Ryan’s 2012 budget dropped the plan in favor of a proposal to subsidize private or traditional plans on new Medicare exchanges created a decade from now. The extra costs potentially imposed by the 2012 proposal on future seniors are not yet clear, though it is anticipated to raise them.

Instead, most news organizations let Obama and his surrogates get away with the falsehood, simply reporting the $6,400 accusation and occasionally appending a statement from the Romney campaign that says even less about the charge. Talk about boilerplate: the Boston flacks pump out identical language in response to anything they don’t like, whether true, false or egregiously inaccurate. Andrea Saul must have her own boilerplate queued up in the “paste” function of her Blackberry: “President Obama and his team are running a campaign of personal destruction to avoid talking about his failed economic record.” News outlets — especially publish-or-perish websites like Politico — dutifully record such responses, which contribute absolutely nothing to the discussion and seem designed as a CYA tactic to protect media outfits from lawsuits. Such he-said/she-said journalism gives readers no idea whether Obama is lying through his teeth or speaking truth to power; it simply repeats the spin each side wants voters to hear. Reporters are thus reduced to stenographers.

Lately, however, there have been glimmers of hope that the major news outlets are taking Franke-Ruta’s advice. The first sign was this line in a Times article:

The Romney campaign is airing an advertisement falsely charging that Mr. Obama has “quietly announced” plans to eliminate work and job training requirements for welfare beneficiaries, a message Mr. Romney’s aides said resonates with working-class voters who see government as doing nothing for them.

The welfare charge, rooted as it is in class warfare and racial resentment, is not only one of the nastiest lies of the campaign, but one of the most frequently debunked. On PolitiFact’s Truth-O-Meter, it was rated “Pants-on-Fire,” and Glenn Kessler awarded it the maximum four Pinocchios.Yet all the fact-checks in the world haven’t deterred the Romney campaign, whose spokesperson called the attack “Our most effective ad” because “it’s new information.” Well, it’s “new” because it’s entirely made-up. But Boston doesn’t let what Karl Rove would call the “reality-based community” get in the way. “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers,” said Romney pollster Neil Newhouse. Instead, it will be dictated by people like Rove himself, who never had a problem with bending the truth to bolster George W. Bush’s record and continues to fabricate tissue-thin versions of reality as a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. If campaigns are content to ignore fact-checkers, the struggle for accuracy must be shifted into news coverage itself — written, as James Fallows of the Atlantic says, “in the reporter’s own voice.” The Times article exemplifies this shift; it doesn’t tell the reader that an Obama spokesperson alleges the ad is false or that fact-checkers have cast doubt on the welfare claim. It says, plainly and without qualification, that Obama never “gutted” welfare or eliminated” the work requirement. (In fact, the administration is offering flexibility to states, mostly ones led by Republican governors, that can use innovative programs to move 20 percent more people off welfare.)

Other examples of Franke-Ruta’s boilerplate in action have cropped up across the mainstream media. At Mother Jones, Kevin Drum points to an LA Times article that reveals the lie in the headline itself:

Drum praises the LA Times, writing that “it’s about time reporters and copy editors started putting this stuff front and center.” While I don’t share his optimism that even the most direct call-outs by the media will lead to politicians “paying a very visible price for spouting these lies” — I’m much more of the James Fallows school, which asks, “but what if it turns out that when the press calls a lie a lie, nobody cares?” — the LA Times headline is indeed a step forward. In an interview with media critic Eric Wemple, the Times’ Washington bureau chief explains that separate fact-checking articles are not always sufficient. “We need to try new ways to at least make clear to the readers what the camps are doing,” David Lauter says, and points out that, while Santorum’s speech itself was “interesting but not exactly news” (or, as Wemple writes, it was nothing we hadn’t heard “300 times in the primary season”), the politician’s willingness to tell a bald-faced lie was newsworthy. Wemple observes that “In the case of Santorum, he wasn’t the nominee nor the keynote speaker, and the point about work requirements has been significant to the Romney campaign.” Thus, Lauter determined that, “in this case, it was not a particularly close call”: the lie made it into the header.

The “Obama is giving your money to those people” subtext of the welfare falsehood has also been addressed quite explicitly by the AP, which headlined an article, “Romney pushes on with discredited welfare attacks.” The piece garnered a lot of attention for its suggestion, the most direct yet by a mainstream media outlet, that the welfare charge is “could open Romney up to criticism that he is injecting race into the campaign and seeking to boost support among white, working-class voters by charging that the nation’s first black president is offering a free pass to recipients of a program stereotypically associated with poor African-Americans.” Less sensational, but perhaps just as significant, as the AP’s effort to address the racial elephant in the room is its assertion in the first paragraph that “Mitt Romney claims he’s got a winner with his criticism that President Barack Obama is giving welfare recipients a free ride. Never mind that aspects of his argument against the Democrat are factually inaccurate.” The article notes that fact-checkers — “including the Associated Press” — have dismissed the allegations, but even the AP’s own fact check probably ran in few newspapers. The stand-alone article about the advertisement’s racial subtext, on the other hand, received significant play in outlets across the country.

The welfare charge is not the only lie being addressed head-on by the media. Fallows himself highlights a bit in the print edition of the New York Times addressing the Republican distortion — omnipresent on the first day of the convention and currently filling TV screens across the country — of the president’s “You didn’t build that” statement.

Recently, conservatives have not only twisted the meaning of Obama’s remarks (he was referring to infrastructure, not saying that entrepreneurs don’t create businesses) but “selectively edited” them, splicing together fragments from the speech in order to turn non sequiturs into a supposedly unbroken indictment of capitalism that has served as a non-stop audio track to the convention. The Times’ blunt acknowledgement that “He Wasn’t Saying That” addresses this distortion, albeit with considerable qualifications in the piece below. The item received little play on the website — it was part of a live blog of the Republican convention that didn’t even merit its own URL — but there is something hopeful about its appearance in the print edition.

Yesterday, similar directness on a different subject cropped up in another Times article.

Rae Lynne Chornenky, the president of the National Federation of Republican Women, addressed the convention on Monday, repeated the oft-discredited claim that 92 percent of all the jobs lost under Mr. Obama were those of women.

On issues that require a more nuanced take, simply inserting words like “false” or “oft-discredited” does not suffice. The argument over the $716 million that Obama’s health care reform either steals (if you ask a Republican) or saves (if you ask a Democrat) is not such a straightforward lie as the welfare attack; it contains at least a grain of truth. Both the Times and the Post manage to address the issue in news articles, however, and their language is so rote that they seem to be following Franke-Ruta’s advice about automatic qualifiers. The similarity between the two papers’ approaches to Paul Ryan’s convention speech is striking. Here’s the Post on the Medicare question, as well as on Ryan’s tenure on the Simpson-Bowles commission:

However, at several points, Ryan critiqued Obama’s positions without disclosing the fact that he had held similar ones. For instance, although he attacked Obama for reducing Medicare spending by more than $700 billion, his own budget proposal would curb the program by a similar amount. He also criticized the president for not supporting the recommendations of a bipartisan commission on deficit reduction, without noting that he had been a member of the commission and had not supported it either.

And here is the Times:

Mr. Ryan was referring to a provision of the health law that cuts more than $700 billion in projected spending from the Medicare program. Mr. Ryan’s budget assumes similar reductions, a point Democrats will be certain to continue making in the weeks ahead.

Likewise, Mr. Ryan, whose deep budget-cutting plans drew intense criticism from Mr. Obama long before the Republican ticket was completed, accused the president of failing to act on the recommendations of his own bipartisan debt commission. Mr. Ryan did not mention that he had served on that commission and dissented from its policy proposals, which included specific steps to reduce budget deficits.

