The Times Nails Kerry's Anti-Bush Exaggerations -- October 19, 2004 -- TimesWatch.org

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Times Watch for October 19, 2004

The Times Nails Kerry's Anti-Bush Exaggerations

Give the Times credit: After running a fact-check article on Bush in early October, Times Watch wondered if the Times would run for the sake of balance a follow-up article on Kerry's exaggerated claims against Bush. Now they have.

The Times on Tuesday rebuts several of John Kerry's recent accusations against Bush on Social Security, the draft, and flu vaccine shortages. David Rosenbaum and David Halbfinger's story, "Kerry Goes Beyond Some of Bush's Positions."

Now the question is: Will the mainstream media use this piece as impetus to question Kerry's attacks on Bush, the same way they used the previous fact-check article that targeted Bush?

Rosenbaum and Halbfinger point out: "After weeks of facing attacks that his campaign and outside commentators called distortions, Senator John Kerry has begun criticizing President Bush on Social Security and the draft in a manner that reaches far beyond Mr. Bush's positions. Mr. Kerry may also have exaggerated the president's responsibility for the shortage of flu vaccine…. The truth is that Mr. Bush has promised not to cut the Social Security benefits of current retirees or those nearing retirement age. He said flatly in the debate on Wednesday that he had no plans to reinstate military conscription. And as for the vaccine shortage, experts say Congress is as much to blame as the president for allowing domestic manufacturers to stop production. In his years in the Senate, Mr. Kerry apparently never addressed the matter, either….the chances are extremely remote that Congress would approve a general draft. On Friday, Mike McCurry, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign, suggested that Mr. Kerry was 'not alleging that there's a secret plan or anything like that' 'for the draft but simply mentioning a possibility in answer to a question from the paper. Even so, a group that supports Mr. Kerry, Win Back Respect, said its advertising in swing states raised prospects restarting the draft."

For more fact-checking of Kerry, click here.

Classifying Terrorists as "Victims" in Iraq

An A1 story Tuesday by Norimitsu Onishi attempts to quantify the death toll among Iraqis. In "How Many Iraqis Are Dying? By One Court, 208 in a Week," Onishi tallies: "A weeklong effort to tally Iraqi casualties shows soldiers, insurgents, politicians, journalists, a judge, a medic and restaurant workers among the victims."

Did you catch that? The Times is counting "insurgents" -- the terrorists who try to kill U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians -- as among the "victims."

Onishi goes on: "According to a report by the Health Ministry, which last April began compiling figures for all regions except the Kurdish north, 3,040 Iraqis were killed in war-related incidents during the 22 weeks from April 5 to Sept. 6 -- a little more than 138 deaths a week. The dead included 2,753 men, 159 women and 128 children. There are no agreed figures for civilian deaths in Iraq over all since the war began in early 2003, but the best estimates, by private groups and independent news organizations, place the figure in the 10,000 to 15,000 range."

Accepting Onishi's statistics as accurate, there's something huge missing: Context. What about the death toll in pre-war Iraq? The story doesn't mention Saddam Hussein is estimated to have killed upwards of 600,000 of his own people.

For the rest of Onishi's report from Baghdad, click here.

• Fatalities | Gaffes | Iraq War | Norimitsu Onishi

Rebutting Bush So Kerry Doesn't Have To

Tuesday's campaign dispatch from Florida by David Sanger and Jodi Wilgoren is headlined, "Bush Adds Teeth to His Attacks on Kerry." They fret: "Mr. Bush's speech was more than an incremental escalation of his attacks on Mr. Kerry, the Democratic nominee. It was a change in tone to a far more incendiary characterization of the senator as a man who would undercut American defenses, surrender its military decisions to other nations and treat terrorism as a disease in need of treatment rather than an enemy force in need of evisceration."

They portray Kerry as the aggrieved party: "Mr. Kerry's campaign, clearly outraged, described the statements as brazen distortions, driven by desperation as the casualties in Iraq mounted. Kerry aides promised an aggressive response in a new television advertisement to be broadcast on Tuesday and a speech in Iowa on Wednesday. Mike McCurry, Mr. Kerry's chief spokesman, called Mr. Bush's remarks a 'thoroughly dishonest speech' that deliberately twisted Mr. Kerry's words."

