More even than George W Bush (Hail to the Chief!), the man everybody loves to despise is Dick Cheney. So what’s this all about? A standing ovation to welcome him? Laughter and mirth? Is it, to pilfer a line from Cheney’s speech, some right-wing gathering of bitter men who cling to their guns? Nope, this is the assembled media. Could he, belatedly, be winning them over?

Part one:

Part two:

The full transcript of this very amusing talk before the Radio Television Correspondent’s dinner can be found here. It’s better in the reading, if you don’t have the time/bandwidth for the video. Cheney really was joking about his natural charm and charisma.

This could have been a mildly interesting story. US house prices are falling and credit is becoming more expensive, which is not exactly the way many consumers bet a few years ago. They were taking a calculated gamble that their asset value would reliably go up, and interest rates would remain low, thereby covering a home loan they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford. They bet wrong. Result? Foreclosure. And the result of a spate of foreclosures? Many unoccupied houses, repossessed by banks, now find themselves going cheap in a buyers’ market.

So far, this is elementary stuff, although Democrats are trying hard to complicate matters by outbidding each other with dumb populist promises, funded with money they expropriate from responsible borrowers who didn’t bet wrong.

But now, what happens to these empty properties, besides depressing market prices? As you can imagine, vandalism and looting is becoming a bit of a problem. Metals and expensive fixings such as airconditioner units left in empty houses are tempting targets, after all.

Here’s how one Jason Szep from Reuters spins the story:

Some homes worth less than their copper pipes

BROCKTON, Massachusetts (Reuters) - Shards of broken glass outside the basement window of 31 Vine Street hint at the destruction inside the three-story home.

Thieves smashed the window to break in and then gutted the property for its copper pipes — a crime that has spread across the United States as the economy slows and foreclosed homes stand empty and vulnerable.

Perhaps the looters figured that the house would be slightly harder to fence than copper. Which makes them smarter than this reporter.

It should be noted that this article was published on 1 April. However, the feature’s length, the perfectly serious vein in which the rest of it continues, and the Massachusetts dateline suggests this is mere coincidence. Jokes only work if you consciously intend to make them.

The story talks about houses being sold for “$100″. Granted, that would be less than their copper pipes, assuming that they had any. It’s not like the story gives further detail on such bargains, such as what condition the house is in, where it is located, whether there are any buyers in the market, whether it was sold in a firesale at auction, or whether it includes the mortgage. If it’s a gag, it’s braindead. My bet is that it’s either a misprint or a misquote, and if I had to choose, I’d wager it’s a misquote.

If that was the basis of a joke, however, consider this:

In Brockton, which suffered 400 foreclosures last year, blamed largely on predatory lending [sic], and which is bracing for another 400 this year, Charney said the thieves inflicted about $15,000 of damage on the home on Vine Street. […] After haggling, the bank shaved $5,000 off the $105,000 price.

Clearly, Reuters reporters are not beyond parroting partisan political rhetoric, such as “predatory lending”. Last time I checked, predators use force against prey, but mortgages are voluntary contracts in which one party stumps up a great deal of cash, and the other party vouches for their ability and intent to pay off the loan. If one party were to breach that contract, the other party can only make the best of a bad situation, and exercise whatever rights they have to compensate for their losses. Reuters calls it “predatory lending”. I’ll see them and raise them “greedy borrowing”. And I’m not bluffing when I say I might throw in “fraud”.

Not that Reutervillians would understand elementary economics, to judge by their arithmetic. Not that Reutervillians understand the difference between reporting and editorialising, judging by their ability to draw sweeping conclusions from a sample of one. Not that Reutervillians grasp the complex nuances of the conditional value and positional magnitude of the zero digit in our numerical notation, judging from the fact that the very house used in the example is worth $105 000, which, according to the headline, is less than the $15 000 in damage caused by the looters. Perhaps they were referring to the actual price of the stolen copper, but then they’d surely report on the fellow walking down the street with 13.5 tons of copper wiring in his hands. And that would be funny.

Thanks to some straight-up, hard-nosed, unbiased reporting, we now know that when it suits the political leanings of the reporter, $15 000 exceeds $105 000. Nice to know Reuterville still has its share of village idiots.

Yesterday, either CNN or Sky News reported on the Heartland Institute’s conference on climate change. (It was CNN — see update.) The three-day conference, held in New York earlier this week, was designed to answer some of the questions that would be relevant to my “10 reasons to reject” and “10 more reasons to disbelieve“. Questions such as:

• how reliable are the data used to document the recent warming trend?
• how much of the modern warming is natural, and how much is likely the result of human activities?
• how reliable are the computer models used to forecast future climate conditions? and
• is reducing emissions the best or only response to possible climate change?

