unSpun

by Brooks Jackson

  There was plenty of reason to question Bellesiles’s data. Given how starkly it contradicted what had been accepted for two centuries, it amounted to an extraordinary claim demanding extraordinary proof. Gun-control advocates were too quick to swallow it because it seemed to help their cause, and they paid the price in embarrassment when the facts of Bellesiles’s deception were uncovered. When a claim seems “too good,” it should be a warning to withhold judgment until we get a close look at the evidence.

  Data in the Service of Ideology

  Extravagant claims are just too easy to accept when they match biases. In 1991, we were told something shocking, which seemed to confirm the view that women are victims of a sexist society. In her book The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf claimed that 150,000 women die annually from anorexia nervosa. This was a preposterously high number, more than five times the number of Americans who died of AIDS that year, for example. But it strongly supported Wolf’s thesis that women were suffering because of an impossible standard of beauty imposed by society.

  The 150,000 figure was disputed in 1994 by Christina Hoff Sommers, a critic of the feminist movement, who said “the correct figure is less than 100.” While Sommers should be credited for debunking Wolf’s wildly inaccurate claim, she, too, was way off, according to Harold Goldstein and Harry Gwirtsman of the Eating Disorders Program of the National Institute of Mental Health. They noted that between one half percent and one percent of the 28 million women between 15 and 29 years old were thought to have anorexia, and that a mortality rate of about 10 percent over a 20-year period was “generally accepted.” That would work out to roughly 1,000 deaths per year, Goldstein and Gwirtsman figured. They also cautioned against accepting “data in the service of ideology.” That’s a notion we endorse. When the data square too nicely with your biases, always ask, “Is this dramatic story really true? Am I buying this just because I want it to be true? What’s the evidence?”

  WARNING SIGN: The Dangling Comparative

  “LARGER,” “BETTER,” “FASTER,” “BETTER-TASTING.” ADVERTISERS FREQUENTLY employ such terms in an effort to make their product stand out from the crowd. In a recent ad, makers of New Ban Intensely Fresh Formula deodorant claimed it “keeps you fresher longer.” One might be forgiven for thinking they meant it keeps you fresher, longer than the competition. But, as a competitor complained to the Better Business Bureau’s National Advertising Division, they meant fresher than Ban’s old formulation.

  Politicians are particularly able users of this technique. In the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush’s TV ads hammered away with this line: “[John] Kerry supported higher taxes over 350 times.” A voter might quite reasonably have thought this to mean that Kerry had voted to raise taxes an alarming number of times, but that implication was grossly misleading. Bush did not mean that Kerry had in every case voted to make taxes “higher” than they were at the time. Such votes were relatively rare. Employing a common political tactic, Bush counted every vote Kerry had cast against a proposed tax cut, which meant voting to leave taxes unchanged. He also padded the count by including many procedural votes on the same bills. Bush even counted some of Kerry’s votes for Democratic tax cuts, reasoning that those would still leave taxes higher than the Republican alternatives. Thus, by means of twisted use of the dangling comparative, a vote for cutting taxes became a vote for “higher taxes.”

  Bush was using the phrase “higher taxes” without answering the question “Higher than what?” A dangling comparative occurs when any term meant to compare two things—a word such as “higher,” “better,” “faster,” “more”—is left dangling without stating what’s being compared. Bush used a dangling comparative to mischaracterize Kerry’s actual record. Kerry did vote for several tax increases during his twenty years in the Senate, but nothing remotely close to 350. His voting record was consistent with his promise to repeal only part of Bush’s tax cuts and to raise taxes only on persons earning more than $200,000 a year.

  Please Mom, More Arsenic!

  Just to be fair, we should note that the Democrats have been known to employ the dangling comparative with some skill themselves. In 2001, for example, President Bush was accused of trying to put “more arsenic” in drinking water. In April of that year, the Democratic National Committee ran a TV ad in which a little girl asks, “May I please have some more arsenic in my water, Mommy?” And at the January 4, 2004, debate among Democratic presidential hopefuls in Des Moines, Iowa, Representative Dick Gephardt of Missouri said the Bush administration “tried to put more arsenic in the water. We stopped them from doing it.”

