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Kneecapping Barack Obama at every opportunity. | ||
Spinsanity wrote a questionable review of Sean Hannity's, "Let Freedom Ring" that reminded me of several left-wing critiques of Ann Coulter's, "Slander" that I've read lately. In these articles, the authors look at a fact or even an opinion from a book, merely cite different opinions or different interpretations of facts and then proclaim that the author is a liar. Then after doing some of what couldn't even loosely be called, "fact-checking" they proclaim that the book is full of untruths. Let's look at select sections of Spinsanity's poorly constructed review of Hannity's recent book and you'll see what I mean.
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"But in Let Freedom Ring, Hannity seems to be following another regrettable trend in modern punditry: Never let facts stand in the way of a good partisan screed. That was the dirty truth behind "Slander" and "Stupid White Men," and Hannity continues it with his book, a poorly researched effort full of blatant falsehoods and highly distorted versions of the truth.
...But Hannity's claims often stray into the realm of myth. He scores some points with his criticism of the outrageous rhetoric thrown by some liberal commentators, such as James Carville and Bob Herbert, but Hannity gets his facts wrong again and again, especially, and not surprisingly, when it comes to Democratic politicians."
Numerous lies abound, for instance, about former President Bill Clinton. Hannity cites an oft repeated lie that in a speech at Georgetown University, "Clinton seemingly blamed the vicious terrorist attacks on you and me and all Americans." Citing a passage from the speech in which Clinton noted that Europeans and Americans had engaged in atrocious acts in the past, such as the Crusades and slavery, Hannity says Clinton is providing a "justification for radical Islamic terrorism" and an "apology for terrorism." This criticism had a bold, but short-lived, life span last fall, when conservative critics leapt to attack Clinton based on a slanted article in the Washington Times before actually reading what he had said.
"The speech itself makes it clear that the former president didn't note these historical events to excuse the attacks of Sept. 11 but merely to illustrate that killing innocent noncombatants has a long history. Other conservatives who picked up this tick had the class to correct their attacks with the truth. Now, 10 months after this myth was corrected, truth doesn't seem to be much of a concern for Hannity."
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I read that entire speech and commented on it right after Clinton made it (unfortunately those archives have been lost) and I agree with Hannity's interpretation. Here's a quote from that speech, read it and draw your own conclusions. Do keep in mind that Clinton is referring to 9/11 with the last line....
(**Here in the United States, we were founded as a nation that practiced slavery, and slaves quite frequently were killed even though they were innocent...This country once looked the other way when a significant number of native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human.
"And we are still paying a price today**)
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Let Freedom Ring also accuses Clinton of "not effectively going after Osama Bin Laden" and suggests Clinton should have sent "a covert team over to the Middle East to take out Bin Laden." But Clinton, of course, did attempt to kill bin Laden with a cruise missile attack in 1998 and authorized several other overt and covert measures targeting the terrorist leader. He just failed. But such a claim could also be made thus far against President George W. Bush.
Clinton also turned down an offer from Sudan to hand him over in 1997 and to the best of my knowledge Clinton never sent a covert team into Afghanistan to track down and eliminate Bin Laden. So where is Hannity wrong?
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Without citing a reference, Hannity also states on the first page of his chapter on taxes that "the tax burden on American families is at a record high, having skyrocketed during the Clinton-Gore years." Hannity most likely arrived at this figure -- and this is a guess; footnotes are irregular and sometimes incomplete -- using deceptive calculations that simply divide total taxes collected by the government by the number of families. But the progressive nature of our income tax system means that the national tax burden is not evenly divided among families. Tax receipts naturally went up in the 1990s as the economy grew rapidly and more citizens were pushed into higher tax brackets. Yet a study from the left-leaning but well-respected Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that the share of income paid in federal taxes by the middle 20 percent of families declined from 1995 to 2000, when it stood at its lowest level since 1979.
Hannity continues this faulty logic in repeating the canard spread by the Tax Foundation that, under Clinton, "tax freedom day" (the day when Americans have paid off their tax bill for the year) was pushed back from April 20 to May 1. Once again, this is a lazy use of averaging to make higher incomes (that is, more people moving into higher tax brackets) look like an increase in tax rates for average citizens.
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So we have a difference in the way that Spinsanity and Hannity are figuring the stats. Both seem to be able to make a case for their side as Spinsanity even seems to admit. So how does this justify calling Hannity's version of things a "myth", a "blatant falsehood", or "highly distorted?" It looks like a plain old disagreement about how to figure the statistics to me.
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In other cases, Hannity can't even interpret the data from his own sources correctly. In a discussion of President Ronald Reagan's economic policies, he claims that "had all of Reagan's budgets been adopted federal spending would have been 25 percent less on a cumulative basis." This statement is immediately followed by a chart, reproduced from a Web site that shows that the total difference between federal budgets enacted from 1982 through 1989 and those proposed by President Reagan was $197.3 billion, or 2.7 percent (the 25 percent number on the chart is based on a flawed method of compounding the difference between each year's budget).
