Think Progress

WSJ Ed Page: Shooting the Messengers

Despite entitling the editorial “Bolton Endorsement,” today the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Page suffers from a classic case of attacking the messengers and not the message by going after the nearly 60 diplomats who have signed a letter urging the Senate to reject Bolton’s nomination. Here’s an excerpt from their summation:

“We’ve scanned the list of this striped-pants set, and it looks to be precisely the crowd that has long placed diplomatic niceties above action and holds that the only legitimate foreign policy decisions are those taken under the ‘multilateral’ auspices of the U.N.”

In fact they spend more words talking about what’s wrong with the diplomats — respected experts who have served in the administrations of former Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bush I, to name a few of the WSJ Editorial Page’s heroes — then what’s right with Bolton. And when they do shakily try to prop up Bolton, it’s on two unsteady foundations: the Proliferation Security Initiative and a diplomacy strategy that “works.”

With regards to Bolton and the Proliferation Security Initiative, the New Yorker wrote:

“As Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, he has rightly been given credit for the Proliferation Security Initiative…. But on his watch North Korea, the chief target of his ire, reprocessed enough plutonium to make six new nuclear weapons.”

As Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment put it, “Bolton has been totally unapologetic about his radical prescription for dealing with the proliferation threat. The main problem is that it hasn’t worked anywhere.”

And when it comes to Bolton having a diplomatic strategy that “works,” North Korea won’t deal with him and Bolton won’t take the Iran nuclear threat seriously.

Post Editorial Page Embarrasses Itself

A Washington Post editorial (taking a page from David Brooks) defends Paul Wolfowitz’s candidacy to the World Bank. The editorial is an embarrassment for the paper. Here’s why:

1. The principal argument of the editorial is that Wolfowitz’s critics should “get beyond their dislike of his role in the Iraq war.” Of course they would say that. The Post editorial page teamed up with Wolfowitz to sell the American people false information about Iraq’s supposed WMD capability. In a February 3, 2003, editorial titled “A Case for Action,” the Post editors wrote, “the United States should lead a force to remove Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and locate and destroy its chemical and biological weapons and its nuclear program.” For the Post to argue that people should “get beyond” Wolfowitz’s involvement in pushing the nation into war is completely self-serving.

2. The editorial says we should support Wolfowitz because “somebody has to think through the trade-offs between the environment and indigenous lifestyles on the one hand and the need for electricity and development on the other.” If we should have a World Bank president who is mindful of the impact of the organization’s policies on people, Wolfowitz seems a poor choice. After all, appearing before Congress in March 2004, Wolfowitz — the deputy secretary of defense — couldn’t even remember how many U.S. soldiers had died in combat in Iraq.

3. It doesn’t mention a single reason why Wolfowitz is qualified for the job.

Short Term Memory at Fox News

Yesterday, Fox and Friends responded to the letter signed by sixty former diplomats who oppose the controversial nomination of John Bolton:

HILL: Here’s what struck me about that story. Here are a couple of the names of the diplomats who don’t want John Bolton to get the nomination: Princeton Lyman, Monteagle Stearns, and Spurgeon Keeny –
KILMEADE: Those guys again!
HILL: Just odd names.
KILMEADE: Who the heck are they?

Before he came under attack for not throwing his blind support behind President Bush’s nominee, Princeton Lyman certainly received a lot more respect from the network. Here are just two examples of how Fox News had previously referred to him:

“[W]e turn to Princeton Lyman, a veteran American diplomat, who was a former U.S. ambassador to South Africa and an authority on that continent.” [Fox News, 6/30/04]

“[W]e turn to a man with long experiences, an American diplomat in Africa. Princeton Lyman, who spend [sic] three years as U.S. ambassador to South Africa…and who is now a senior fellow on Africa at the Council on Foreign Relations.” [Fox News, 7/3/03]

Servicing the Rich

In today’s New York Times story about how America loses more than a quarter trillion dollars in tax revenue each year to cheating, the paper claimed, “The I.R.S. said that 80 percent of taxes owed but not paid by individuals were a result of underreporting of income, often by people working in the service sector.”

It was hard for me to believe that 80 percent of about $200 billion was being stolen mostly “by people working in the service sector” (waiters underreporting tips, fast food workers underreporting income, etc.), as the Times suggests. If that were the case, I would think service sector workers in America would be far more well-off than they are today.

So I went to the primary source, the IRS’s new report, and found that yes, it is true that “noncompliance from underreporting account for more than 80%” of the missing tax revenue. However, page 10 of the report breaks down that statistic a bit more. It shows specifically that the underreporting of “business income” accounts for about $100 billion of the tax gap, and underreporting of “wages, salaries, tips, etc.” account for just $18 billion. “Business income,” remember, is defined as money made by sole proprietorships, S corporations, etc. The category includes wealthy lobbyists, sports agents and high-paid political consultants — not exactly what you think of when you hear the phrase “working in the service sector.” In fact, I can find absolutely no data in the IRS report which justifies the New York Times suggesting that the problem “often” emanates from those “working in the service sector.”

What’s my point? Simple: the media often reinforces dishonest stereotypes designed by conservatives to help the right-wing pursue its ideological agenda. The New York Times’s error plays into the right-wing’s “persecuted rich” myth, reinforcing the idea that the rich are overtaxed, and it is working class people who are ripping off the system.

Media Priorities

Four U.S. national guardsmen from Indiana were killed Saturday when their vehicle struck a land mine in southeast Afghanistan. It was the deadliest day for U.S. forces in Afghanistan in nearly a year, and “highlighted the dangers still facing foreign and Afghan troops more than three years after the fall of the Taliban.”

Didn’t hear about any of this? Hardly a surprise. A LexisNexis search of broadcast and cable news television transcripts found only seven references to the deaths in Afghanistan — two on ABC, two on NBC, and three on CNN; the average length of the reference was thirty-two words, about 15 seconds of airtime. During the same period, LexisNexis found 159 programs featuring discussion of the Schiavo case, with most devoting an entire segment to the issue.