  But by “more arsenic” Democrats did not mean “more than is in the water now”; the disagreement was over how much to reduce arsenic levels. When Bush took office he suspended a regulation that President Clinton had proposed only days before the end of his term. This last-minute regulation would have reduced the federal ceiling on arsenic in drinking water from 50 parts per billion (ppb), where it had been since 1942, to 10 ppb. The Bush administration said it wanted to review the costs being imposed on small communities, estimated to be as high as $327 per household for some towns of fewer than 10,000 people. Bush administration officials considered a more flexible limit that would have allowed a limit of as high as 20 ppb in a few cases. That would have been double the limit proposed by Clinton but still a 60 percent reduction compared to the existing ceiling. Eventually, however, Bush accepted the 10 ppb level and the new limit went into effect in January 2006 exactly as Clinton had proposed—no earlier, no later. At no time did the Bush team propose to raise the limit above the existing level to allow “more arsenic.”

  In both cases, the deceivers’ central point may well have had a grain of merit, but rather than make an honest argument they invited the public to accept gross exaggerations. So when you hear a dangling comparative term such as “more” or “higher,” always ask, “Compared to what?” The answer may surprise you—and keep you from being fooled.

  WARNING SIGN: The Superlatives Swindle

  JUST AS COMPARATIVE WORDS SUCH AS “MORE” AND “HIGHER” ARE warning signs, so are superlatives such as “most” and “highest” and claims such as “biggest in history” or “smallest ever.” In 2004 a pro-Bush group named the Progress for America Voter Fund ran a TV ad asking, “Has any president been dealt a tougher hand?” Their message was that Bush, because he inherited an economy on the verge of a downturn and had presided during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, faced the toughest circumstances of any president in history. That’s silly. Was Bush “dealt a tougher hand” than Abraham Lincoln, whose election prompted the breakup of the Union and who took office just six weeks before Confederates fired on Fort Sumter and began the Civil War? Tougher than Franklin Roosevelt, who took office during the Great Depression and later contended with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941? Come on!

  Another example of the “superlative swindle”: Republicans still persist in calling Bill Clinton’s 1993 deficit reduction bill—in Bush’s words—“the biggest tax increase in American history.” It wasn’t, unless you count only raw dollars and disregard population growth, rising incomes, a growing economy, and inflation. Measured as a fraction of the entire economy, Clinton’s 1993 increase was one sixth the size of Roosevelt’s 1942 tax increase. That World War II levy was equal to $5.04 for every $100 of economic output, according to a paper prepared by a tax expert in Bush’s own Office of Tax Policy. Clinton’s tax increase was equal to 83 cents.

  Republicans have been victims of this tactic as well. The Sierra Club accused Bush of having the “worst environmental record in U.S. history.” But “worst” by what measure? Even the Sierra Club admits that air got cleaner during Bush’s tenure (nearly a 12 percent reduction in the six major pollutants between 2000 and 2005, according to official monitoring required by the Clean Air Act). And Bush—while certainly not as aggressive as the Sierra Club wanted—put in place much stricter controls on diesel emissions than had existed
under his predecessor. In 2005, Bush also imposed the first federal controls on mercury emissions by power plants. We can’t say who did have the “worst” record; but no president before Richard Nixon even had an Environmental Protection Agency, which was created in 1970.

  Superlative claims can lead us to choose needlessly expensive products and make shallow political decisions. Approach them with care!

  WARNING SIGN: The “Pay You Tuesday” Con

  BY NOW NEARLY EVERYBODY WHO HAS INTERNET ACCESS IS PROBABLY familiar with the Nigerian e-mail scams that have been going on since the 1980s. A supposedly wealthy or high-placed foreigner sends a message asking for financial help—today—to move millions of dollars out of his homeland, in return for a percentage of the money to be paid later. That this is a con should be obvious, but the U.S. Secret Service was still warning in 2006 that the Nigerian e-mail scam “grosses hundreds of millions of dollars annually and the losses are continuing to escalate.”