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I haven't picked up Hannity's book yet so I don't have access to the chart but all we have here is Hannity saying, "It's correct" and Spinsanity saying, "No it's not." Is that supposed to be some sort of definitive proof that Hannity was wrong? This is nothing but a "he said / she said" argument unless Spinsanity can present the chart and show the "flawed method" they claim Hannity is using.
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When discussing Democratic opposition to Bush's tax cut, he accurately quotes House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., who stated in April 2001 that "at a time when key indicators tell us that there is an economic slowdown, the president has sent a plan that ignores the needs of average Americans and provides a blueprint to fulfill a campaign promise to cut taxes first no matter what." Amazingly, Hannity follows this quote with an accusation: "Can you believe these statements? Not even the most liberal of economists will argue for tax increases during a recession."
Gephardt, however, didn't argue for a tax increase in that quote -- or in any others during the Bush tax-cut debate. This is a blatant distortion designed to equate opposition to Republican tax cuts with support for a tax increase.
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Actually Hannity did not accuse Gephardt of wanting to raise taxes. What he was pointing out (correctly I might add) was that Gephardt wanted higher taxes in a recession than the Republicans.
Since Bush's tax cuts have yet to be made permanent, being against making them permanent (Gephardt's position today) does by default mean he is currently for raising taxes. That's because taxes will go up from their current levels unless the cut is made permanent. Even in 2001 you would have to say that Gephardt was for 'higher taxes' than the Republicans. Again, Spinsanity and Hannity simply have a disagreement about how the issue has been presented.
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And in an attack that would certainly come as a shock to those who took part in the radical New Left movement of the '60s, Hannity devotes eight pages to his contention that Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle is "a New Left Democrat" and "arguably the most ideologically intransigent New Left liberal to ever serve in the Senate leadership."
The New Left was, as Hannity himself admits earlier in the book, a radical movement that wanted to largely dismantle capitalism and the U.S. military. To back up his use of this label on Daschle, Hannity cites only a list of 10 votes over a 23-year career in which Daschle voted against increased defense spending and missile defense, against the Persian Gulf War, and for a nuclear freeze. One of the cuts Hannity cites Daschle voting for is a minuscule $329 million. Missing from the list, of course, are all of the defense budgets Daschle voted for, including this year's, which included nearly $30 billion in increased spending -- hardly the action of a New Left radical.
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So we have a disagreement between the author and Hannity over how "arguably" left-wing Daschle is. Hannity says he's a hard core lefty and the author says he isn't. The author cites certain pieces of evidence and he mentions that Hannity cited evidence for his position in the book. So this is an opinion that Spinsanity disagrees with...but is it a "myth" or a "blatant falsehood?" Personally, I believe Hannity to again be correct in his OPINION here...
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The lies continue in Hannity's chapter on the environment, where he focuses on the dispute over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He states that the U.S. Geological Survey said ANWR could yield up to 16 billion barrels of oil. But in March a Washington Post reporter interviewed a geologist at the USGS who said the total was closer to 3.2 billion barrels. Even the highest estimate given by Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, during the congressional debates was 10.2 billion barrels."
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Spinsanity seems much farther off the mark than Hannity here. The USGS's own web site (Adobe Acrobat file) places the amount of oil recoverable from ANWR at between 5.9 - 13.2 billion barrels and says that it could go as high as 15 billion barrels. Furthermore, The US department of Interior has been widely quoted as saying that there is between "9-16" billion barrels of oil in the reserve. So Spinsanity seems to be making far more of an effort to "spin" this issue than Hannity by misleading their readers about the USGS's real estimate and by implying that there are only 3.2 - 10.2 billion barrles of recoverable oil in ANWR.
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But then, Hannity is repeatedly at odds with reality in this chapter, stating that ANWR oil would make the United States "far less dependent on foreign oil" and noting Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa Jr.'s assertion that drilling would create 735,000 jobs. A Miami Herald article citing data from the USGS, the Department of Energy and the Congressional Research Service, however, stated that, at its peak, ANWR would produce less than 5 percent of daily U.S. oil consumption and create between 60,000 and 130,000 new jobs. Yet Hannity, in typical style, uses these falsehoods to make the broad claim that "it is difficult to point to another issue in modern American history where a major political party's rhetoric is so divorced from reality."
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Considering that we only get 10.1% of our oil from Saudi Arabia and Iraq which are our two most unstable suppliers, being able to produce 5% more of our oil domestically would make us "far less dependent of foreign oil." Furthermore, if Jimmy Hoffa's claims conflict with the claims of the Miami Herald, why does that make the claim Hannity cites, "a falsehood" and the claim Spinsanity cites correct?
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And that is Spinsanity's entire case that supposedly shows Hannity's book is a, "poorly researched effort full of blatant falsehoods and highly distorted versions of the truth." Quite frankly, after reading what they have to say, that seems like a more apt description of their review than Hannity's book. Especially since it's coming from a website that bills itself as, "the nation's leading watchdog of manipulative political rhetoric." I guess it takes one to know one.
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