The conference was addressed by leading sceptics of the political orthodoxy emanating from the UN’s IPCC, including many sporting doctorate degrees or other distinctions. The lengthy speaker list included Fred Singer, Ross McKitrick, Anthony Watts, Barun Mitra, Václav Klaus, Craig Loehle, Willie Soon, Roy Spencer, Lord Monckton, Marc Morano, and South Africa’s very own Free Market Foundation man, Leon Louw.

The report ended with a snide comment: “The Flat-Earth Society didn’t shut up shop in 1492.”

Not only does this flippant insult illustrate the media’s clear bias on the subject of climate change, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny itself.

For a start, the Flat Earth Society either originated with Samuel Rowbotham’s book, Earth Not A Globe, in the 19th century, or was founded in 1547, depending on whom you believe. I’d bet on the former, which is corroborated by a a Flat Earth Society FAQ and by Wikipedia. The latter date comes from a tagline on a Flat Earth Society page.

Moreover, the notion that Columbus sailed west against the prevailing wisdom of the Flat Earth Society is a fiction that first appeared in a historical novel by Washington Irving, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, in 1828. Never happened. He probably wasn’t widely mocked for his notion of reaching India by sailing west, and even if he was, by failing to reach India he did not prove the earth was round. That the earth was circumnavigable was proven in practice not by an American icon, but by Ferdinand Magellan, who reached the Phillipines on two voyages, one heading east and the other west from Spain, in the early 16th century. This was also well before the Flat Earth Society claims it was founded. Thing is, the notion that medieval scholars believed the Earth was flat is a myth.

If the media’s snide dismissal of any debate around climate change is itself a fiction, why would anyone believe the editorial opinion about climate change they can’t resist injecting into their news reporting?

Update: It was CNN, which was still running the “news report” today, 13 March. The exact insult by “reporter” Miles O’Brien was: “Even the Flat Earth Society didn’t fold its tents in 1493.” Earlier in the story, he interviewed one of the participants and without blushing asked what planet he was on. No biased editorialising there, either.

William McGurn, George W Bush’s head speechwriter until a couple of weeks ago, has written an editorial that is well worth reading. It’s illuminating to get such a view from the other side of the media fence, even if this piece comes across a little plaintive.

When a man hangs up his byline to write for a president, he gets more than a new job. He gets to see how the press and pundit corps look from the other side of the notepad.

And over three years in the West Wing, you see a few things. You see who’s a straight shooter, and who’s full of snark. You see who’s smart, and whose outrageous behavior would have made its way to Drudge had it involved White House staffers instead of White House correspondents. Most of all, you see how conventional wisdom can keep otherwise talented reporters and commentators on the same stale storyline long after the facts on the ground have changed.

He does make a few very good points. In particular, he notes the irony of the protrayal of Bush as a stubborn, intransigent ideologue, when several examples illustrate the stubborn determination of an editorialising media corps to cling to a story once they’ve made up their minds.

A line in his resignation letter (PDF) reads: “I remember [on 9/11] looking up at the sky and wondering what kind of world my girls would inherit. And I remember saying to [my wife] Julie, ‘Let’s be thankful that George W Bush is president’.”

In this article, he echoes that sentiment. I largely agree with his assessment, and like him, I also admire George W Bush for having the courage and conviction to take necessary decisions, difficult decisions, and as McGurn describes it, to “take the heat” for them.

Still, you can’t help thinking that McGurn is defending not only Bush’s failures to communicate, but his own.

An infamous report was issued in October 2006, just before the US mid-term election that returned Congress to Democratic control. Though the election had been the Republicans’ to lose, by virtue of their disregard for Gingrich Revolution-era promises of small government and spending restraint, the Iraq war played a not inconsiderable part in the electorate’s dissatisfaction with their government.

The Lancet, a hitherto respected British scientific journal, published an estimate by Johns Hopkins researchers (PDF) by means of a cross-sectional cluster sample survey, that between the invasion in March 2003 and July 2006, “there have been 654 965 (392 979–942 636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war, which corresponds to 2.5% of the population in the study area.”

That is carnage. It exploded arguments that modern wars, though always awful, have become progressively less awful because of better targeting, more accurate munitions, and greater care among Western soldiers to avoid “collateral damage” — the unfairly maligned hold-all phrase used to describe death and injury to civilians and damage to non-military buildings and infrastructure. They understand that collateral damage wastes effort, munitions and lives on inconsequential targets. They understand that collateral damage isn’t exactly the best way to win hearts and minds. They understand that collateral damage makes for bad PR back home, which undermines political support for their efforts. They understand that collateral damage serves nobody and harms everybody, and they have the means to avoid it.

