The Republican Brain (34 page)

178
Michele Bachmann
Glenn Kessler, “Bachmann on Slavery and the National Debt,” January 28, 2011. Available online at
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2011/01/bachmann_on_slavery_and_the_na.html
. This item debunks two separate claims by Bachmann from one speech.

178
Donald Trump
Glenn Kessler, “Donald Trump in New Hampshire amid ‘birther' madness,” April 27, 2011. Available online at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/donald-trump-in-new-hampshire-amid-birther-madness/2011/04/27/AFrjfEzE_blog.html
. This debunks four items from Trump and one minor item from President Obama.

178
Newt Gingrich
Glenn Kessler, “Newt Gingrich's Pinocchio-laden debut,” May 13, 2011. Available online at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/newt-gingrichs-pinnochio-laden-debut/2011/05/12/AFf8qb1G_blog.html
. This item checks six separate Gingrich claims from one interview.

178
skyrocket
Indeed, there was one item that upbraided three Republican officials, Karl Rove, conservative blogs, and the Heritage Foundation for all wrongly claiming that President Obama had “apologized” for America. Again, we were highly charitable to Republicans and only counted this as one rating. See Glenn Kessler, “Obama's Apology Tour,” February 22, 2011. Available online at
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2011/02/obamas_apology_tour.html
.

178
failed to bestow a rating
Glenn Kessler, “Sarah Palin's Midnight Ride, Twice Over,” June 6, 2011. Available online at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/sarah-palins-midnight-ride-twice-over/2011/06/06/AGIsoJKH_blog.html
.

178
“half-Pinocchio”
Glenn Kessler, “Obama administration boasting about border security,”
The Washington Post
, May 11, 2011. Available online at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/obama-administration-boasting-about-border-security/2011/05/10/AFj71ZkG_blog.html
.

179
consistency across two fact-checking organizations
A third highly influential fact-checking organization is
FactCheck.org
, which is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. To further clinch the case that Republicans are vastly more wrong than Democrats—or, to further prove that fact-checking organizations are all united in a vast liberal conspiracy to embarrass Republicans—I also wanted to undertake an analysis of this organization's work. However, that was much more difficult to do, because unlike PolitiFact and the
Washington Post
fact-checker,
FactCheck.org
does not use a ratings system of a sort that easily lends itself to quantitative analysis.

Nevertheless, another researcher, Sylvia S. Tognetti, came up with a methodology for analyzing the work of
FactCheck.org
over the same time period for which PolitiFact was analyzed—January 2010 through January 2011. However, a thorough analysis of this rather large dataset of fact-checks could not be completed by this book's deadline. I hope to say more about this study, when it is complete.

180
destabilizing of Greenland
John Cook, “What CO2 level would cause the Greenland ice sheet to collapse?”
Skeptical Science
, March 23, 2010. Available online at
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?p=2&t=73&&n=164
.

180
conservatives who are white and male
Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap, “Cool Dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States,”
Global Environmental Change
, Vol. 21, 2011, p. 1163–72.

181
“litmus test”
Raymond Bradley, “Global warming is a litmus test for US Republicans,”
The Guardian
, August 3, 2011. Available online at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/03/global-warming-republicans
.

181
Romney seemed to have gotten back into line
Katrina Trinko, “Romney and Global Warming,”
National Review
, August 25, 2011. Available online at
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/275599/romney-and-global-warming-katrina-trinko
.

181
pitched blog debate
See Chris Mooney, “Unequivocal: Today's Right is Overwhelmingly More Anti-Science Than Today's Left,” September 27, 2011. Available online at
http://www.desmogblog.com/unequivocal-today-s-right-overwhemingly-more-anti-science-today-s-left
.

182
“socialism”
Joe Romm, “AEI's Kenneth Green Pulls a Charlie Sheen, Plays ‘Socialist' Card in Exchange With Chris Mooney,” September 29, 2011. Available online at
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/09/29/332012/kenneth-green-charlie-sheen-socialist-card-chris-mooney/
.

183 “
development, adjustment, and well-being of children with lesbian and gay parents
” American Psychological Association Council of Representatives, Research Summary on Sexual Orientation, Parents, And Children. Available online at
http://www.apa.org/about/governance/council/policy/parenting.aspx
.

183
“bad sampling techniques”
Interview with Charlotte Patterson, May 3, 2011.

183
“while ignoring God”
Quoted in Judge Cindy S. Lederman, Final Judgment of Adoption in the matter of
John and James Doe
, Circuit Court of the Eleventh Judicial Circuit, Miami-Dade County, Juvenile Division, November 25, 2008.