  The warning sign is simple: if it sounds like J. Wellington Wimpy, it’s likely to be a trick. Wimpy, a friend of Popeye, was an unscrupulous glutton who tried to snag a free meal with the classic line: “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” That “pay you Tuesday” element should raise suspicions.

  In politics it’s a little different but the principle is the same. We, the voters, are going to get our hamburger today. That is, we will if only we vote for the right candidate, who promises we won’t have to pay until Tuesday, if ever. The difference is that Wimpy doesn’t intend to pay, but we or our children will have to. In general, Democrats promise social programs without mentioning future costs to taxpayers, while Republicans promise reduced taxes but are vague about future deficits or program cuts.

  Democrats constantly promise to “preserve Social Security” without mentioning that to finance the benefits scheduled in current law will require a sizable tax increase. Official projections issued in May 2006 put the shortfall at $4.6 trillion over the next seventy-five years. To put that in perspective, the shortfall amounts to more than a third of the entire U.S. economy for the year 2006. To be paid Tuesday, of course.

  Bush, for his part, promised to “pay Tuesday” for the war in Iraq, for his tax cuts, and for big increases in domestic spending, including a prescription drug benefit that is the largest expansion of Medicare in its history. The president assured the nation in his 2002 State of the Union address: “Our budget will run a deficit that will be small and short-term”—but as it turned out the deficit ballooned to $413 billion in 2004, a record measured in raw dollars and much above average even measured as a percentage of the economy. The deficit was still $318 billion the following year and an estimated $250 billion the next, and deficits of between $266 billion and $328 billion were projected each year for the remainder of the decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Those deficits are hardly “small” and certainly not “short-term,” as the president had predicted. When “Tuesday” arrives somebody is going to be stuck with a very large tab.

  WARNING SIGN: The Blame Game

  TO HEAR PRESIDENT BUSH TALK, YOU WOULD THINK THAT GREEDY lawyers are a major factor in the rising cost of health care. “One of the major cost drivers in the delivery of health care are [sic] these junk and frivolous lawsuits,” he said in 2004. He insisted that doctors ordering needless tests and procedures for fear of being sued were costing federal taxpayers “at least $28 billion a year” in added costs to government medical programs. This claim rested mainly on a single 1996 study suggesting that “defensive medicine” accounted for 5 percent to 9 percent of total spending on health care. However, that conclusion had been contradicted by just about every other researcher who had looked at the problem.

  The basis of Bush’s blame-the-lawyers claim was disputed by both the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO), respected and politically neutral investigative agencies. After examining all the research on the subject, the CBO found “no evidence” that caps on damage awards of the sort Bush sought would reduce medical spending. “In short, the evidence available to date does not make a strong case that restricting malpractice liability would have a significant effect, either positive or negative, on economic efficiency,” the CBO said.

  Bush was engaging in the blame game, pointing a finger at an unpopular group and hoping to divert attention from the weakness of his own evidence. People who find their own position weak or indefensible often attack. That’s why we say casting blame is a clue that the attacker may need a closer look than the person being blamed.

  Blaming often occurs reflexively, out of pure partisanship and with little regard for facts. For example, a former Clinton aide, Sidney Blumenthal, suggested that George W. Bush was to blame for the flooding in New Orleans brought about by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In a widely quoted article for Salon.com, Blumenthal wrote that “the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature.” He cited budget cuts by the Bush administration in flood-control projects in Louisiana. As later investigation revealed, however, the major cause of the flooding was the collapse of floodwalls and levees built before Bush took office. An engineering study commissioned by the National Science Foundation concluded that money was not the problem: “The performance of many of the levees and floodwalls could have been significantly improved, and some of the failures likely prevented, with relatively inexpensive modifications of the levee and floodwall system details.” The report’s author, Raymond Seed of the University of California–Berkeley, told reporters there was a “high likelihood” that human error was to blame, and possibly outright malfeasance: “Some of the sections may not have been constructed as they were designed.” All this was underscored in June 2006 when the Army Corps of Engineers released a nine-volume study of the disaster, saying the New Orleans flood-control system failed to work as it was supposed to, and had so many weaknesses it had been “a system in name only.” Whatever blame history will place on Bush’s shoulders for his slow response to the flooding, Blumenthal was simply wrong to blame the president for the flooding itself.