Then the Times rides to Kerry's defense by helpfully detailing Kerry's positions to rebut Bush: "Some of Mr. Bush's characterizations of Mr. Kerry's statements on Monday appeared fair, if open to partisan rebuttal. Others ignored elements of Mr. Kerry's record and stated positions in a way that paints an incomplete or distorted portrait of his approach. For example, Mr. Bush was correct in saying that Mr. Kerry voted for the Patriot Act but is now seeking to roll back a number of its provisions. Those sections include some having to do with surveillance, viewing a person's library records and other elements of the law that have raised civil liberties concerns. Mr. Kerry's concerns are shared by some Republicans in Congress. In declaring on Monday that Mr. Kerry 'wants to go back to' the 1990's, when 'America's response to terrorism was generally piecemeal and symbolic,' Mr. Bush was relying on a quotation from Mr. Kerry in an article in The New York Times Magazine on Oct. 10. Mr. Kerry was quoted then as saying the goal should be 'to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance.' Mr. Kerry did not say that the path to achieving that goal would be to diminish the intensity of the effort to battle terrorists. He suggested that the most realistic objective would be not to eliminate terrorism completely but to contain it to the point where 'it's not threatening the fabric of your life.' Mr. Bush attacked what he called 'irresponsible' legislation proposed by Mr. Kerry in 1994 to reduce the nation's intelligence budget by $6 billion, and said he then tried to cut the intelligence budget again in 1995. Mr. Kerry did propose the reductions Mr. Bush cited. But in the mid-1990's, members of both parties were seeking cuts in the intelligence budget. Porter J. Goss, then a Republican member of Congress from Florida and recently appointed director of central intelligence by Mr. Bush, co-sponsored legislation in 1995 that would have reduced intelligence spending by more than the cuts sought by Mr. Kerry. Similarly, in citing Mr. Kerry's support for cuts in weapons programs, Mr. Bush ignored the bipartisan effort in the 1990's to scale back or end production of many planes, ships, missiles and other military hardware. The Kerry campaign on Monday detailed how Vice President Dick Cheney has spearheaded some of those moves."

For more from Jodi Wilgoren and David Sanger, click here.

Pro-Kerry Commentary in the Corrections Box

Tuesday's Times corrects this portion of a September 21 story by Jodi Wilgoren and Elisabeth Bumiller: "The president also accused Mr. Kerry of changing his mind on the question of whether Iraq is part of the war against terrorism. In New York on Monday, Mr. Kerry mentioned Osama bin Laden four times as he argued that the Iraq operation was a distraction from other terror hot spots, but Mr. Bush said his opponent had 'acknowledged that confronting Saddam Hussein was critical to the war on terror.' Campaign aides said he was referring to Mr. Kerry's statement on May 15 on Fox News that 'Iraq may not be the war on terror itself, but it is critical to the outcome of the war on terror.'"

It turns out Kerry didn't make his comment May 15, but on December 15, 2003, the day after Saddam Hussein was captured.

But the Times takes a rare step in injecting an editorial commentary into the correction, going beyond the error to engage in post-mortem "truth-squad" work defending Kerry against criticism from the original article: "A front-page article on Sept. 21 about Senator John Kerry's denunciation of President Bush's policies on Iraq misstated the date that Mr. Kerry told the Fox News Channel that 'Iraq may not be the war on terror itself, but it is critical to the outcome of the war on terror.' It was on Dec. 15, 2003 -- not May 15, 2004. (Mr. Kerry made the comment the day after Saddam Hussein was captured, but he did not specifically link Mr. Hussein to the war on terror, as his critics have suggested.)"

• George W. Bush | Corrections | Saddam Hussein | Iraq War | Sen. John Kerry

Down the Stretch With Bush and Kerry

Adam Nagourney and Janet Elder's lead story Tuesday is a pretty objective summary of the paper's latest campaign poll findings ("Poll Shows Tie: Concerns Cited On Both Rivals -- Bush Job Approval Low -- Voters Are Also Telling of Strong Reservations About Kerry.").

