After a week of efforts to equate the controversial remarks of two particular members of Congress, I pushed back a bit at New York:
It looks like House Republicans are going to deal with outrage over their perennial problem child Marjorie Taylor Greene by finding a Democrat to punish. That would be Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, according to Politico’s Huddle:
“’I think that Ilan should receive the same type of punishment as Marjorie because if it’s good for one, it is good for another,’ Rep. Maria Salazar (R-Fla.), who voted to remove Greene from her committees, told me. ‘Anti-semitism is the same thing as anti-semitism. It’s just that Nancy is afraid …'”
There are others who want to push for Omar’s removal as well as those looking to censure her over her war crimes remarks — and a few Dems may join them.
The idea of equating Omar’s complaints about unequal treatment of countries in investigating military misconduct with Greene’s comparisons of mask and vaccine requirements to the Holocaust is deeply satisfying to a lot of people. Republicans can continue their now-ancient habit of waving away extremism in their ranks by claiming it’s more prevalent on the other side of the aisle. Nervous centrist Democrats can document their nervous centrism by firing thunderbolts left and right. And most of all, accusing both parties of harboring those prone to “false equivalence” appeals to the false equivalence many Beltway media folks want to draw between Democrats and Republicans, who are engaged in the mutually assured destruction of partisan polarization.
There’s only one problem: Treating what MTG and Omar have said as equal expressions of false equivalence actually is false, as any honest evaluation of their words quickly shows. Greene bluntly compared COVID-19 precautions to the Holocaust, analogized vaccine documentation mandates to the Nazi practice of making Jews wear yellow stars, and, for good measure, said Democrats are like Nazis because they are “socialists.” Omar said this in the midst of a virtual exchange with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken over investigations of the brief but intense war between Israel and Hamas:
“’We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity,’ she wrote. “We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.’”
Her point wasn’t to say the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban were equally culpable in their commission of atrocities, but that all should be equally subject to international investigation. I suppose there are superpatriots who would dispute the idea that America has ever committed “unthinkable atrocities,” though the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attacks, and of countless genocidal assaults on Native Americans, among many examples, suggest otherwise. But in any event, when challenged by Republicans and Democrats alike to make it clear she was not imputing equivalent culpability to these various nations and coalitions of fighters, Omar complied instantly:
“U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar said Thursday that she was ‘in no way equating terrorist organizations with democratic countries with well-established judicial systems … ‘
“’To be clear: the conversation was about accountability for specific incidents regarding [International Criminal Court] cases, not a moral comparison between Hamas and the Taliban and the U.S. and Israel.’”
MTG, meanwhile, kept doubling down on her comparisons of public-health measures with the slaughter of many millions by Nazi Germany, and finally, after more than three weeks and a tour of the Holocaust Museum, she issued an apology that betrayed little understanding of the full scope of the Holocaust, and then refused to apologize for the Democrat-Nazi analogy.
Looking more broadly at the two women and their records of controversial utterances, Ilhan made an unfortunate and erroneous reference to “the Benjamins,” in a gratuitous comment about support for Israel in the United States, for which she “unequivocally” apologized:
“Anti-semitism is real and I am grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-semitic tropes. My intention is never to offend my constituents or Jewish Americans as a whole. We have to always be able to step back and think through criticism, just as I expect people to hear me when others attack my identity. This is why I unequivocally apologize.”
Greene lost her committee assignments earlier this year after media focus on an almost incredible blizzard of incendiary statements she made on social media before coming to Congress (barely anyone even noticed her practice of brandishing an AR-15 when discussing her enemies in campaign ads). In February, she apologized for claiming that school shootings were fake and for promoting QAnon conspiracy theories. She never apologized for happily contemplating violence against congressional Democrats (including, very specifically, Ilhan Omar) and the Speaker of the House, or for her unusually aggressive support of Trump’s electoral big lie and the effort in January to overturn the presidential election results, or for her own subscription to very weird anti-Semitic claims.