Both papers present the facts without veering into the opinion-page territory of labeling Ryan a liar. Conservatives like to paint fact checks as thinly-disguised spin, but the Times and the Post are careful not to pass judgment. Contrast such cool treatment in the news pages with the harsher verdict of the Post’s editorial:

Mr. Ryan’s selection prompted a serious discussion of Medicare reform but also ushered in a depressingly predictable series of “Mediscare” charges and counter-charges. Mr. Ryan stooped to some of that Wednesday night, asserting that “the greatest threat to Medicare is Obamacare,” although the health care law began the hard task of reforming the program. He assailed Mr. Obama for having “funneled” $716 billion out of Medicare, without mention that his own budget assumed cuts of precisely that magnitude.

It’s worth noting that even loaded terms like “stooped” and “Mediscare” maintain a civility scarce among the self-proclaimed fact checkers of the blogosphere. Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast writes of a “cavalcade” of lies and concludes that “It just boggles the mind to imagine how Paul Ryan can stand up there and lash Barack Obama for abandoning Bowles-Simpson when he did exactly that himself.” New York Magazine’s Dan Amira gripes that, with all the “lies and deception” in the speech, “Ryan’s pants are on fire, but all America saw was a barn.” The Post’s editorial looks tame by comparison.

Of course, not every issue should be — or even can be — fact-checked. Conservatives have a point when they complain that fact-checkers overstep their bounds when they attempt to police more subjective statements. When Romney surrogate John Sunnunu calls Obama “un-American” or Rush Limbaugh accuses a Georgetown grad student of wanting taxpayers to fund her sex life, the remarks are certainly odious — but they’re not necessarily inaccurate in the traditional dichotomy of true and false. They’re opinions, albeit opinions based on twisted reasoning and malicious intent, but they are opinions nonetheless. Likewise, there are plenty of issues that spark controversy because of differing perspectives, not differing facts; in such cases, he-said/she-said journalism still has a place. Abortion, for example, is a hot-button topic because morality is inherently uncheckable; there are no facts that will convince a pro-lifer that restricting abortion restricts a woman’s autonomy, just as there are no facts that will convince a pro-choicer that ending a pregnancy is tantamount to murder. Someday we may be able to offer a fact-check about the moment a fetus becomes “alive,” but currently no amount of science or mainstream consensus will make abortion foes believe that fetuses don’t feel pain. It’s simply not an issue worth litigating on PolitiFact or FactCheck.org, much less in mainstream news articles. In fact, it’s often the best journalists can do just to report the opinions on both sides of the issue. Less controversial but equally subjective are the merits of labor unions, a question on which the Times wisely reverts to the old he-said/she-said dynamic. There is no “truth” to append to the argument, no statement like “PolitiFact has ruled that unions make America happier and more prosperous” to add to the debate. On the right to form a union via card check, which the Republican Party platform opposes, the Times relies on an “on the one hand . . . on the other hand” formulation:

Employer groups argue that card check is far less trustworthy than secret ballot elections, asserting that union organizers pressure workers to sign pro-union cards. But labor leaders complain that election campaigns often turn into an unfair exercise in which companies intimidate workers and have far greater access and ability to persuade workers than the union has.

Though both sides of the aisle take issue with fact-checking, especially when it occurs in the middle of a straight news article, the conservative dogma of a “liberal media elite” plotting against Republicans means that most of the ridicule comes from the right. Certainly Democrats, including myself, have problems with PolitiFact, particularly in its designation as “Lie of the Year” the assertion that Paul Ryan’s budget proposal would “end Medicare as we know it.” Frankly, saying that the Ryan plan — which would give seniors a voucher to cover the second cheapest insurance option or put toward traditional fee-for-service Medicare — doesn’t end Medicare is like saying that a company switching its employees from a pension plan to a 401(k) isn’t ending defined-benefit retirement as we know it. Yet any liberal dissatisfaction with media fact checking is overwhelmed by the vehemence of the right. The Washington Post points to one example of many:

Jon Cassidy, writing on the Web site Human Events, said one fact-checking outfit declares conservatives inaccurate three times as often as it does liberals. “You might reasonably conclude that PolitiFact is biased,” he wrote.

Well, you might conclude that. Or you might conclude that conservatives lie three times as often as liberals. If Romney doesn’t like the fact that, as Charles Blow observes, 42 percent of his statements reviewed by PolitiFact have been classified as “Mostly False”, “False” or “Pants on Fire” (compared with 27 percent for Obama), perhaps he should stop saying things like “We’re only inches away from no longer being a free economy.” He earns “Pants on Fire” ratings at four times the rate of the president not because of fact-checker bias but because such statements are patently ridiculous. Still, conservatives soldier on with the narrative of the liberal PolitiFact stooges. At National Review, Mona Charen conveniently invents a universe in which Paul Ryan has Democrats shaking in their boots: “There’s a reason the so-called “fact-checkers” and other liberals have gone beserk about him. It’s quite simply this: He is the most impressive Republican politician since Reagan . . . . As such, he delights us and scares the Hell out of them.” I’d argue that Charen misses the largest similarity between Ryan and Reagan: both are/were actors, and both traffick in untruths.

James Fallows, who pointed out the Times’ “You Didn’t Build That” headline in the Atlantic, explains why he sees little bias in the paper’s decision to call out the Romney camp’s mendacity. He compares the Obama quotation to Romney’s own “I like to fire people” remark, which was likewise stripped of context by the opposition and used against the candidate. In both cases, Fallows writes, it’s apparent that the speaker didn’t really mean what the attack ads imply: Romney wasn’t saying he enjoys laying people off, and Obama wasn’t saying entrepreneurs deserve no credit for their success. Yet the “You didn’t build that” remark has morphed into a centerpiece of the Romney campaign, complete with its own line of T-shirts. “I like to fire people” was a joke on late-night TV for a couple days. Fallows continues:

Nonetheless their party is devoting much of its convention time and ad budget to the pretense that Obama “really” thinks that people don’t achieve things on their own; this is another step toward post-truth politics. And here is the fair-minded test: if the Democrats spend comparable emotion and air time in Charlotte on “I like being able to fire people,” they will be just as misleading and should be called out in just the same way. Including, yes, with a comparable headline in the NYT.

For as much as conservatives pretend not to care about the verdicts of fact-checkers — see National Review’s recent “PolitiFiction” — they spend an inordinate amount of time refuting those checkers’ conclusions. After media outlets from the AP to National Journal (aggregators at The Week actually compiled a list titled “The media coverage of Paul Ryan’s speech: 15 euphemisms for ‘lying'”) had the audacity to point out that Ryan blamed Obama for the closing of a GM plant in Ryan’s hometown of Janesville that actually closed during the Bush administration, the Romney camp fired back with the legalistic contention that Ryan didn’t technically blame the president for the shut-down. The actual line in Ryan’s speech?

Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: ‘I believe that if our government is there to support you, this plant will be here for another hundred years,’ That’s what he said in 2008. Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day.”

“I’m not saying it was his decision,” Ryan protested later on CNN. “I’m saying he came and made these promises, makes these commitments, sells people on the notion that he’s going to do all these great achievements, and then none of them occur.” The Post reports that a Boston spokesperson also defended the Janesville accusation by “point[ing] to a campaign statement by Obama in late 2008, when it was announced production would end, that he would ‘lead an effort to retool plants like the GM facility in Janesville.'” And Obama did engineer a bailout of Detroit that kept hundreds of plants open — but apparently he can be faulted for not focusing on the hometown of one Wisconsin congressman. Would the “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” GOP have preferred a more far-reaching bailout, possibly a nationalization of the auto giants altogether?