Or so we thought. Until we discovered that around 650 000 people died unnecessarily. This was a much higher death toll than even the most vocal opponents of the war had yet claimed. It was at least 13 times more than the worst estimates of the US military, the Iraqi health ministry, or the independent Iraq Body Count organisation. Not to say that their estimates of 50 000 deaths was good news, but given that some combatants deliberately targeted civilians, it was better than half a million or more. In fact, it wouldn’t compare unfavourably with the death toll during the five years of South Africa’s “peaceful” transition to democracy. In short, tragic though it remains, 50 000 or 100 000 deaths are expected, but 650 000 are not.

The study was met with skepticism in some quarters, and the error margin of 550 000, or over 40% either way, doesn’t inspire confidence. President Bush dismissed the credibility of the report, and his political opponents in turn dismissed his credibility.

Meanwhile, the result was trumpeted across newspapers the world over. The National Journal, which stuck to an arcane debate clouded too often by splits along political lines, rather than substantive arguments about research accuracy and statistical methodology, noted:

CBS News called the report a “new and stunning measure of the havoc the American invasion unleashed in Iraq.” CNN began its report this way: “War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis, or more than 500 people a day, since the U.S.-led invasion, a new study reports.” Within a week, the study had been featured in 25 news shows and 188 articles in U.S. newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

Turns out Bush was right, though. Earlier this month, the National Journal published a comprehensive set of conclusions in an article entitled Data Bomb, in which it interrogates every aspect of the study.

Days later, the New Scientists publishes an article entitled “Iraqi war death toll slashed by three quarters”, in which it reports that according to Iraqi health officials, the death toll for March 2003 to June 2006 was in fact between one sixth and one third of those published in The Lancet.

As the American Digest observes, if 600 000 Iraqis had really died, where are all the funerals? Were they held in secret? Were reporters just not interested in the heartfelt drama of corpses swaddled in white, borne by crying men and women?

The Iraq issue may turn out to be the most curious aspect of the 2008 presidential election campaign. Though dramatic mistakes were made, at political level, at intelligence level, and in strategic and tactical decisions on the ground, one gets the impression that most voters now recognise one might expect such missteps in a difficult war. Too many prophecies were made before the fact, rather than after the fact, the way Churchill preferred them, and a political price was paid. It is time, to turn an Angry Left slogan against it, to move on.

The carnage and failures and pessimism appears to have been exaggerated for too long. General David Petraeus is overseeing a strategy that is demonstrably working. Would it surprise anyone to learn that MoveOn.org, the pressure group that slandered him as “General Betray Us” in the New York Times, is funded by the same George Soros who partly funded the Lancet study?

The danger of exaggeration is that people stop believing you. That they recognise you’ll have difficulty making a case on the facts of the matter. The result, in the case of the Iraq-war-as-willful-carnage myth, is that few of the current presidential candidates even mention the war, beyond promising its responsible conduct to a hopeful conclusion. Even some of the Democratic candidates are, implicitly, endorsing the Bush Doctrine now. They know that they can’t objectively call Iraq a disaster, and that it’s no longer politically advisable either. Now, it seems voters, who opposed the war when it was (or sometimes merely appeared to be) going badly, have resolved that competently bringing it to a satisfactory conclusion is a more reasonable political desire than high-tailing it and leaving carnage behind. How far we’ve come, in just one short year.

The conservative Media Research Council has announced the Best Notable Quotables of 2007. The winner is truly funny, and most are very instructive. However, another entry from the MRC, which arrived in my inbox a week later, caught my attention.

It appears sexism against Hillary Clinton has to become a big issue. Whether it’s idiots falling for deliberate trolling, or defenders who need foils for attacks they can’t handle, accusations of prejudice become the last refuge of political hacks.

The original of a curiously sanitised piece by Jonathan Tilove in the Seattle Times of 29 November was a little different from what’s posted there now. The original was published in an MRC email on 26 December, but has not yet made it to its rather primitive-looking website. The MRC says that in excerpt, it reads as follows:

Sen. Hillary Clinton is facing an onslaught of open misogynistic expression. Step lightly through that thickly settled province of the Web you could call anti-Hillaryland and you are soon knee-deep in ‘bitch,’ ’slut,’ ’skank,’ ‘whore’ and, ultimately, what may be the most toxic four-letter word in the English language….Thanks to several thousand years of phallocentric history, there is no comparable vocabulary of degradation for men, no equivalently rich trove of synonyms for a sexually sullied male. As for the word beginning with C? No single term for a man reduces him to his genitals to such devastating effect.

I say bollocks. What a prick. For start, this schmuck surely knows that the C word is commonly applied to men, without reference to either women or their degree of sexual sulliedness? And what tosser removes offensive language from an article after it’s been published? I’d also challenge this dickhead to search the “thickly settled province of the Web you could call anti-Bushland”, and analyse the epithets found there. Hint: they’re not “clear-eyed” and “rosy-cheeked”. Not even with witty sarcasm. In fact, I’d wager he’d find a fair few of a character that would offend his delicate sensibilities.

