Fool Us Once, Shame on You. Fool Us Twice, Shame on Us

Remember "yellow rain," the first time we got overstated, and ultimately inaccurate, claims about weapons of mass destruction (although that's not what they were called back then)? Are any of you even old enough to remember yellow rain? Alexander Haig? There's nostalgia for you.

A brief dialogue:

L: The evidence that Bush lied about Iraq having vast supplies of weapons of mass destruction is as solid as the evidence of a connection between Iraq and Al-Queda.

R: But that's preposterous. There's no evidence that Bush lied, only leaks and assertions from people with an axe to grind and who want to persuade people based on emotion, not fact.

L: Exactly.

Mendacity and Mythmaking
STRETCHING THE TRUST IS JUST SOP FOR GOP
East Valley Tribune, Jun. 8, 2003

Critics of the Bush administration’s overselling, to put it mildly, of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction probably fear looking foolish if U.S. forces eventually find some (any?) WMD.

Fate is indeed callous, and worrying comes naturally to me; after all, I’m Jewish, and a Democrat, but I repeat myself. But the more I think about it, the less I fret.

First, nobody who sold us on the idea of Iraqi WMD now seems the least bit concerned. Does President Bush look like he’s worried about where all those nasty weapons went?

If before the war Iraq actually had WMD, but now that we’re occupying the country and haven’t found any, doesn’t that make any Iraqi WMD completely unaccounted for, and more likely available for acquisition by terrorists? Wouldn’t that make us less safe?

(One of my less coherent critics attacked my last column because I hadn’t heard that before the war Iraq put all its WMD on two ships that were sunk. Gosh -- some of you ‘wingers will believe anything.)

Bush, Rumsfeld, and the rest look like fraternity boys who sent the new pledges on a snipe hunt. Now that we’ve scoured Iraq and found nary a snipe (just two trailers that, if you eliminate all other possibilities, might have been snipe pens) they’re having a tough time keeping up the pretense. Some joke, huh?

Too bad in this particular snipe hunt, dozens of our servicemen and women had to die -- and are still dying -- far from home. But life is better in Iraq now, and after all, isn’t that why, by a 5-4 vote, we elected George W. Bush?

Second, it’s not the first time these guys tried a WMD scare. Some twenty years ago, the Reagan administration and The Wall Street Journal editorial page used similarly unreliable and unconfirmed reports from exiles to allege that the Soviets had used biological weapons in Southeast Asia. But the “yellow rain” mycotoxin claims, despite their repetition and vehemence, were disproved by independent scientists.

But that generation of neocons never paid any price to their credibility. Instead, the false and overblown WMD claims helped justify their defense programs and plans. Maybe this generation also believes that once you convince yourself, then it’s not really a lie, is it?

And speaking of Bill Clinton, Bush’s critics should get to fire away with nary a concern because Republicans never worried about getting anything wrong about Clinton. So shouldn’t we get to pummel Bush without worry, too?

Remember the FBI files, Mena airport, the Travel Office, the Arlington National Cemetery waivers, the haircut at LAX, the trashing of the White House on moving out, the Hillary gift registry? Remember Whitewater itself, or Al Gore saying that he had “invented” the Internet?

None of those claims were accurate, but ultimately it didn’t matter, to what most people think of either the Clinton administration or of all those Republicans who huffed and puffed and never once apologized for getting anything wrong.

It’s heads-I-win, tails-you-lose. Bush got swoons from columnists because he stayed away from the return of the U.S. Air Force crew captured by the Chinese in 2001. The conservatives admired his restraint; after all, Clinton could never have resisted putting himself into the limelight like that.

Heck, Clinton was such a self-aggrandizing egotist, he might stolen the spotlight by meeting the crew by landing on an aircraft carrier or something. That would have been flagrant and terrible if Clinton had done it. Of course, Bush doing it is entirely different.

No wonder these guys take all the tax cuts for themselves. “Stretching the truth” to justify a war is just standard operating procedure.

It All Depends on What You Mean by WMD

If it's really all about human rights, it's on to the Congo!