Cowed by the Romney campaign’s indignant reaction, fact-checkers modified their original analyses to note that GM only announced its closing under the Bush administration; it ultimately locked its doors under Obama. Contrary to Republican complaints, the fact-checking community is still more concerned with false equivalence than with “nailing” conservatives. In an attempt to appear even-handed, Glenn Kessler gives credence to Ryan’s distorted timeline and obvious implication that Obama can be faulted for half a century of auto industry mismanagement. He writes that “The plant was largely closed in December 2008 when production of General Motors SUVs ceased — before Obama was sworn in. A small crew of about 100 workers completed a contract for production of medium-duty trucks for Isuzu Motors, a contract that ended in April 2009.” The lamest part of this whole manufactured controversy is that even if Ryan is technically correct that the plant closed under Obama, it hardly closed under his policies. In no sane reality can a president in office for three months be blamed for a factory shuttered before the Detroit bailout even took effect. Ryan implies that the newly inaugurated president should have focused not on rescuing a foundering financial system from a second Great Depression but on preventing the already-scheduled closing of one Midwestern factory. Whatever happened to the Bain doctrine of creative destruction? If Ryan wants to talk about the unfairness of one group of workers being laid off to preserve the viability of a larger industry, he could start with the folks at AmPad or GST Steel fired during Romney’s stint in private equity.

Interestingly, amid the movement of mainstream media sources to imbed assessments of accuracy in their news articles, one prominent outlet took a step backward in opting for the opposite tactic on the Janesville story. The spineless culprit? The Wall Street Journal, natch, which headlined its brief item on the controversy “Democrats: Ryan Misled on Plant Closing” and wrote that “Democrats said Mr. Ryan implied that the plant closing was the fault of the Obama administration,” neglecting to mention that Ryan’s narrative had been debunked not only by Chicago but by the vast majority of independent fact-checkers. Funny how the Journal doesn’t seem to have trouble citing fact-checkers and debunking myths when it comes to misleading ads or inaccurate statements about Bain Capital by the Obama camp.

So do conservatives really lie more than liberals? They certainly seem to double down more frequently on the lies that they do tell. When David Axelrod joked to the Times that the Romney campaign was relying on “the audacity of mendacity,” veteran White House reporter Jackie Calmes seconded the sentiment, if not the tone. And this is from a straight news article:

The partisan operative’s critique was harsh even by the standards of the normal combat of presidential politics. But it is one that was echoed to some degree by a raft of nonpartisan fact-checking articles, commentary and editorial columns recently, especially on Thursday after Mr. Ryan, who generally has been credited as a straight-shooter throughout his career in the House of Representatives, in his prime-time convention speech on Wednesday night repeated some debunked claims by Mr. Romney and added a few widely disputed statements of his own.

Calmes takes Franke-Ruta’s advice and runs with it, going beyond the boilerplate insertion of facts to essentially point out that, at least lately, conservatives have indeed lied more than Democrats. “Criticism from the Obama campaign could well be dismissed among voters as the usual stuff of politics, and independent fact-checkers have criticized some of Mr. Obama’s statements, too,” she writes, in the harshest condemnation of the Romney campaign’s disdain for the truth that I’ve read yet in the Times’ news pages. “Still, the number of falsehoods and misleading statements from the Romney campaign coming in for independent criticism has reached a level not typically seen.”

Perhaps more significant than the number of lies peddled by Romney & Co. is the doggedness with which Boston repeats the falsehoods. Despite all evidence, Romney presses ahead with discredited allegations about “gutting welfare” and “apology tours.” Democrats tell plenty of lies — see Harry Reid’s outlandish suggestion that Romney paid no taxes for an entire decade, the deceptive statement that Romney’s 13.9% effective tax rate is lower than that of most middle class families, or the Obama advertisement incorrectly claiming that Romney opposes abortion, even in cases of rape or incest — but they rarely rise to the level of absurdity of the Janesville jujitsu. Harry Reid aside, Democrats are more likely to walk back or abandon arguments deemed by fact checkers to be inaccurate. (OK, the “end Medicare as we know it” line is also an exception, though the idea that PolitiFact got this one right is, in my mind, pretty far-fetched.) Obama quickly backed off the notorious — and widely panned — Priorities USA ad that linked Romney to the death of a laid-off steelworker’s wife. It’s crucial to note, as well, that while Romney and Ryan are content to lob their fictional allegations themselves, many of the more dubious liberal claims come from super PACs not controlled by the campaign. Of course, the separation between super PACs and the official campaigns is tissue-thin, but this is not a particularly winning argument for Romney, whose former campaign manager now heads the main pro-Romney super PAC (just as former Obama operatives head Priorities), and who claimed during the primaries that any inappropriate coordination would send him to “the Big House.”

Where Obama once asserted ad nauseam that the Romney-Ryan Medicare plan would raise costs for beneficiaries by $6,400, the president now acknowledges that the figure is taken from an outdated version of the Ryan plan: “I do not think it is a good idea to set up Medicare as a voucher system in which seniors are spending up to $6,000 more out of pocket. That was the original proposal Congressman Ryan put forward.” Other Democrats, like Chris Van Hollen (Ryan’s Democratic counterpart on the House Budget Committee), continue to use the inaccurate figure, and they should be called out on it. That said, at least Ryan actually proposed a plan that would indeed have shifted the costs in question. By contrast, Romney’s welfare attack accuses Obama of doing something he never did, and the Republican claim that the new Ryan plan would impose no extra costs on current seniors is demonstrably false (repealing the ACA would put reopen the prescription drug “donut hole,” put seniors on the hook for currently free preventative care, and increase Medicare premiums calculated as a share of total costs by spending more on the program as a whole).

Like Republican falsehoods, many of Obama’s dishonest statements can be finessed as technically, sort of true. The abortion ad alleged that Romney “backed a bill that outlaws all abortion, even in case of rape and incest,” and Romney has indeed indicated support for “personhood” legislation that would give fetuses 14th amendment rights to “equal treatment under the law.” It’s difficult to see how classifying abortion as the murder of a fully-formed human being is conducive to exceptions. To a greater degree than Republican lines of attack, Democratic accusations tend to be based on emotion and subjective evaluation, rather than a cut-and-dried distortion of the facts. It’s impossible to fact check an ad in which employees laid off from Bain-controlled companies lament Romney’s lack of concern for regular people. True, private equity companies exist to make money, not save jobs — but the ads rarely make that claim. Instead, they rely on heartstring-tugging personal testimony that amounts to little more than personal opinion. At the Republican National Convention, Staples co-founder Tom Stemberg talked up the nominee and slammed Obama for “demonizing the private equity industry that has created so many new jobs.” But demonizing is not the same as lying. One appeals to emotion, the other to false pretenses. In much the same way that fact-checkers raised an eyebrow at the Janesville timeline, they have taken Chicago to task for blaming Romney for factory closings that happened after his official retirement from Bain. Yet those same fact-checkers have also dinged the Republican nominee for conflicting statements about the date he stepped away from Bain, and Romney was CEO by law if not in spirit during many of those closings. (This doesn’t even account for the fact that Romney continued to make money from Bain investments for a decade after his “retirement,” which opens an even more tangled can of culpability worms.)