  Politicians’ tendency to point fingers was epitomized by a T-shirt slogan we spotted: “When in doubt—blame liberals!” The word “conservatives” could fit just as well. Liberals like to blame “big oil companies” when gasoline prices shoot up, ignoring such factors as clean-air regulations that create local supply bottlenecks, or the surging global appetite for crude oil as China and other countries industrialize. Conservatives typically blame liberals for being “soft on crime,” ignoring the steady rise in the U.S. prison population, to a point where as of mid-2005 nearly one in every 200 U.S. residents is serving time in a federal, state, or local lockup. And of course, whatever party is out of power always blames the incumbent president when the economy goes soft or the stock market tanks, even though the White House has only modest influence on global economic trends and markets.

  When you hear people casting blame, take a close look at their facts. It’s good to say to yourself, “That sounds like a one-sided case for the prosecution. What would the defense have to say about it?”

  WARNING SIGN: Glittering Generalities

  BEWARE OF ATTRACTIVE-SOUNDING BUT VAGUE TERMS—WHAT STUDENTS of propaganda techniques call glittering generalities. Coca-Cola isn’t just carbonated water that’s been flavored and sweetened, it’s “the Real Thing.” United isn’t just an airline emerging from bankruptcy, it’s your access to “the friendly skies.” Allstate isn’t just a colossal insurance company, it’s “good hands.” The U.S. Army isn’t just a military organization, it’s the “path of strength.” The idea is to get you to buy the product without asking too many questions.

  Perhaps the most popular glittering generality among politicians is that of mouthing support for the “middle class.” In politics, it’s hard to find a candidate who isn’t for the middle class, because in America so few people think of themselves as lower-class or upper-class. In 2004,
Democrat Dick Gephardt promised in his TV ads to “fight for America’s middle class.” John Edwards promised to “target tax cuts to the middle class.” Howard Dean said he’d “strive for greater tax fairness for middle-class working families.” Kerry said he “won’t raise taxes on the middle class.” And the president, not to be out-glittered, said “the middle class is paying less in federal taxes” because of his tax cuts.

  Bush wasn’t wrong: households earning between $40,000 and $50,000 in 2003 had received an average tax cut of $1,012, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. But richer families got a lot more. Households earning over $1 million saw cuts averaging $112,925. Kerry’s definition of “middle class” included those earning as much as $200,000 a year: he promised not to raise taxes on anyone below that level. Dean and Gephardt, on the other hand, proposed to repeal all of Bush’s tax cuts, including even those for people at the bottom of the federal income tax scale. So while all these politicians promised aid to the “middle class,” their policies and definitions were quite different.

  Learn to recognize glittering generalities, and you’ll notice them flying at you from every direction. Lots of groups push for “affordable housing” but seldom define what that means in terms of price. A “right to privacy” sounds good, but should it prevent the FBI from asking who took out books on making explosives? Years ago, Vice President Dan Quayle frequently expressed support for “family values,” but his support didn’t extend to unwed mothers and their children. We learned that in 1992, when Quayle famously attacked the popular television sitcom character Murphy Brown, who had become a mother out of wedlock, for “mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.” Some other nice-sounding but vague terms to watch out for: dignity, honor, freedom, integrity, and justice (including both the “economic” and “social” varieties). It’s always good to ask, “What do you mean by that, exactly?”