BUSH PLAYING FAST AND LOOSE WITH THE TRUTH
East Valley Tribune, June 2, 2003

Feeling nostalgic? Let’s recall those glorious days of yester-month, when Iraq absolutely, positively had weapons of mass destruction:

“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” Vice President Dick Cheney, Aug. 26, 2002.

“Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. In such quantities, these chemical agents could also kill untold thousands . . . U.S. intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents . . . The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.” President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, Jan. 28, 2003.

“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” President Bush, March 17, 2003.

“We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003.

“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, quoted in Vanity Fair and by Reuters.

You can read the whole series of quotes, a dramatic arc running from total certainty and imminent threat (remember those balsa-wood drones?) to “who claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, anyway?” at "Billmon's" Whiskey Bar.

I guess Bush decided to “restore honor to the Oval Office” by limiting his lying to things other than sex.

Speaking of lying, those of you expecting those millions of new jobs from the so-called “Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003” need to remember this sorry history. When new jobs prove as rare as Iraqi WMD, the rationale for the $350 billion tax cut undoubtedly will keep changing before our eyes.

If this “jobless recovery” continues -- and reporter John Hilsenrath, in the May 29 Wall Street Journal quoted experts who believe that due to productivity growth, the economy needs to expand at greater than 3.5 percent annually, which most predict as far too optimistic, to generate new jobs -- we soon will see far different rationales.

We’ll probably hear those new jobs never existed, or went to Syria or Iran, or got destroyed before the tax cut. I doubt we’ll hear the real reason, that the Bush administration’s goal always has been cutting health care, education, and other programs to give the rich more money.

And from the “If Democrats Tried This, You’d Kill Us” Department, why the near-complete silence over both the Arizona Senate GOP leadership calling in DPS to ferry Sen. Linda Binder back to Phoenix, and Rep. Tom DeLay involving the new federal Department of Homeland Security in the Texas redistricting brouhaha?

As The New Republic noted, “When FBI files showed up in Bill Clinton’s White House, Republicans, with the help of the press, screamed with outrage, even though no evidence that they were used for any partisan purpose was ever uncovered. Yet, in this case, when we know that police powers were harnessed for partisan gain, the issue elicits laughs.”

Finally, I can’t resist noting that another Tribune columnist “spelled out” an interesting complaint in describing the questioning of Sen. John McCain at the GOP forum in Scottsdale (read carefully): “Why aren’t some Republicans staying true to Republican principals?”

That’s odd. Everyone knows school administrators are usually Democrats.

Who Said Irony Is Dead?

The Note got there first, but this has got to be the quote of the decade:

"Is nothing private?"--Kenneth Starr.

From the New York Post.

UPDATE: As Charles Pierce said on NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me this weekend, finally, after seven years, we get the punch line. Ken Starr--the man is an absolute master of comedic timing.

MISTIA vs. MIATIS

Political writer Matt Bai profiles former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean in this week's New York Times Magazine, summarized by Slate here. ABC News's The Note quotes a key passage of the article about Dean's anger as key to his appeal among Democrats:

"Dean is a gifted orator. Self-righteousness surges like a current from his feet up through his 5-foot-8 frame, energizing a hard voice that strikes a listener in the chest. At a dinner held by local Democrats in little Lee County, Iowa, I watch as he ignites a room full of voters with a broad indictment of Democrats for letting Bush have his way on war, tax cuts and education. 'The sad thing is that the Democratic Party has helped the president do this,' Dean says, although he doesn't sound sad at all. He sounds as if he wants to throw the lectern through a wall."

The Note previously coined an acronym for a typical speech by either Sen. Joe Lieberman or Sen. John McCain, where they speak "more in sorrow than in anger" or MISTIA. I've used that formulation with my children ("I note, more in sorrow than in anger, that nobody has picked up their rooms as we asked you to do this morning") and while they may not see the humor in it now, they will eventually. But Dean may have developed a better formulation for the primary season: More In Anger Than In Sorrow. MIATIS just may plug into what Democrats participating in the primary and caucus process want to see against that guy who's president now and who's screwing up the economy, not to mention Iraq and Afghanistan.