Ezra Klein, whose politics are liberal but whose Wonkblog prides itself on at least attempting dispassionate analysis, actually seems disappointed — I’ll let you judge whether the sentiment is genuine or just concern-trolling — that, “quite simply, the Romney campaign isn’t adhering to the minimum standards required for a real policy conversation.” Klein is no fan of false equivalency, but you get the idea that he’d prefer some actual equivalency, which would eliminate the need to equate one side’s fibs with the other’s howlers:

I don’t like that conclusion. It doesn’t look “fair” when you say that. We’ve been conditioned to want to give both sides relatively equal praise and blame, and the fact of the matter is, I would like to give both sides relatively equal praise and blame. I’d personally feel better if our coverage didn’t look so lopsided. But first the campaigns have to be relatively equal. So far in this campaign, you can look fair, or you can be fair, but you can’t be both.

So why has the Romney-Ryan ticket been so mendacious, despite an unprecedented effort not only by official fact-checkers but by the media in general to hold it accountable? In another blog post, Klein calls Paul Ryan’s convention speech “blistering,” yet notes that the veep candidate was raked over the media coals the next day for his numerous untruths. “What’s worse, the untruths were unnecessary,” he writes. “Almost every one of them could have been rephrased as an equally devastating, and reasonably accurate, attack. Obama, for instance, has released a debt plan. So rather than say he hasn’t, why not just say “the president has never proposed a path to a balanced budget” or “even the president’s own party rejected his budget when it appeared before Congress?” Klein’s point doesn’t address the most egregious of the Romney campaign’s falsehoods, many of which (e.g. the welfare attack) seem designed to throw red meat to the base without regard for accuracy. In such cases, Boston takes advantage of the unfortunate reality that efforts to debunk a lie often just perpetuate the lie itself — see “birtherism” or the Obama-as-Muslim trope, which have likely benefited from the attention called to them by the eye-rolling media elite.

Still, Klein’s befuddlement is echoed in the latest column by Kathleen Parker, a conservative who is normally sympathetic to the GOP but who has recently objected to its treatment of women’s issues, among other things. (If you’ve lost Kathleen Parker . . . .) She writes, “In one instance, Ryan criticized Obama for ignoring the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles commission.” She continues:

What Ryan didn’t mention is that he served on the commission and that he voted against its proposals. There’s nothing wrong with either of those facts except their omission. His criticisms would have carried more weight had he mentioned them and elaborated. What’s wrong with saying, “I served on the commission and, while I had problems with it and voted against it, it was the right approach. We just didn’t go far enough, and the president simply looked the other way.”

Parker laments Ryan’s growing reputation for untruth-telling, asking, “Whom does this serve? Certainly not the Romney/Ryan ticket, which now risks being perceived as less than straightforward. This is crucial, given a recent Gallup poll that found Obama leading Romney (48 percent to 36 percent) on the question of who is more trustworthy.” Here, Parker inadvertently stumbles upon the real reason for the persistence of what Steve Benen has chronicled as “Mitt’s Mendacity”: The public just doesn’t care. Would his “trustworthy” numbers tick upwards if he told the truth more often? Unlikely, given that his favorability ratings remain mired at 40 percent, and that the “likability” gap separating him from the president is in the double digits. Slate, which partnered with Survey Monkey to run a real-time online survey during Romney’s acceptance speech, asked respondents whether Ryan’s speech would hurt the ticket’s chances in November, given that it “has been criticized by some media organizations for containing false or misleading information.” Forty-five percent said it wouldn’t hurt Romney’s chances at all; only 27 percent thought it would. (Twenty-eight percent “didn’t know.”) “Maybe those surveyed don’t believe their fellow Americans will be able to discern fact from fiction,” Slate wrote. “Or maybe they just think the average citizen doesn’t care what’s true.”

More likely, the Romney campaign is responding to the new political reality described by philosophy professor Jason Stanley on the New York Times’ “The Stone” blog as one in which “Americans no longer expect or care about candidates making honest assertions in the public sphere. They no longer expect consistency and honesty from politicians, and the savvy political campaigner recognizes that there is no cost to making statements that contradict even their most well-known beliefs.” Stanley goes much further than I would, positing that “it may not be possible to assert or lie anymore in a presidential campaign” because “the trust required to support the existence of such speech acts is absent.” Perhaps that’s true, but Stanley then uses this as an excuse to get Romney off the hook: “The Romney campaign is not at fault for making false statements. They are just astutely taking advantage of the political environment in which all campaigning now takes place.”

This ignores the vast discrepancy between the quantity of lies told by each party. It ignores the fact that writing off truth-telling as just another outdated, past-its-prime fetish is a grindingly pessimistic act. We may laugh at the post-modern idea of “truthiness” but we should not celebrate it. Even if the media can’t change the atmosphere of a campaign or force the candidates to stick to reality, it should not abandon its duty to hold elected officials’ feet to the fire, to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” as the Finley Peter Dunne chestnut goes. Here, we should return to Garance Franke-Ruta, who puts it best: “And if lies are going to be repeated, the truth has to be, too.”

Todd Akin Is a Jerk, But Not an Outlier

Todd Akin’s crime: saying what too many in the GOP really think. (Photo via The Week)

The GOP doesn’t like the intimation, originally made by Democrats last spring when Republicans howled about insurers being forced to cover contraception and Rush Limbaugh infamously applied the “slut” label to a Georgetown grad student, that it is waging a “war on women.” To be fair, conservatives have a point; it’s more accurate to say the GOP is waging a war only on women who value autonomy, reproductive rights and the hard-won victories of 20th-century feminism. Considering half the country votes Republican, perhaps that eliminates a lot of American women. But every time an aggrieved conservative like Kathryn Jean Lopez, the uber-Catholic writer at National Review, attempts to make the argument that “much of this ‘war on women’ rhetoric is a cynical scare tactic to ensure that single women vote Democrat this November,” some Republican Neanderthal comes along and knocks the entire debate back to the 1950s. The most recent Exhibit A: U.S. Rep. Todd Akin, the candidate challenging Claire McCaskill for her Missouri Senate seat, who stirred up controversy on both sides of the aisle when he tried to explain why he opposes abortion in all cases, without exceptions for rape or incest. Pregnancy, according to Akin, hardly ever happens unless a woman is, you know, faking a rape:

It seems to me, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. You know, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

To their credit, prominent Republicans — including Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell and Scott Brown — denounced the remarks, though Akin’s ill-advised monologue differed more from the Republican party line in its impolitic rhetoric (and its junk science) than in its substance. How shocked, just shocked could conservative luminaries possibly be when Akin’s hard-line position on abortion and invocation of “legitimate” rapes is a mere finger’s breadth away from the beliefs of the Republican vice-presidential nominee? As Margaret Carlson writes at Bloomberg View, “The difference between Ryan’s views and Akin’s could fit on a Post-it note.”

Paul Ryan, with his 100% rating from the National Right to Life Committee, also opposes abortion without exceptions for rape, incest, or the woman’s health. (He would permit it only in “cases in which a doctor deems an abortion necessary to save the mother’s life.”) When Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels proposed a “truce” on social issues, Ryan fired back, saying, “I’m as pro-life as a person gets. You’re not going to have a truce.” Ryan is as good as his word; in the House, he and Akin were co-sponsors of the Sanctity of Human Life Act, a lovely little piece of “personhood” legislation that would have defined humanity as beginning at conception, when the sperm meets the egg, and given embryos the “all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.” The law would not only have allowed states to criminalize abortion, but would have potentially enabled them to ban the morning-after pill (on the scientifically dubious grounds that it could prevent a fertilized embryo from implanting in the uterus) and in vitro fertilization (the procedure that produced one of Mitt Romney’s grandsons). In 2010, Ryan penned an essay titled “The Cause of Life Can’t Be Severed From the Cause of Freedom,” and Daily Beast writer Michelle Goldberg has this to say about the veep candidate’s cri de coeur: “For anyone who wants to know how Ryan thinks, that essay is worth reading. It’s about 1,500 words long, but the word “woman” doesn’t appear in it once.”