183
“not consistent with the science”
Judge Cindy S. Lederman, Final Judgment of Adoption in the matter of
John and James Doe
, Circuit Court of the Eleventh Judicial Circuit, Miami-Dade County, Juvenile Division, November 25, 2008.

183
“his own personal ideology”
Judge Timothy Davis Fox, Memorandum Opinion in
Matthew Lee Howard et al. v. Child Welfare Agency Review Board
, Circuit Court of Pulaski County, Arkansas, December 29, 2004.

184
all of which have been refuted
American Psychological Association, “Sexual orientation and homosexuality,” noting, “most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation”; “lesbian, gay, and bisexual orientations are not disorders. Research has found no inherent association between any of these sexual orientations and psychopathology”; and “To date, there has been no scientifically adequate research to show that therapy aimed at changing sexual orientation (sometimes called reparative or conversion therapy) is safe or effective.” See
http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/sexual-orientation.aspx
.

184
refuted through epidemiological research
For the breast cancer claims see National Cancer Institute, “Abortion, Miscarriage, and Breast Cancer Risk” Fact Sheet, noting, “having an abortion or miscarriage does not increase a woman's subsequent risk of developing breast cancer.” Available online at:
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/abortion-miscarriage
. For the mental disorder claim see Trine Munke-Olsen et al, “Induced First-Trimester Abortion and Risk of Mental Disorder,”
New England Journal of Medicine
, January 27, 2011, Vol. 364: No. 4, 332–9, noting, “The finding that the incidence rate of psychiatric contact was similar before and after a first-trimester abortion does not support the hypothesis that there is an increased risk of mental disorders after a first-trimester induced abortion.”

184
adult stem cells can supplant embryonic ones
For an overview, see Chris Mooney,
The Republican War on Science
, Chapter 12. For Gingrich, see
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2011/09/30/332730/gingrich-deceives-stem-cell-research/
. For the current scientific consensus, see a statement from the International Society for Stem Cell Research, noting, “it would be unwise to ignore the potential for either adult or embryonic stem cells to result in a meaningful new approach. Adult and embryonic stem cells are complementary subjects of research and studying them side by side offers the greatest potential to rapidly generate new therapies.” Available online at
http://www.isscr.org/Adult_Stem_Cells_Myths_and_Reality/2878.htm
.

184
exaggerating the effectiveness of abstinence only education programs
For an overview, see Chris Mooney,
The Republican War on Science
, New York: Basic Books, 2005, p. 223–227. See also Douglas Kirby, “The Impact of Abstinence and Comprehensive Sex and STD/HIV Education Programs on Adolescent Sexual Behavior,”
Sexuality Research and Social Policy
, September 2008, Vol. 5, No. 3, p. 18–27. Available online at
http://www.cfw.org/Document.Doc?id=283
.

185
wild “Truther” conspiracy theory
See Brendan Nyhan, “Why the ‘Death Panel' Myth Wouldn't Die: Misinformation in the Healthcare Reform Debate,”
The Forum
, Volume 8, Issue 1, available online at
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/health-care-misinformation.pdf
. For a longer discussion about why the “Truther” question is posed in a reasonable way in the Scripps-Howard poll, see Brendan Nyhan, “9/11 and Birther Misperceptions Compared,” August 10, 2009. Available online at
http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2009/08/911-and-birther-misperceptions-compared.html
.

Chapter Ten

The Republican War on Economics

There are people who literally walk across the street when they see me coming.”

Bruce Bartlett is sitting in an Irish pub in Great Falls, Virginia, explaining how he became a heretic on the U.S. political right. In the course of our conversation, what comes across most clearly is that Bartlett is the kind of person who says exactly what he thinks—which, it seems, was a large part of the problem.

“It's absolutely amazing the uniformity of attitudes you hear from conservatives,” says Bartlett. “It's like they use the same identical words.” Bartlett hews to no such line: When we talked he was coming off a large press blip for calling Texas governor Rick Perry an “idiot” on CNN. (The provocation was Perry's remark that it would be “almost treasonous” for Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke to launch another bout of quantitative easing prior to the 2012 election.)

You might think, based on his resume, that Bartlett would have impeccable cred in the conservative movement. Trained as a historian, but frankly an economics wonk, over his career Bartlett has worked in the Reagan White House, the George H.W. Bush Treasury department, on staff for Congressional Republicans (including Ron Paul and Jack Kemp), and on the think tank circuit—Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation. He's seen all parts of the conservative movement. He's kicked the tires. “For a long time, I was a very loyal Republican,” he offers.