They explain: "Mr. Bush's job approval rating is at 44 percent, a dangerously low number for an incumbent president, and one of the lowest of his tenure. A majority of voters said that they disapproved of the way Mr. Bush had managed the economy and the war in Iraq, and -- echoing a refrain of Mr. Kerry's -- that his tax cuts had favored the wealthy. Voters said that Mr. Kerry would do a better job of preserving Social Security, creating jobs and ending the war in Iraq. But a majority of Americans continue to see Mr. Kerry as an untrustworthy politician who will say what he thinks people want to hear. More than half of respondents said they considered him liberal, reflecting a dominant line of attack by Mr. Bush this fall. The poll found the two candidates each drawing 46 percent of all registered voters in a head-to-head race. Among likely voters in a two-way race, Mr. Bush has 47 percent, with 46 percent for Mr. Kerry."

Nagourney and Toner admit: "Some other polls taken during that time have shown Mr. Bush in a slightly stronger position among what they described as likely voters."

For the rest of Nagourney and Toner's poll analysis, click here.

Loving the "Neoconservative" Label

David Sanger's wonders if a Bush second term will mean "pre-emption on steroids." In Sunday's Week in Review, he explains: "With 16 days remaining until Election Day, Washington is consumed by two parlor games. There's the obvious one, from which all power, jobs and influence flow: whether George Bush or John Kerry is in the Oval Office in late January. But then there is the constant speculation, heard over lunch in the blocks around the White House but rarely on the cable shout-shows: If the president is still Mr. Bush, would a second term be marked by pre-emption on steroids, unilateralism in a silken glove, or the kind of alliance-building Mr. Bush talked about in the three debates?"

Sanger, who's never hidden his disapproval of Bush foreign policy, manages to work in the loaded term "neoconservative" three times: "'Rumsfeld is the key to this whole thing,' said one senior administration official. If he leaves after the election, it would free up many places on the chess board. One possibility is that the Pentagon will no longer be a base for the neoconservatives and hawks who pressed for the invasion of Iraq and backed Ahmad Chalabi as its next leader….Some think that Paul Wolfowitz, Mr. Rumsfeld's neoconservative deputy and a chief architect of the argument that it is America's calling to spread democracy around the world, could be promoted, but he may not be confirmable by the Senate because of his role in planning the war in Iraq….Mr. Wolfowitz, a former ambassador to Indonesia and a foreign policy scholar, would love the job. He could bring his neoconservative philosophy to a State Department of doubters."

For the rest of Sanger's analysis on a Bush second term, click here.

• Campaign 2004 | Defense | Neoconservatives | Iraq War | David Sanger

Kerry Hurt by Lesbian Comment?

On Monday Adam Nagourney argues that Kerry's "strong performance" in the debates may have been imperiled when he brought up Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter. In "For Kerry, a Few Words That May Be Debatable," Nagourney notes ironically, "Senator John Kerry and President Bush devoted four and a half hours and nearly 45,000 words to three detailed and substantial debates. But a single remark by Mr. Kerry, noting that Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter Mary is a lesbian, has shadowed his strong performance and given Republicans an opening to slow the momentum Mr. Kerry got from the debates, some Democrats say. Amid signs of Democratic concern, Mr. Kerry's advisers acknowledged Sunday that some voters perceived Mr. Kerry's remark as an invasion of Ms. Cheney's privacy, a gratuitous personal insult, or a crass political calculation by which Mr. Kerry was trying to drive a wedge between Mr. Cheney and conservatives unaware that his daughter was gay."

Nagourney insists: "Mr. Kerry invoked Ms. Cheney at the debate in Arizona last Wednesday in arguing that homosexuality was not a choice. Mr. Bush dodged the same question as he reiterated his support for a constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage, a position Mr. Cheney says he does not share."

Mickey Kaus doesn't agree: "What Bush said was 'I don't know.' That's not dodging the question. It's answering the question. The answer was that Bush doesn't know. (When John McCain said he didn't know about something, during Q & A's in the 2000 race, wasn't that treated as a refreshing dose of candor?) ... Actually dodging the question might involve referring only to the views of others without ever really stating your own opinion. See, e.g., Kerry's answer."

Nagourney later actually cites some polls favorable to Bush: "Still, as the fallout continued this weekend, some Democrats were clearly concerned, aware that there has rarely been a presidential campaign as close as this one. Three organizations released polls on Sunday showing that Mr. Bush had improved his standing. Time magazine showed him with a lead of two percentage points while Newsweek found he was ahead by four percentage points. The latest Gallup poll said Mr. Bush had a lead of eight percentage points."

For the full Nagourney, click here.

E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org