Ryan has also dabbled in the same “legitimacy” canard that Akin has been so roundly condemned for bringing up. He and Akin were among the 173 co-sponsors of last year’s No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, a another piece of legislation that passed the House — where it won the vote of every Republican representative, plus 16 Democrats — but died in the Senate. One proposed section of this subtly-named law would have added the word “forcible” to the rape exemption to the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funds from being used for abortions. Currently, Medicaid pays for abortion if a woman has been raped or is the victim of incest; the NFTA Act would have narrowed the exception to “forcible rape” — what Akin later told radio host Mike Huckabee that he meant by “legitimate rape” — a term almost Orwellian in its redundancy. (In actuality, Medicaid rarely ends up paying for abortions; Dylan Matthews writes at the Post that state-level restrictions and complex reimbursement requirements mean that, of women covered by the rape-and-incest exemptions, “only 37 percent of women ended up getting eligible abortions funded by Medicaid. As a consequence, a quarter of women on Medicaid who planned on getting an abortion and were eligible under the Hyde amendment ended up giving birth instead, according to a study by the Guttmacher Institute.” Most states require a doctor to certify that the woman has been raped, but 11 states force women to submit a police report to include in the Medicaid claim. NFTA attempted to further reduce the number of eligible abortions. When the legislation was under consideration in the House, Mother Jones reported:

For example: If a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion. Other types of rapes that would no longer be covered by the exemption include rapes in which the woman was drugged or given excessive amounts of alcohol, rapes of women with limited mental capacity, and many date rapes.

Why did the future VP nominee feel compelled to define rape down? Because, in the words of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Associate Director of Pro-Life Activities (try putting that one on a resume), the change in language was “an effort on the part of the sponsors to prevent the opening of a very broad loophole for federally funded abortions for any teenager.” Back to Mother Jones:

Pro-life advocates believed they needed to include the word “forcible” in the law to preempt what National Right to Life Committee lobbyist Doug Johnson called a “brazen” effort by Planned Parenthood and other groups to obtain federal funding for abortions for any teenager by (falsely) claiming statutory rape. Abortion rights groups, Johnson warned, wanted to “federally fund the abortion of tens of thousands of healthy babies of healthy moms, based solely on the age of their mothers.”

The “forcible” language was removed after it sparked an uproar, but the Republican party has a history of looking to classify and demonize “unworthy” rape victims. In March, the sponsor of a bill in the Idaho state legislature that would have required all women to view an ultrasound before an abortion, state Sen. Chuck Winder argued that no exceptions should be made for rape victims:

Rape and incest was used as a reason to oppose this. I would hope that when a woman goes in to a physician with a rape issue, that physician will indeed ask her about perhaps her marriage, was this pregnancy caused by normal relations in a marriage or was it truly caused by a rape.

Ladies: before seeking to abort the child of your attacker, please make sure you have actually been raped. Sen. Winder understands this can be confusing; maybe it’s best that you not worry your pretty little head about abortion in general.

The canard that rape cannot cause pregnancy also has a long history on the right, albeit on the pro-life fringe of the right. Most of the so-called “evidence” is drawn from a 1999 article by physician John C. Willke, a former president of the National Right to Life Committee, that the “emotional trauma” caused by “assault rape” (but not, apparently by the lesser forms of rape) can disrupt hormones that “radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, implantation and even nurturing of a pregnancy. So what further percentage reduction in pregnancy will this cause? No one knows, but this factor certainly cuts this last figure by at least 50 percent and probably more.” As Dave Weigel of Slate snarks, “Pro tip: If your medical argument includes the phrase “no one knows, but…” then you might want to head back to the crime lab.” Lest you think that Willke’s article is a relic of the benighted 20th century, be aware that it’s currently reprinted on the website for Christian Life Resources, and was referenced just yesterday by Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association (who has made more news lately for his virulently homophobic views than his positions on abortion), who linked to the article in a tweet that read, “Todd Akin is right: physical trauma of forcible rape can interfere w/ hormonal production, conception.” The New Republic’s website has a run-down of some of the conservative politicians who have made similar statements, including North Carolina state Rep. Henry Aldridge’s 1995 contention that “the facts show that people who are raped — who are truly raped — the juices don’t flow, the body functions don’t work and they don’t get pregnant.”

Again, there’s that “truly raped” language. For all the hubbub over Akin’s use of the term “legitimate,” he’s hardly the first knuckle-dragger to do so.

More mainstream Republicans whine, not without reason, that they are unfairly being tarred with the beliefs of their party’s radical fringe. (Though Red State’s Eric Erickson, who is mainstream enough to do commentary for CNN, did make the pretty fringe-y accusation that President Obama supports infanticide, when he wrote that “I’ll take Todd Akin’s inarticulate remarks over an infanticide supporter any day of the week.”)But apart his scientific illiteracy, Akin is squarely within the mainstream of conservative thought. Exceptions for rape and incest may come off as compassionate, but most pro-lifers oppose them — and for this they at least gets points for intellectual consistency. If you think that “Blastocyst Americans,” as Think Progress sarcastically refers to the fertilized embryos given Constitutional rights under “personhood” legislation, are real people, then it’s wrong to kill people, no matter how they were conceived. William Saletan of Slate notes that Republicans copacetic with exceptions tend to pin the issue on responsibility; a woman pregnant by rape should not be made to suffer for actions she didn’t commit, while women who choose to have sex should pay the price — er, take personal responsibility. No word on why pro-lifers think a woman willing to kill her unborn child to avoid personal responsibility would make a good mother. The idea that children conceived by rape should not be “punished” for the crime is firmly entrenched in the Republican establishment; today, under the subhead of “Let’s not double down on violence and pain,” National Review ran a sampling of reactions by conservative thought leaders to the Akin flap. Serrin Foster, executive director of Feminists for Life, said: “When someone asks about abortion exceptions for rape and incest, we must also consider the feelings of those who were conceived through sexual assault.” A member of the state Republican central committee backed Akin’s argument that few rapes cause pregnancy, telling the Times that “at that point, if God has chosen to bless this person with a life, you don’t kill it.”

Yes. Consider the feelings of the fetus, please. Or, as Paul Ryan’s favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, would have said, Consider the feelings of the “piece of protoplasm.” (While Ryan continues to enthusiastically embrace Galt-style economics, he has disavowed Rand’s atheism and, presumably, her conviction that “abortion is a moral right” and her dismissal of embryonic personhood as “vicious nonsense.”)

The righteous outrage on the part of conservatives only masks the true depths of the Republican threat to women’s rights (and yes, I do count abortion as part of “women’s rights.”) While Romney issued a statement claiming that “Gov. Romney and Cong. Ryan disagree with Mr. Akin’s statement, and a Romney-Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in instances of rape a Romney-Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in instances of rape,” the campaign later confirmed that Ryan’s personal views differ. The Republican candidate for Montana Senate, Denny Rehberg, put his piety on display by giving away a $5,000 contribution he received from Akin’s PAC — to a “crisis pregnancy center,” of all places. Such centers, many of which don’t even have a medical professional on staff, are thinly-disguised pro-life organizations designed to encourage “alternatives” to abortion by demonizing Planned Parenthood and peddling discredited myths about links between abortion and suicide or breast cancer. Crisis pregnancy centers, which advertise themselves as neutral clinics but which push women to keep their pregnancies in all cases, would find little to disagree with in Akin’s rejection of exemptions for rape — and might very well be promoting similar junk science about pregnancy-preventing “rape hormones.”