If you cannot discern a qualitative difference between Omar’s “outrages” and Greene’s, and between the speed and coherence of their clarifications and apologies, it may be time for some remedial work in logic and rhetoric. These two members of Congress aren’t alike at all, and as much as I sometimes disagree with Ilhan Omar, treating her as a left-wing MTG is lazy and just plain wrong.
Right-Wing lies and propaganda? Say it isn’t so! Horror of horrors! Yeah, there’s alot of angry Democrats on the rampage and it’s about time we had a common cause to rally behind. It appears that the pendulum is beginning to swing to the left, but Democrats need to stay politically engaged and become pro-active to prevent this slide into fascism.
Sad that they had to tilt the poll to make Bush appear to be moving up in the polls. Why cant the press just report the facts. Fact is that GW is dropping in just about every poll that is taken. The trend is downward …not upward!
The more I think about this, the more I think this is a serious, serious SCANDAL.
Its very difficult to believe that between Kohut, Campbell, and the NYT fact checkers, that this “mistake” is not at least partially due to anti-liberal/pro-Bush bias. This is precisely the kind of bullshit that always leads to people thinking that Republicans are much more popular than they really are. The Washington Post has been whoring for Bush on poll numbers as well.
I’m sick of hearing people make purely the a priori argument that it is ridiculous to think that allegedly liberal papers like the New York Times would be biased against liberals. How many times do we have to get screwed before the pattern becomes clear?
If any of you fucking weasels at the Washington Post or the New York Times reads this:
FUCK YOU
We are sick of your shit and we are coming after you this time. No more of your bullshit like around impeachment, or Al Gore, or the Florida debacle, or Bush’s tax cuts, or the Iraq War, or WMD, or Howard Dean, or Wesley Clark, or Bush’s poll numbers.
We will EXPOSE your asses mercilessly. Your reputations will be DESTROYED. No more Ceci Connolly’s.
FUCK YOU
Angry? You bet your ass I’m angry. And you know what? I don’t need your fucking permission to be angry. How come you’re not angry? Answer: because you’re a bunch of fucking weasels.
FUCK YOU
Well, if there’s one thing about Kohut, he will always be there to support the conventional wisdom. The last thing he would ever want to do is make anyone uncomfortable with his poll results. He trades on his insider status and thus has to reinforce whatever most people are saying or want to hear said, particularly those in leadership positions — who of course are Republicans.
It’s shameful, it reminds me of Ruy and Clark’s polls!
That should say everyone else was in the 30s.
It’s pretty amusing this story appeared in the N.Y. Times the same day the CBS N.Y. Times poll showed Bush dropping from 60 to 50 percent in less than a month. BTW, Bush’s disapproval of 45 percent is the highest at this point in their presidencies of any president from Carter on. And it’s not even close. Clinton was at 40 percent dispproval and everyone was in the 30s.
Thanks, Ruy, for that post. I was shocked to see Kohut’s name on that piece of pro-Bush PR. I mean, I expect nothing less than partisan spin from a lot of the “straight-news journalists” at the WaPo and the NYT (it turns out that their reporting of their own poll was much more pro-Bush than either CBS’ report or the Washington Times! — see Atrios). But I really thought Pew was one source that could be trusted. Oh well.
It would be nice to see a systematic comparative study of how newspaper headlines/ledes described similar poll movements for Bush v Clinton v Dean etc.
Both the Wash Post and the NYT regularly give Bush the best possible spin on his numbers. People who work at those papers, like Richard Morin and Claudia Deane at the Post, should be ashamed of themselves.
Why would you expect them to stick to the facts? When their data showed that Gore won Florida they crafted a headline that said the exact opposite.
As Bartcop says, they bow down and kiss the ground for the almighty ditto-monkey dollar.
I have a dumb question: Is there any measurable effect in the polls when the media reports a candidate is rising/falling in popularity?
In other words, are poll ratings self-fulfilling?