Root Cause Analysis

My Devereux friends may see in this column something that we quote from the late Weaver Falberg each year at the annual leadership award dinner, about avoiding the comfortable seat of success. (It's not available on the website, so I guess I'll have to wait until next May to put it into my Palm Pilot for future use.)

Anyway, my right-wing analog on the Tribune op-ed page of course blamed the Jayson Blair episode on affirmative action and liberal muddle-headedness, without recognizing that the issue is really organizational and structural, not political and ideological. Of course, she's the business school professor and I'm the ex-politician, so go figure.


PRESTIGE CAN BLIND LEADERS TO CATASTROPHE
East Valley Tribune, May 25, 2003

The Jayson Blair debacle at The New York Times isn’t really about affirmative action or political bias. The best analysis has come from Prof. Sydney Finkelstein of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, writing in The Wall Street Journal. While a local business professor crams all facts into her pre-existing ideology, some Ivy Leaguer explains the actual organizations lessons.

Finkelstein contends that the Blair scandal matches what happened at Barings Bank and Motorola. Key executives at both companies were both very smart and were aware of what was happening -- but didn’t recognize the significance of facts that called their widely-acknowledged expertise into question. What they were hearing was so contrary to their internal assumptions that they proved incapable of understanding and acting. It’s less hubris than cognitive dissonance.

Nicholas Leeson, Finkelstein wrote, wasn’t some “rogue” trader covering up huge losses on speculative trades with a dummy account. His superiors in London approved his trading, so long as he kept winning (or didn’t report his losses). Even low-level clerks knew of Leeson’s large and risky bets. But the losses grew too big to ignore, and the loss of reputation, not the monetary loss, brought down the bank.

Motorola dominated the analog cell phone market, but did little about Nokia’s increasing success with digital phones. Motorola knew what was happening, because it licensed some key patents to Nokia, which reported back its sales results. Motorola resisted shifting resources away from its (then) highly profitable analog lines into the (then) unproven digital market, which proved disastrous.

We’ve seen additional examples of “reputational blindness” recently. Being a rocket scientist offers no protection, either. Congressional hearings last week into the Columbia disaster revealed NASA managers rejected pleas from lower-level engineers to request satellite photographs to check for damage to the shuttle’s wing. Maybe no useful photographs existed, but nobody with authority ever bothered to ask. Senior NASA managers apparently believed they and their top contractors knew more than anybody else about the shuttle program’s risks -- and thus saw no need to ask lesser mortals for help.

Ernst & Young was tipped to accounting fraud at HealthSouth, specifying accounts where expenses were classified as capital expenditures to reduce costs and boost profits -- but senior accountants didn’t believe their huge client would engage in a billion-dollar scam.

With hindsight, senior Times managers had evidence of Blair’s plagiarism and deceit. But according to Prof. Finkelstein, top editors didn’t act because of their institutional prestige and self-image.

Not only did outsiders consider Barings, Motorola, NASA, E&Y, and the Times tops in their industries, filled with really, really smart people -- but so did people inside each organization. Nobody questioned a young reporter who “scooped” everyone else on national stories; that’s what Times reporters are supposed to do.

Nobody questioned CEOs who had led Motorola back from near-bankruptcy to great success when they chose not to make and market digital phones; gutsy strategic decisions is what Motorola CEOs are supposed to do. And nobody who mattered questioned not seeking some outside help about the shuttle; staying focused on core mission tasks is what NASA managers are supposed to do.

As Finkelstein notes, it’s easy for people to fail to understand “evidence that challenges their deepest self-image.” Success is very comfortable. It’s extraordinarily hard for a successful manager to keep running scared. Smarts aren’t enough; too often, successful smart people stop challenging their beliefs and start thinking they’re smarter than they really are.

Successful business run perpetually scared, and their managers keep challenging their assumptions -- especially assuming that success today means success tomorrow. In other words, thinking that Jayson Blair proves you were right all along could be your big mistake.