Akin has apologized for using “the wrong words in the wrong way” but hasn’t backed off his opposition to exemptions for rape or incest. Vowing to stay in the race, he characterizes the GOP response as “a little bit of an overreaction,” and on this point I am inclined to agree with him. It’s hard not to be cynical about remarks like these from Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, a Tea Party favorite: “Todd Akin’s statements are reprehensible and inexcusable. He should step aside today for the good of the nation.” Evidently, it’s “inexcusable” to expose the nasty side of Republican extremism; yet today, as party bigwigs meet in Tampa to develop the 2012 platform, CNN reports that “The Republican Party is once again set to enshrine into its official platform support for ‘a human life amendment’ to the Constitution that would outlaw abortion without making explicit exemptions for rape or incest.” This stance is nothing new; the platform has included similar language since 1976, and the current elocution is unchanged from the 2004 and 2008 cycles:

Faithful to the “self-evident” truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.

The DNC has already blasted out fundraising e-mails dubbing such language the “Akin plank” — and it’s well within its rights to do so. A separate e-mail characterized the Republican position as “trying to take women back to the dark ages” and proclaimed that “Akin’s choice of words isn’t the real issue here. The real issue is a Republican party — led by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan — whose policies on women and their health are dangerously wrong.” Strong language, but this is an issue that deserves strong language. If conservatives are content to label Democrats “baby-killers” and accuse the president of promoting infanticide, they shouldn’t be surprised when liberals strike back with references to the dark ages. When Sen. Johnson suggests that Akin should quit the race “for the good of the nation,” he gets it precisely backwards: If anything, Akin’s candidacy is good for the national dialogue, as it pulls back the curtain on the GOP’s views of women and highlights the party’s staunch opposition to reproductive rights. “Polls show Americans broadly oppose a constitutional amendment banning abortion,” the Washington Post reports, and over 75 percent of Americans believe exceptions should be made for rape and incest. If mainstream candidates like Mitt Romney are going to embrace people like Bryan Fischer and Eric Erickson — and if they are unwilling to denounce even Rush Limbaugh’s “slut” remarks in terms harsher than “not the words I would have used” — then they should be held accountable to the electorate. It presents a sharp contrast with President Obama, who said yesterday that “rape is rape” and that “what I think these comments do underscore is why we shouldn’t have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making health-care decisions on behalf of women.” Amen.

I have no illusions that voters will suddenly rise up and toss abortion opponents out of office. In fact, polls also show that a strong majority of Americans approve of restrictions on abortion; the right has succeeded in smearing “abortion on demand” as a femi-Nazi plot. The latest PPP poll out of Missouri shows Akin still beating McCaskill by the narrowest of margins, though it’s unclear how many of the respondents were aware of the latest controversy. But as Eliot Spitzer, who knows a thing about bouncing back from controversy, writes at his Slate blog:

We should not be fooled that Akin’s statement, merely because it is so offensive and quickly retracted or clarified, is a mere slip. It actually represents the worldview of Akin and many like-minded Republican colleagues. His comments are part and parcel of a view of civil rights, women’s rights, and science that should be antithetical to a modern society.

Akin, in refusing to drop out of the race, tells Mike Huckabee that “I’m not a quitter . . . . To quote my old friend John Paul Jones, ‘I’ve not yet begun to fight.’” Pro-choicers should take a similar attitude. This is not a battle we can afford to “quit,” and it’s not a fight we can afford to lose.

Wading Into The Deep End of Politics

Iowa Rep. Steve King: This man only looks rational.

It’s one thing for talk-radio buffoons like Rush Limbaugh to say ridiculous things. After all, Americans consume a lot of media that could qualify as ridiculous, from Jerry Springer to Housewives of Orange County to the latest Adam Sandler movie (choose between Sandler in drag — Jack and Jill — and Sandler with a mullet — That’s My Boy!). To some degree, we pay celebrities, with our eyeballs and advertising dollars, to be ridiculous. There’s a reason that the comparatively sedate Mike Huckabee has done little to break Limbaugh’s dominance of the right-wing airwaves. But we supposedly elect politicians to run our country and represent us in the legislature, not to put on a freak show. Shouldn’t we have higher standards for the people we reward with our tax dollars and votes than those to whom we devote a few lazy hours on the couch?

We should, of course, but the evidence is piling up that we don’t.

It’s not a phenomenon restricted to candidates running for office, who might see outrageous claims and attention-grabbing statements (see: Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell) as a way to shoehorn their way into evening news cycle. Increasingly, politicians already in office say inflammatory things for the sheer sake of being inflammatory: Maine Governor Paul LePage compares IRS agents to the Gestapo, or Florida Representative Allen West announces that “there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party.” There is a line between calculated headline-grabbing and dishonoring the office — and both LePage and West have crossed it. If a government “of the people, by the people” is supposed to be an expression of our highest American values, what values are these men conveying?

This week’s line-crossers commit particularly egregious violations of the spirit of public service, not to mention particularly egregious violations of sanity. First up: Iowa Rep. Steve King held a tele-townhall meeting to update his constituents on the important matters “under investigation” by the representative’s office. Asked whether he believes President Obama is a natural born citizen, King assured the questioner that he is on top of the conspiracy that put a foreigner in the White House. Unfortunately, that wily Kenyan is probably home free until the election:

We went down into the Library of Congress and we found a microfiche there of two newspapers in Hawaii each of which had published the birth of Barack Obama. It would have been awfully hard to fraudulently file the birth notice of Barack Obama being born in Hawaii and get that into our public libraries and that microfiche they keep of all the newspapers published. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some other explanations on how they might’ve announced that by telegram from Kenya. The list goes on. But drilling into that now, even if we could get a definitive answer and even if it turned out that Barack Obama was conclusively not born in America, I don’t think we could get that case sold between now and November.

The conspirators in the early years.

Well, Stanley Dunham (Obama’s mother) must have been quite the soothsayer. You won’t find a Manchurian candidate more perfect than the president; his mother hatched a plot 51 years ago to have a baby in a foreign country (why Durham, as an American citizen, didn’t just give birth stateside is unclear), fake documents to get him into the U.S., then shepherd him into the Oval Office. Even more impressive, she achieved that last goal from beyond the grave. What a woman!

That the whole birther meme is still being talked up by supposedly intelligent people — people responsible for the future of Social Security, health care, and our national defense — is frightening. Even more frightening is the attempt by liberals, of all people, to rationalize this craziness as just another facet of our dysfunctional politics. Gridlock, attack ads, Swift-boating — all are unsavory, but none rise to the level of Area 51 nuttiness. To pretend that these things exist on some sort of continuum, that one is just an amusing intensification of the other, is the ultimate in false equivalence. Times columnist Frank Bruni, with whom I usually agree but who should really stick to writing about popular culture, draws a comparison between the birtherism of Donald Trump and recent accusations by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that Mitt Romney hasn’t paid anything in taxes for the last ten years. “Do one tribe’s antics justify the other’s?” he asks, as if Reid wondering whether the American tax system is overly generous to multi-millionaires is somehow akin to alleging the president is a lying, birth-certificate-faking foreign agent. Here’s Bruni:

Reid’s defenders will say that Romney’s reluctance to release more than one complete year of tax returns (at least so far) makes clear that he’s hiding something, which must be flushed out one way or another . . . But if you’re going to subscribe to that sort of reasoning, “You might as well put a dead cocker spaniel on your head and start yelling about birth certificates,” said Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show,” flashing a photograph of the quizzically coiffed Donald Trump, who to my eyes was wearing either an Irish setter or maybe a Pomeranian. Stewart’s point — an excellent one — is that the crazies who insist that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States are Reid’s philosophical and strategic kinfolk.

