The President and the Truth [i]or[/i] Milbank and Krugman and Ari, Oh, My!

Great Debates
21

Did you guys manage to keep a straight face when you pecked this out on your keyboards? Do you take special irony-suppresent drugs? But never mind, it is a triviality. Besides, it is churlish to belittle a faith that surpasseth all understanding.

What of Dana Milbank? What of Our Leader, the Man Who Fell Up? That’s rather more to the point, don’t you think? Whether one uses the delicately embroidered euphemism “imprecise” or the more homey “so full of bullshit his eyes are brown”, the fact remains that the cited article lays out an entire array of [things that aren’t entirely true] or [bald faced lies].

Mr. Krugman is not trying to mislead us into war. Whatever his faults, there is little immediate likelihood of fatality. If you are quite finished with him, might I direct your attention to Mr. Bush whose laser guided imprecision has more dramatic impact, i.e., death, destruction and horror?

22

We’ve been over this before 'Luce. The President’s words are possibly the most scrutinized in the entire world. Not to beat around the Bush, but Clinton said lots of things that weren’t true, lots of things that were misleading, lots of things that were ambiguous and could have been said better than they were.

When the spoken word is analyzed and searched for innacuracies, they are found. This is because it is very difficult to speak exactly what you mean to say or with perfect factual accuracy.

It is unreasonable to presume otherwise, and it has been this way with every President there’s been in the modern media age.
The old searching for falsehoods and innacuracies game, is one that’s always played by the lowest common denominator of the opposition in the presses. It’s bullshit.

There’s gonna be innacuracies and problems with his extamporaneous comments, as with anybody’s.

If you want to take issue with policy and arguments it’s best to take it from prepared speeches, where this is less excuse for these kinds of errors or innacuracies.

23

What Scylla said.

Also, if you think the President is trying to “mislead us into war,” it would be better to debate directly whether or not war is a good policy. Even though a handful of Bush comments may be inaccurate, that doesn’t prove war is a mistake. He may be using inaccurate arguments to properly lead us into war.

24

I think the point is that Bush has a reputation for being a plain spoken, honest guy. There is absolutely no basis for this opinion, anymore than there is for Gore being a pathological liar, Bush being a gibbering idiot, etc. These are simply scripts.

25

Scylla, we’re not talking about minor blunders in syntax or inadvertent oopsies. We are talking about a man making a case for war. Kind of thing a lot of us regard as pretty serious business. (I’m kind of sensitive that way, I guess, I don’t much cotton to procedures that makes folks dead. Your Morality May Vary.)

Now, admittedly, this doesn’t rise to really grave levels, like lying about sex, but, you know, a body bag here, a body bag there, after awhile they start to pile up. A lie in service of civility, like maudlin Republican tributes to the late lamented Mr. Wellstone, is understandable, hypocrisy being the compliment that vice pays to virtue. A lie to promote horror and havoc is an obscenity.

december

Stunning. Utterly stunning.

26

Elucidator:

Yes, but that doesn’t change the nature of spoken speech, or extamporaneous comments.

They will occasionally be innacurate, ambiguous, or misleading.

27

Scylla:

I don’t think most of this discussion has been about extemperaneous subjects. I’m sure the speech Bush gave to the American people on TV was carefully written and rehearsed.

28

It’s unclear that all (or even most) of these are extamporaneous comments, Millbank says only that “Some of Bush’s overstatements appear to be off-the-cuff mistakes.” But it also appears that some of these “overstatements” were made repeatedly (e.g. the radiation detector fib). I’ve seen Bush speak extemporaneously at several press conferences now, and complicated sentences such as “There’s over $15 billion of construction projects which are on hold, which aren’t going forward – which means there’s over 300,000 jobs that would be in place, or soon to be in place, that aren’t in place” don’t come easy to him.

A more interesting question is why (up till now at least) the press has treated these stretchers – most of which involve major policy issues – with relative kid gloves, while excoriating Gore for trivialities such as his choice of attire, or whether a schoolgirl had a desk. See the
Daily Howler for more examples. (And I say this as no particular fan of Gore).

Also, the Krugman/Coulter analogy just doesn’t hold up. You would need to show a pattern of lies and hate that I’m afraid Krugman just can’t approach. I suspect it’s Krugman’s Harken reporting that has Scylla and other conservatives most riled. Whether Bush did anything illegal or not, the central point of his columns has been to show that Bush’s “man of the people” personna is a farce, and more importantly that the Prez is a product of crony capitalism.