Besides, how anti-feminist of Tilove to think that Mrs Clinton is too fragile as a woman to tolerate the sort of ribald political rough-riding that typifies the more puerile corners of the interwebs.

Pictured alongside is Lauren Bush, the niece of US president George W Bush. She made the news recently with a charity project called FEED. Each designer canvas bag sold will generate enough money to feed one child in the developing world for a year.

Good Magazine quotes her as saying: “I would love for [this] to be completely nonpolitical because I think it distracts from the real humanitarian point of the project.”

But that’s not good enough for Sky News, whose Adam Boulton spent most of his interview with the 23-year-old trying to trip her up over his own prejudices about her uncle. According to the Sky report:

However, the US is often seen by some as the main obstacle to helping the Third World in terms of world trade.

It has the largest economy but as a proportion of its wealth it does not give as much as some other nations.

Nevermind that this is irrelevant, ill-informed and uncalled-for editorialising. Nevermind that it confuses aid with trade. Nevermind that the US is the biggest global aid donor in nominal terms, is on a par with many others in relative terms, and that the Bush administration has increased aid commitments to Africa compared to previous US administrations. Nevermind that the US is the leading promoter of trade (as opposed to aid) in the fight against poverty. Nevermind whether trade should be preferred to aid. Nevermind whether simply dispatching an arbitrarily chosen share of gross national income on foreign aid is better or worse than spending less money more effectively. Nevermind whether throwing good money after bad in foreign aid is likely to address “Third World” poverty (as opposed to merely soothing the collective conscience of the rich). These weren’t the questions Boulton asked of Lauren Bush.

Instead, Boulton threw his own simple biases about the US president at his college-age niece, which strikes me as pretty low. If he’s going to bash Bush, why pick on her? Is she to blame for the public’s perception (or more accurately, the media’s lack of objectivity) about the US? Why would she have anything at all to say about US policy on foreign aid or free trade? Why not ask her directly under which conditions she believes aid works, and when she believes aid trumps trade in poverty relief? Why not ask her about her own project, instead of harrying her with cheap shots about her uncle?

When the activistreporter closed by asking why she didn’t want to go into politics, she tartly shot back: “Because of questions like these.”

That barb didn’t make it into the online version of the report. Well done, Ms Bush, for revealing the brave Bush-bashing Boulton as nothing more than an editorialising chicken-hawk who can’t handle being smacked down by a good-looking girl.

Here’s a story: “U.S. fire scatters crowd after Afghan bomb: witness.” Sounds serious, doesn’t it? I mean, read the intro:

BATI KOT, Afghanistan (Reuters) - At least one U.S. soldier opened fire to scatter a crowd of civilians and police on Thursday after failed suicide bomb attacks on a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military and witnesses said.

Them US thugs, there they goes again. Indiscriminately killing civilians, just because they panicked. It takes Noor Mohammad Sherzai, the self-serving idiot who wrote the piece, until the sixth paragraph to point out that they were actually two warning shots, not aimed at the crowd, designed to disperse them after one suicide bomber had already failed and a second was thought to be approaching.

Why use the pejorative term “idiot”, or describe said idiot as “self-serving”? Well, besides noting the misleading reporting that once again goes on at Reuters, guess who the “witness” of the headline is?

“I saw the fire brigade vehicle rushing to the area at top speed. Somehow its brakes failed and hit one police vehicle and coalition vehicles, then the Americans started firing,” said Reuters correspondent Noor Mohammad Sherzai.

In Best of the Web Today, James Taranto has a funny response, under the headline The Lone Reuter:
Read the rest of this entry »

According to the Times of London, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has “shaken the White House” with a “stinging critique” that includes a claim that it went to war for oil:

However, it is his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion that is likely to provoke the most controversy. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he says.

… Britain and America have always insisted the war had nothing to do with oil. Bush said the aim was to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and end Saddam’s support for terrorism.

Read other reports about it, however, such as that in the Wall Street Journal, or the Washington Post, and it turns out that Greenspan said securing global oil supplies was “not the administration’s motive.”

“I have never heard them basically say, ‘We’ve got to protect the oil supplies of the world,’ but that would have been my motive.”

So it turns out securing oil supplies and thwarting Saddam Hussein’s moves towards the Strait of Hormuz was the reason why Greenspan himself supported the first Iraq War. It turns out that he shared the administration’s view on Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes and intentions. It turns out Greenspan’s actual beef with the current administration is big government, not “war for oil”.

It turns out you can’t believe a word the Times of London writes, because the primary purpose of its “news” reporting is bashing Bush. And you know, I actually think they’ll succeed: I’m starting to suspect Bush might not win the 2008 US elections.