The irony is, Stewart regularly rails against false equivalence on his show, condemning mainstream pundits for accusing both parties of playing to their bases, when the GOP has moved staggeringly further to the right than the Democrats can dream of moving to the left.

In their denunciations of Reid, however, both Bruni and Stewart are playing to the sanctimonious center, which demands politeness from all without differentiating between incivility and beyond-the-pale craziness. Reid and Trump would only be “strategic kinfolk” if Reid accused Romney of harboring not only a secret plot to establish polygamy in America (the “Obama is un-American” subtext to Trump’s accusations) but a file of marriage licenses to 12 of Ann Romney’s sister-wives as well. Reid’s charges may be unfounded, but he is not alleging that Romney did anything illegal, only something that voters would look on with askance. Overlooked in all the conservative consternation over Reid’s remarks is that he has not accused the Republican candidate of cheating on his taxes; he alleges only that Romney was able to find enough loopholes and engage in enough offshore-haven arbitrage to reduce his tax burden to zero. Romney likely did pay taxes in the last decade, but during the 2008-09 downturn, there’s a real possibility that he booked enough losses – as many investors did – to have a tax bill of nada. If you think there’s nothing separating a supposed half-century conspiracy to manufacture Obama’s citizenship with the allegation that the tax code is so friendly to millionaires that Romney owed nothing to the Treasury . . . well, if you think that, I don’t have a case to make to you, because logic is obviously not doing the trick.

Bruni quotes John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House, as bemoaning what Bruni calls “the casual slander of Romney.” I can almost imagine Boehner tearing up as he laments to Fox News Radio about, oh, the injustice of it all. “It’s one of the problems that occurs here in Washington,” he said. “People run out there without any facts and just make noise.” Funny, it must not be a very pressing problem, because Boehner has been missing in action as his caucus paints the president as “the other” and dispenses wisdom about tracking down birth certificates. The Speaker has time to castigate Harry Reid, yet he won’t condemn inflammatory and racist statements by members of his own party.

The debate over the lack of civility in politics is worth having, but while the coarsening of public discourse probably contributes to Rep. King’s perception that there is little to lose in promoting wild conspiracy theories, it is not the proximate cause of such nonsense. Nastiness in politics is a more nuanced issue; as many commentators have pointed out, personal attacks have a long and storied history, beginning with John Adams’ smear of Thomas Jefferson as “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow” and Jefferson’s fabrication of dastardly plans by Adams to go to war with France. (Adams’ description of his opponent as “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father” does, however, bring to mind the right’s favored picture of Obama as a Muslim, anti-colonial Kenyan.)

It’s hard to defend malicious ad hominem attacks, but it’s also true that politics is nasty for a reason: it’s not small ball. Women’s reproductive freedom, the future of safety net programs like Medicaid and TANF, the level at which the wealthy are asked to kick in to support the country — these are not trivial issues. Venomous remarks and vituperative rhetoric can advance a point, however crudely, and the most effective negative ads work because they confirm a pre-existing narrative (Romney’s notorious stiffness is spoofed in an ad featuring the candidate warbling the national anthem) or contain a grain of truth (when Obama said “you didn’t build that,” he really was expressing a we’re-all-in-this-together attitude). By contrast, statements like Rep. King’s contain no more truth than Bigfoot tales and Loch Ness legends. Harry Reid’s history of what the NYT calls “tart-tongued volleys” — he has said Romney is “kind of a joke” and had to apologize for calling George W. Bush a “loser,” though no mea culpa was forthcoming for labeling Bush a “liar” — amounts to small potatoes next to the typical conservative descriptions of Obama as “fascist” and his policies as an “ultimate vision of Orwellian statism” that will “spell the end of America as we’ve always known it.” So when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell deplores Reid’s allegations about Romney’s taxes as “beneath the dignity of his office,” you have to wonder what he feels Steve King contributes to the dignity of America’s greatest deliberative body. “Dignity” is not the word that comes to mind when I consider King’s myriad other crusades, including his quest to revive the McCarthy-era House Internal Security Committee to investigate “the ugly spread of Marxism in America, its roots, branches and current manifestations, particularly within the administration of President Barack Hussein Obama.”

Increasingly, taking nonsensical positions is a legitimate political strategy. For all I know, Frank Luntz hosts conference calls to advise Republicans on bolstering their “brand” by associating themselves with radical, headline-garnering ideas. Case in point: Arizona’s Joe Arpaio, the self-proclaimed “America’s toughest sheriff” whose notoriously harsh treatment of illegal immigrants prompted a Justice Department lawsuit for discriminatory policing (cost to county taxpayers: $50 million), recently trekked to Hawaii to personally investigate Obama’s “fraudulent” birth certificate. You might expect mainstream conservative politicians to distance themselves from such behavior, yet Rolling Stone describes him as “the go-to media prop for conservative politicians, from state legislators to presidential candidates, who want to be seen as immigration hard-liners.” As Arpaio shows the Rolling Stone reporter into his office, he revels in the attention: “I had Michele Bachmann sitting right there. All these presidential guys coming to see me!”

What does it say about conservatives that they are attracted to candidates who pander to a guy like this?

Next up in Kool-Aid Drinking News is Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Kelly, commenting on the mandate by the Department of Health and Human Services that insurers cover contraception, which went into effect August 1:

I know in your mind you can think of times when America was attacked. One is December 7th, that’s Pearl Harbor day.  The other is September 11th, and that’s the day of the terrorist attack. I want you to remember August the 1st, 2012, the attack on our religious freedom. That is a day that will live in infamy, along with those other dates.

Democratic Rep. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, an 87-year-old veteran who was actually at Pearl Harbor, called the comparison “misguided” and said, “It is complete nonsense to suggest that a matter discussed, debated, and approved by the Congress and the President is akin to a surprise attack that killed nearly 2,500 people and launched our nation into the second World War.” Given the chance to walk back his remarks in an interview with the conservative website Newsmax, Kelly instead doubled down on the sentiment — or, as Newsmax put it, “responded to Inouye’s attack.” Putting aside the apparent right-wing confusion over the meaning of the word “attack,” Kelly called the mandate “an undeniable and unprecedented attack on Americans’ First Amendment rights.” He elaborated:

Our freedoms and way of life have been under attack before, from both internal and external threats. If we fail to defend our constitutional rights, we risk losing the freedoms that so many brave men and women have given their lives to defend throughout the course of our nation’s history. We will not turn a blind eye to the HHS mandate’s attack on our religious freedom and we will work to stop this unconstitutional mandate from taking away our God-given and constitutionally protected freedoms.

Uh-huh.

Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Kelly

My general Nazi Rule — that anyone likening political opponents to Nazis should automatically be disqualified from intelligent conversation — applies here. That Kelly apparently expects us to take him seriously is more than a little disturbing. Who compares women’s reproductive freedom to the combined deaths of nearly 6,000 people? (Oh, right: someone who believes abortion “kills” millions of “babies” and considers the morning-after pill, which is included in the HHS mandate, to be an “abortifacient”). Even more disturbing is that many of Kelly’s conservative constituents probably don’t disagree with him. The hyperbolic hand-wringing over the contraception mandate has reached amazing heights, with right-wingers alleging that it amounts to an unconstitutional violation of employers’ religious freedom to deny their workers comprehensive healthcare. (OK, those last words are mine.) The conservative American Spectator hyperventilates that President Obama despises Christians, “reducing them to the status of serfs in his planned secularist and socialist state.” George Neumayr writes that, if businesses “refuse to subsidize the sex lives of their employees, Obama can now bankrupt them through punitive fines.” The implication here is that insurance is not monetary compensation but a “subsidy” doled out by those generous job creators; that women are not entitled to use their paychecks — because what is employer-sponsored health insurance but deferred wages? — as they see fit. Should female employees be forced to save their receipts so that their personal spending can be audited for purchases of birth control pills and IUDs? After all, the employer provided that money; doesn’t its use for baby-killing also trample freedom of religion? For all the conservative outrage about the Affordable Care Act ostensibly putting government bureaucrats “between you and your doctor,” they are strangely OK with putting your boss’s omniscient old man in the sky between you and your insurance options.

While both sides of the contraception/abortion debate are passionate, the rhetoric on the right stands out because it is so disproportionate to the cause. Comparing anything to the Holocaust, as pro-lifers regularly do with abortion, is insulting to the millions of living, breathing people (not fetuses) who died in Hitler’s death camps. When pro-choice advocates argue against restrictions on abortion, they invoke the specter of backroom procedures and a return to the 1950s — scary scenarios, but hardly close to World War II or 9/11. I have yet to see a Planned Parenthood mailer that reads, “Republican Plan to Defund Women’s Health Initiative Will Kill More People Than Hitler.”

It’s not that liberals don’t have their share of wingnuts, but those wingnuts tend to be more loosely affiliated with the party; Bill Maher has indeed said nasty things about Sarah Palin, but last time I checked, Maher was not drawing a government salary. He’s an entertainer on the level of Limbaugh and can be just as coarse and asinine, though I’d personally take Maher’s attempts at humor over Limbaugh’s assaults on reason any day. Democratic politicians can be just as vicious on the campaign trail as Republicans, but there is a difference between assailing an opponent’s record (that’s politics) and spouting nonsense (that’s crazy). But the key distinction between the parties, though, lies in the disparate ways each responds to nonsense from elected officials or candidates. Republicans embrace bomb-throwers — just look at Allen West, the Tea Party favorite and potential McCarthy successor (see above) who frequently likens Obama’s policies to slavery.

Democrats, to their credit, suffer fools less lightly. Take Mark Clayton, an anti-gay-marriage activist and conspiracy theorist who believes the feds are constructing, as Mother Jones puts it, “a massive, four-football-field wide superhighway from Mexico City to Toronto as part of a secret plot to establish a new North American Union that will bring an end to America as we know it.” (He also believes, in his own words, that anyone protesting the liberals’ “godless new world order” will eventually be locked in “a bone-crushing prison camp similar to the one Alexander Solzhenitsyn was sent or to one of FEMA’s prison camps.”) When this intellectual light won the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Tennessee, the state party swiftly disavowed the nominee, denouncing his involvement in a “known hate group in Washington, D.C.” promising “not do anything to promote or support him in any way,” and encouraging Tennessee voters to write in a different candidate in November. Compare this to the Tennessee GOP, which has enthusiastically advanced bills in the state legislature to ban the teaching of evolution and criminalize discussion of homosexuality in public schools, and which backed away from a proposal to punish “material support” for sharia law with 15 years in prison only after a public outcry. Of course, just as soon as Mother Jones writes waggishly, “the local GOP . . . has an opening: It can be the party of rationality,” Tennessee’s Republican delegation manages to embarrass itself again. Apparently, state representative Kelly Keisling created an online stir when he forwarded an e-mail to his constituents claiming that the Obama administration is planning to stage an assassination attempt “that would be blamed on ‘white supremacists’ and subsequently used to enrage black and Hispanic communities driving them to rioting all across the nation.”

Get your tinfoil hats right here, just $2.50 apiece.

The proliferation of off-the-wall claims by elected officials like Keisling, Kelly and King (hey, maybe there’s a conspiracy about names that begin with “K”) raises real questions: Is our democracy so broken that demonstrably unqualified people can weasel their way into office? Or do American citizens actually support investigations of the president’s birth certificate as a worthwhile use of their tax dollars? The latter possibility, that my conservative neighbors truly believe that birth control is tantamount to mass murder, is even worse than the former. I’d almost rather think that the system is irreversibly corrupt than that people other than National Review writers view Democrats as “opponents of morality” and the contraception-mandate-opposing Catholic Church as “the only major institution standing in the way of efforts to permit sexual exploitation, polygamy, same-sex “marriage,” and other cultural assaults upon children’s welfare is the Church.”

I used to roll my eyes at the bumper sticker reading, “If You’re Not Outraged, You’re Not Paying Attention,” and I still think there’s a lot in politics not worth getting angry about. But the ease with which society accepts such patently false statements from the very people we should be holding to higher standards is outrageous. It’s easy to blame Reps. Kelly and King for making imbecilic remarks, but they only have a platform for those remarks because “we the people” keep giving it to them. Before the next election, perhaps we should ask ourselves: Who are the real imbeciles here?

Fox News Runs PR for the NYT

Announcing that Fox News slants to the right is about as revelatory as reporting that fish are wet. Still, the latest pairing of stories on the channel’s website is particularly rich: Fox buries its own poll, which gives President Obama a four-point lead over Mitt Romney, in favor of the most recent poll by the New York Times — that evil liberal behemoth! — that conveniently shows the Republican challenger ahead.

The article summarizing the Fox poll ignores its key horse-race findings and instead opts for a Romney-friendly headline: “37 percent of voters say they are better off than four years ago.” Only in the tenth paragraph — and only after we’re told that “by a 12 percentage-point margin, more voters say the Obama administration has made the economy worse rather than better” and “a 62-percent majority says they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country” — does the article inform us that Obama leads Romney 45-41.

By itself, Fox’s selective reading of its poll results is not a surprise. After all, the “Trending in Politics” feed that runs down one side of the web page features such crucial and reality-based news as Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s latest proclamation that the president’s birth certificate is “definitely fraudulent.” But the downplaying of the proprietary Fox poll, when paired with the site’s lead article, is particularly amusing. What piece of news does the site lead with? “Poll Shows Romney Edging Past Obama Nationally.” And who conducted that poll? CBS News, erstwhile home of Dan Rather (best known on Fox for the faked documents he cited when reporting on George W. Bush’s military record), and the New York Times. Like Newt Gingrich, who rails against the “liberal media” but referred authoritatively to a NYT article when it supported his Romney-bashing agenda during a debate, Fox reports on mainstream polls only when the results are convenient:

Despite the glut of tough ads against him, Mitt Romney has edged past President Obama in a new national poll that reflects dimming views about the state of the economy.

The New York Times/CBS News poll released Thursday shows Romney with a 45-43 percent lead. That’s within the poll’s margin of error but marks the first time Romney has held any lead in the survey since becoming the presumptive Republican nominee.

Ironically, conservative outlets regularly slam the Times’ polls for giving an advantage to Democrats by undersampling Republicans. The Times interviews registered voters, while conservative pollsters like Rasmussen and news organizations like Fox regularly sample only likely voters — criteria which may more accurately reflect election-day turnout but which also ensures the universe leans older, whiter and more Republican. That the Times poll nevertheless gives Romney the lead, while the Fox poll advantages Obama, is probably due more to statistical noise and the inevitable ups and downs of approval ratings than anything else. Pollsters of every political stripe caution that reading too much into a single survey, or even a handful of surveys, is dangerous.

But hey, don’t step on the message. Obama is losing. That’s the truth in the right-wing reality, and Fox is sticking to it.