Is this mud slinging? Not worth knowing? Well, I was in Asia when the 1997-98 financial meltdown occured – I still remember the strutting arrogance of most American commentators, denouncing the region for rampant crony capitalism (and advocating they adopt “American-style” accounting standards – snicker!). Now we have a president who is the very embodiment of this brand of entitlement capitalism. Something to be very concerned about, IMO, whether he did anything technically illegal or not.

29

Preach it, brother!

30

And this as well…

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2002-10-24-oped-bamford_x.htm

"As the White House searches for every possible excuse to go to war with Iraq, pressure has been building on the intelligence agencies to deliberately slant estimates to fit a political agenda. In this case, the agencies are being pressed to find a casus belli for war, whether or not one exists.

“Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements, and there’s a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA,” Vince Cannistraro, the agency’s former head of counterterrorism, told The Guardian, a London newspaper…"

There’s more as well, some of it repeating the already noted “imprecise” statements, as well as other offhand, extemporaneous pronouncements that turn out to be not quite true, a shade less than factual. Of note, however, is this regarding the Dreaded Aluminum Tubes…

“…In his Oct. 7 address to the nation, Bush warned of Iraq’s attempts to import hardened aluminum tubes “for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.” But David Albright, a physicist and former United Nations weapons inspector, told The Guardian that it was far from clear that the tubes were intended for such a purpose. He also said skeptics at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California had been ordered to keep their doubts to themselves. …”

Other, more generous, observers will no doubt see minor rhetorical stumbles, niggling insignificant innaccuracies, the sort of loveable errors and oopsies we have come to expect from the Man Who Fell Up, the living avatar of the Peter Principle.

I hear lies.

31

Ace Face:

That pattern’s there. As has been proven in at least two seperate threads, Krugman habitually dissembles on the subject of Bush, and he draws his preferred conclusion no matter, and often in spite of the evidence.

32

Scylla, that assertion has been made on several occasions, but it by no means has been proven. What’s been shown is that Krugman has made occasional factual errors, most or at least many of which he’s acknowledged and corrected in subsequent columns, something which cannot be said of Coulter. The instances where Krugman’s conclusions differ from those held by his opponents, or where he’s made characterizations with which his opponents disagree are not instances of dissembly.

33

Bullshit. Krugman is welcome to his opinion. However, he asserts it not as opinion but as fact, and supports it with a string of falsehoods, misrepresentations, and outright fabrications.

He does this habitually, and I’ve never seen him retract any of these lies.

He’s a lying pundit, selling bullshit to people who want to believe.

Coulter works just the same way. People want to believe her shit.

They both give their audiences what they want. That’s all.

You may see it differently.

34

And from whom should we demand a higher level of veracity? If we are to insist upon complete truth from Mr. Krugman, how much should we demand from a man who seeks to lead us into war? You are quite forgiving of the Man Who Fell Up, going so far as to suggest that his political enemies are combing through his speeches for niggling errors of syntax and minor mistatements.

The President buttresses his demands for war and political advantage that borders on autonomy with allegations that vary from fudging the numbers to bald-faced lies. This is not leadership, this is snake oil. Venemous snake oil.

It would seem from your posts that you accept Dana Milbanks column as essentially factual, what you object to is Mr. Krugmans “spin” on those facts. The facts themselves are quite enough, if Krugman had said nothing at all, they would still be there.

If, as you suggest, Mr. Krugman “habitually dissembles” why does he not get the advantage of your generousity? Our Leader “habitually dissembles”, does he not?

35

Bullshit yourself sir. As much as you’ve tried to slander Krugman as a liar in various threads. You’ve never been able to demonstrate anything more than a couple of mistakes. None of which were central to Krugman’s arguments, and as such, are unlikely to be deliberate lies.

I should also point out that you’ve spent a lot more time claiming to have “already proved” your point’s re Krugman that you have actually making an argument. No doubt hoping that those hoping to be able to disbelieve Krugman will just take your word for it…

36

Hey Scylla, stop using Krugman as a “straw man” :slight_smile:

Seriously though, Scylla, the issue is not dishonesty, per se, but the MOTIVE for dishonesty, as well as the potential consequences of said dishonesty.

The fact that political columnists, on both sides, can be glib, parsimonious with the truth, capricious, hypocritical and sniping is all true enough. However these people are understood to be rhetorical free-agents, expressing their own opinions,for good or for ill. They are not purporting to provide the public with vital information, in an official capacity, to justify war.

I don’t think that it is unreasonable to expect a much higher level of truth and integrity from our chief executive than from a political pundit.