But near the middle of George W. Bush's first term in office, Bartlett began sensing something was very amiss. In late 2003, Bush and Congress created Medicare Part D to pay for senior citizens' prescription drugs—and did so in a way that not only blocked the government from negotiating with pharmaceutical companies for better prices, but added considerably to federal budget deficits. “I was just absolutely flabbergasted,” says Bartlett, “because any half competent budget analyst knew Medicare was our number one budget problem.”

Working at that time for the conservative, Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, Bartlett became increasingly critical of the administration. He made particularly large waves when he was quoted in
The New York Times Magazine
in late 2004, accusing George W. Bush of “[dispensing] with people who confront him with inconvenient facts . . . Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis.” Bartlett then exercised his own need for analysis in his bestselling 2005 book
Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy
, which denounced the president for terrible fiscal stewardship—for not being a good economic
conservative
—but carefully stayed away from criticizing Bush on social and foreign policy.

“I thought, naively, if I just wrote about only domestic policy and quoted a lot of conservatives, and wrote only stuff that no conservative could disagree with on the substance, and documented it well, then people would be forced to accept it,” Bartlett remembers.

Instead, the National Center for Policy Analysis dismissed Bartlett after seeing the manuscript. According to a report that soon emerged in
The
New York Times
, the conservative outlet “did not want to be associated with that kind of work.” Bartlett, it seemed, had betrayed the team, the group. He had been far too individualistic, and frankly, too Open.

The transformation was complete, and now Bartlett no longer calls himself a Republican—though he still insists that, in the Burkean sense, he's a conservative. “I think we should conserve what's good,” he explains. But trying to conserve intellectual conservatism has been a losing battle—and like a Kerry Emanuel of economics, Bartlett has grown more and more outspoken about how off-base the right has become on fiscal and monetary policy. To read his work over the past few years is to quickly see that conservatives have become just as anti-economics as they are anti-science. And we're not talking about debatable or nuanced matters here, like whether you're a Keynesian or a follower of Milton Friedman, and in what context. As Bartlett explains, the right today doesn't even follow Friedman—a onetime free market conservative icon and Reagan adviser—any longer.

“Now all the kooks have gone over to bashing the Fed, going for the gold standard,” says Bartlett. “Somehow Ben Bernanke should be strung up for even thinking about increasing the money supply. That used to be the standard conservative response, and now it's not even allowed to be discussed.”

“Milton Friedman, if he were alive, he'd be saying, ‘you're all nuts,'” says Bartlett.

Economics has long been the one academic discipline that conservatives feel they own. To hear a Bartlett or David Frum tell it, the period from the 1970s up through the Reagan years was a time of intellectual ferment and excitement on the right, precisely because of the introduction of new and heretical thinking in economics.

But whether conservatives can still make such a claim to the field is dubious. Even though they're less liberal than experts in some other fields, academic economists today are liberal by nearly a 3:1 margin, according to the research of sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons discussed earlier. Even if you sample the average citizen, rather than the expert class, liberals do not appear any worse at basic economic reasoning than conservatives.

For instance, in a 2009 survey that tested the public's “economic Enlightenment” by asking 17 questions—some clearly designed to trap liberals, and some clearly designed to trap conservatives or libertarians—the two groups performed equally poorly on the specific questions that were crafted to trip them up. For instance, liberals and progressives didn't do so hot when asked to agree or disagree that “Rent-control laws lead to housing shortages” (they do) and “Free trade leads to unemployment” (it doesn't, overall). But conservatives and libertarians didn't do so hot when asked to agree or disagree that “Gun-control laws fail to reduce people's access to guns” (they don't fail). And conservatives in particular did much worse when asked to agree or disagree that “Making abortions illegal would increase the number of black market-abortions” (it obviously would).

Less important than the flubs made in surveys, though, are the wrongheaded economic claims now fully embraced and repeated endlessly by conservative elites—elected representatives, think tank mavens, and commentators. We're talking about assertions that are rejected by a consensus of economic experts, or that are just outright false, but that we nevertheless find conservatives wedded to and unwilling to let go of because they backstop core beliefs. These are everywhere nowadays, and they're hugely consequential falsehoods to boot. They lie at the very center of public debate over fiscal policy and the state of our economy.