Sticking Up for Nick and Slade

This week's column is kind of local--in fact, the first piece I'm responding to didn't run in the entire paper, but only the Scottsdale edition--but I came up with two punch lines and then worked backwards to set up the jokes. The Tribune has been extraordinarily negative on the fire department propositions, and the last piece, by Mark Scarp, contained an unnecessary dig at Nick Barbisan, one of the "yes" campaigners. It really wasn't necessary for Mark's argument, and was not only based on total surmise without any reporting, but also was absurd on its face. Another Tribune columnist, Becky Fenger, has gone after state Sen. Slade Mead a couple of times, and somebody needed to come to the guy's defense, even if I hadn't come up with the Kool-Aid line.


TRIBUNE WRITERS QUICK ON 'TREATMENT' TRIGGER
East Valley Tribune, May 18, 2003

I gotta defend Nick and Slade.

In arguing in Scottsdale edition of last Thursday’s Tribune against the Scottsdale fire service propositions, Mark Scarp laid into Nick Barbisan, whose young son died in a tragic accident and who now publicly supports replacing Rural/Metro Corp. with a municipal fire department.

Here’s the little rhetorical trick Mark played on Nick:

“Nick Barbisan of McDowell Mountain Ranch, whose small son died last July, was recruited by the union to try to shame Rural/Metro, but as Barbisan, in this litigious age, never filed suit against the company over the death, voters have been rightfully skeptical whether the company had anything to do with it compared to the city, which for five years dawdled with its sole authority to build new fire stations in growing areas.”

First, Dan Ables of the “Yes” campaign says they didn’t recruit Barbisan, he volunteered. You can believe the “Yes” campaigners or Mark Scarp, editorial writer -- just not Mark Scarp, objective reporter, who isn’t part of this discussion. Each version comes from somebody arguing passionately about the election. You decide who to believe (probably based on how you already decided to vote).

But the real irony is that the Tribune, which holds greedy trial lawyers responsible for halitosis, reality TV, and Third World debt, attacks poor Nick’s credibility because he didn’t sue. The Tribune wants to limit damages and block access to the courts -- but because Barbisan didn’t sue, we’re asked to dismiss his views.

Naturally, if Barbisan had sued, that would become an equally powerful reason for skepticism. There’s a word to describe reaching the exact same conclusion on exactly opposite facts, and it ain’t logic.

It’s “The World According to Scarp”: Damned if you sue, damned if you don’t.

The other guy getting “the treatment” in the Tribune is state Sen. Slade Mead, a personal piñata for Becky Fenger and the Generalissimo Franco wing of the East Valley GOP.

Now, Becky’s idea of fact-checking is to put something negative about a Democrat in a GOP newsletter, and if nobody complains, then it must be true. I’m still waiting for any evidence that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg ever uttered remarks Becky attributed to her.

There’s something truly odd about these anonymous sources claiming Sen. Mead is bellicose or has popping veins being unearthed by Becky, who just loves J. D. Hayworth, who is to polite decorum what Bill Bidwell is to winning football.

Slade’s real problem is that he reads (and understands) the ingredients on the packages of Kool-Aid that the Republican legislative leadership demands he drink. The GOP leadership plays these little games, where they pack boatloads of unstated assumptions into a question (revenue projections, economic mumbo-jumbo, and their pet alt-fuels-style programs), then claim that if you don’t support their wacko proposals, you must want to raise taxes, by gazillions.

Of course, you could always eliminate handouts to hobby ranchers, or hobby horses like ineffective abstinence-only sex education, instead of slashing funding for autistic kids, but no! Those aren’t part of the GOP leadership’s unchallengeable secret plans.

Sen. Mead figured out that Becky’s favorite education statistic, that Arizona teacher pay ranks near the national median, is misleading because we kept increasing class size to compensate. You easily can pay teachers more if they each must “teach” 35 or 40 kids. (Heck, you have to pay teachers more to deal with 40-plus kids.) That’s why we rank 50th in the nation in teacher salaries per pupil -- a far more accurate statistic, more reflective of educational quality.

So when you read about Nick Barbisan or Slade Mead on these pages, better take it with a grain of salt -- or maybe the whole shaker.