The instances of dishonesty in previous administrations is also irrelevant to THIS discussion. The question is not “is GWB more or less honest than anyone else?” but “Is Bush presenting a DELIBERATELY false casus belli?”

nitpick (not to Scylla but to the USA Today excerpt)

The phrase “casus belli for war” is redundant “casus belli” means “occasion for war” you don’t have to say “occasion for war for war.” This is like saying “per se, by itself” or “et cetera and the rest.”

nitpick over

37

Argh. Long reply eaten.

To paraphrase my lost post:

Of course we hold Bush to a higher standard. I’m simply saying that Krugman is a fabricator on the subject of Bush, and therefore hw’s worthless for establishing what level of dishonesty Bush is engaging in.

I responded to Elucidator’s summary of Milbank’s points in the OP. Noone has taken issue with my discussion of those points as of yet, and my conclusions follow from that.

Finally, I disagree with Milbanks’ assertion that these are central to Bush’s thesis. They are at best peipheral. Some of it’s guilding the lilly and some of it is in the nature of extamporaneous comments.

The central theis is that Saddam has proven himself hostile and dangerous, and he is in violation of resolutions that he himself agreed to. Those resolutions need to be enforced for the general good, and Saddam as a threat needs to be neutralized.

The fact that there is large disagreement and no conclusive proof about exactly where Saddam stands re: WOMD is an argument in favor of action. Not knowing is inherently dangerous.

38

No, Scylla, you have not pointed out anything at all that Krugman has “fabricated”. There is a difference between spinning and lying. Bush has crossed it, frequently. So has Coulter. Krugman has not.

If you disagree with Krugman that a grip on the facts is vital to the decision to do the most important thing a government can do, then you’re in a such a tiny and sorry minority that there is no kind word for it.

Milbank is one of many who has shown that the central facts are other than what Bush says, and that you parrot, and that you have not been able to disprove. We pride ourselves on use of facts and reasoning here. You would do well to try that yourself, before you join Bush in complicity for the wasted deaths of a number of American servicepersons yet to be determined.

For reference: The Complete Bushisms. "“There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.”—Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

39

First sentence: quite rightly so. As to whether Krugman is a “fabricator”, that is proven to your entire satisfaction. It is, nonetheless, irrelevent. If Bush tells 10 lies, and Krugman says its 20 lies, he is fabricating, perhaps, but it is no defense.

Well, there was no call to “take issue”, since you largely agreed that Milbanks assertions were true. I cannot help but notice the spin in point one: as if the issue were the “six months” estimate from the alleged report, in fact, said report did not exist. I would give a lot to know if the report existed in Our Leaders mind, or if he was, in fact, lying through his teeth.

In the first instance, he would have latched on to “evidence” and flouted it, without bothering to ask if it were true. Given the depth and number of White House staff available for such purpose, that seems hardly likely. On the other hand, if he was bullshitting, he must have believed he wouldn’t get called on it. Also, hardly likely (thank God!). Point of fact, the media whores were, save for Mssrs. Milbank and Krugman, utterly supine.

As to being “peripheral”, the Bushistas are admirably flexible on that point. One week, it is WMD, the next, no, the really important issue is nuclear arms, then it is non-compliance with UN resolutions, etc. Point of fact, of the litany of inexcusable sins on the part of Saddam bin Laden, each and every one has been called into question. You or I would certainly be distressed to be convicted of a crime on the basis of such evidence.

As to your last point, which I assume you regard as the central issue, it falls short. Unless, of course, you are asserting that our future policy should be to nuetralize and liquidate any conceivable threat, regardless of its imminence. Talk about “inherently dangerous”! We are not beloved of the nations, Scylla. It is difficult to imagine how a policy of pre-emptive war, which is utterly indistinguishable from aggressive war, is going to endear us.

40

elucidator:

You got two things. The “six months” comment and “The Radiation detectors” comment.

The first has been corrected by the White House, and it seems that nobody has a clue as to what he was trying to say, or what he meant with the second comment.
The rest are nitpicks or ambiguous.

iirc correctly Only the first was made as a policy speech. The second was a pretty clear fuck-up while talking extemporaneously.
From this you draw your campaign of deceit?
Milbank is clearly partisan, but she seems to have written a pretty fair column. Clearly some of Bush’s comments haven’t been as accurate and unambiguous as they should be on these kind of important topics. As you say, she stops short of calling Bush a liar.

I imagine that she does so because the evidence does not support such a claim.