It isn't just misinformation about taxes, deficits, and how our economy came to ail so badly—though there's plenty of that. But we're also talking about putting the entire U.S. economy and way of life in jeopardy on the basis of questionable economics, the way the Tea Party debt ceiling deniers did. And now they've begun an ill-informed attack on the one institution above all that must remain above politics in this country: The Federal Reserve.

Without saying that liberals and Democrats have never gotten anything wrong on economics, then, we can safely say this—they don't show the same denial of reality today. Nor do extreme left-wing economic positions have any real sway at present.

“The problem with left wing economics,” says Bartlett, “is really that you never hear it.”

To show how Republicans have embraced faith-based economics, let's start with one whopping false claim that we've already encountered in these pages. When it was directly refuted right before their eyes in Brendan Nyhan's and Jason Reifler's motivated reasoning study, conservatives were apparently so affronted that they showed a “backfire effect.”

I'm referring to the claim, straight from George W. Bush's mouth and the mouths of many members of his administration, and many other conservatives, that tax cuts
increase
government revenue—or, as Bartlett puts it, “pay for themselves.” Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, put it like this in 2010:

That's been the majority Republican view for some time. That there's no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They
increased
revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy. [Italics added]

McConnell himself asserts that most Republicans believe this—and if that's true, then it's very strong evidence for this book's argument. Because the claim is completely without foundation.

It's true that tax cuts can stimulate the economy and cause growth. And this may, in turn, ultimately lead to some increase in tax revenue. But no serious economist thinks tax cuts (especially the Bush tax cuts) stimulate the economy enough to fully replace the revenue lost to the government from cutting taxes in the first place.

Indeed, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, tax cuts enacted under George W. Bush increased federal budget deficits by some $1.5 trillion between 2001 and 2007. Bush's own Council of Economic Advisers chair N. Gregory Mankiw, the Harvard economist, has likened the idea that tax cuts increase overall revenue to that of “some snake oil salesman . . . trying to sell a miracle cure for what ails the economy.”

And this is just the first of many questionable economic claims now used to support a government-shrinking agenda, to defend conservative policies and—perhaps most important, from the perspective of supporting the in-group and denigrating the out-group—to attack liberal ones.

The notion that tax cuts pay for themselves is a linchpin of the present conservative view that tax cuts are always good, and tax raises always bad. Almost all congressional Republicans have signed a pledge, to Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, that effectively requires them to hew to this supremely Manichean stance. This, in turn, leads to much inflexibility, and much all-or-nothing negotiating. For their pledge notwithstanding, the truth about tax cuts can never be an absolute one: It's always situational. They're very good in some contexts, very bad in others, and everything in between (especially since there are so many different kinds of taxes, from highway tolls to cigarette taxes to real estate taxes to the AMT).

A closely related falsehood is the notion that George W. Bush and his tax cuts are not to blame for the vast deficits we're now laboring under. That Bush had a major hand here is obvious to anyone who analyzes the U.S. fiscal situation—yet conservatives manage to claim otherwise. Here, for instance, is Senator Orrin Hatch in April of 2011: “America has a debt crisis not because citizens are taxed too little, but because government spends too much.”

The Bush tax cuts are not, to be sure, the sole cause of our predicament—any more than Closedness, alone, explains Republicans. The economic story, too, is multifaceted and multicausal. It involves many things that occurred during the 2000s, and most of all, the Great Recession. But even setting the last factor aside, the large majority of them were on Bush's watch. And insofar as some occurred on Obama's—like passing the 2009 stimulus bill—that's because he was trying to put out the fires that raged when he took office.

To show as much, consider a recent Pew Charitable Trusts analysis of our budgetary plight. Pew wanted to understand why there was such a vast difference between the Congressional Budget Office's January 2001 projection of where we'd be right now—the CBO expected then that we'd be running a more than $2 trillion surplus—and our actual state of affairs: some $10 trillion in publicly held debt (a figure that does not include much additional debt held in government accounts). That's a roughly $12 trillion growth in publicly held debt over a decade. What caused that huge change?

According to Pew's analysis, the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts added up to 13 percent of the total, making these tax cuts one of the largest single contributors to the growth in debt. But of course there were many other contributors, including the two wars (10 percent), Medicare Part D (2 percent), increased spending (15 percent), other tax cuts (5 percent) and increased interest costs (11 percent), the Recovery Act (6 percent), and extending the Bush tax cuts in 2010 (3 percent). The biggest single factor was “technical and economic changes” at 28 percent, which includes the recession.