In How to Slant a Poll 101, John Hawkins at Right Wing News explains how CBS gets its headline results:

The first thing you have to understand is that there are 3 different groups of voters the media may poll: adults, registered voters, and likely voters. Out of these 3 categories, “likely voters” is the group that almost always turns out to be closest to the actual election results while “adults” is the group that slants most heavily towards Democrats. Although it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how much polling “adults” instead of “likely voters” slants the poll results to the left (when compared to election results), it’s probably somewhere between 5-10 points. So, let’s split the difference and say 7.5 points.

So, it seems likely that Bush’s approval would probably be somewhere around 41.5% if this had been a poll of likely voters. Still, pretty bad.

But, there’s another factor we haven’t adjusted for: the percentage of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents who participated in the poll. In the 2004 election, the breakdown by party was as follows:

Democrats: 37%
Republicans: 37%
Independents: 26%

While those numbers can change and do change over time and there’s no set rule that says for a poll to be fair those percentages should match up exactly with the breakdown from the last election, the numbers should be pretty close.

So, let’s look at the weighted party breakdown from the CBS poll: 1018

Democrats: 37.4% (381)
Republicans: 28.4% (289)
Independents: 34.2% (348)

So, they undersampled the number of Republicans by more than 8.5% and over sampled Independents by more than 8%. Let’s adjust for that (in a very general way). Add in 8 more Republicans and we’ll say Bush’s favorability goes up 8 points. Take out 8 Independents and we’ll figure Bush loses 4 points of support (Independents were roughly split between Bush and Kerry in 2004) and now Bush’s approval rating, after having 4 points added onto it, is at 45.5. Of course, it’s not quite as simple as I’ve made it look here, nor is this as accurate as simply polling likely voters with a correct breakdown of party affiliation, but it’s close enough for our purposes.

Then, we consider the polls margin of error, 3 points, and Bush’s real approval rating among voters who’ll actually be going to the polls in November is probably somewhere roughly between 42.5 – 48.5. That’s not great, but it doesn’t have exactly the same sort of zing that 34% has either, does it?

This isn’t news. It’s just more political partisanship from the most dishonest network.

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Hat tip to Memeorandum.

Are you an Archconservative, Leftwing Wacko, Antigovernment Libertine or a Commie Sympathizer?

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Daniel Henninger identifies the cynical political game that’s being played in the MSM:

Have you ever noticed how on a scale of one to 10, every untoward event in the life of the Bush presidency goes straight to a 10?

The Abu Ghraib photos? A 10 forever. Dick Cheney catching a hunting buddy with some birdshot? An instant 10. The Bush National Guard story? Total 10. How can it be that each downside event in this presidency greets the public at this one, screeching level of outrage and denunciation by the out-of-power party and a perpetually outraged media?

There was a time when what’s been called news judgment would deem some stories a five or six and run them on page 14, or deeper in the newscast. Back then the Senate minority leader wouldn’t bother to look up from his desk. Not with this presidency. Every downside event — large, small, in between — plays above the fold on the front page now. And when Dick Cheney accidentally pops Harry Whittington, old Harry Reid jumps up from his Senate leader’s desk faster than a Nevada jack rabbit to announce, one more time, that this “is part of the secretive nature of this administration…

If it all seems more than a little tiresome, if you wish it would all just go away, well, maybe that’s the point — their point. Induce swing voters to seek respite from the Bush experience.

As the chart nearby indicates, the public’s allegiance to the two parties is remarkably tight. Thus, anything the Democrats can do to push up their number or push down the Republicans’ materially enhances their chances in this November’s elections and in 2008 — and prevents the onset of a long majority for the GOP of the sort McKinley triggered in 1896. Yes, there will be no Bush-Cheney in 2008, but they’re useful as a wedge to redirect voter preferences.

Absent any fresh or positive message for voters, why not try winning by turning politics under the Republicans into an experience of unrelenting discomfort? The substance of any given issue falls in importance. Connecting Jack Abramoff to George Bush personally was always a stretch. So what?

The most telling evidence of a strategy of discomfiting the body politic was the January bonfire over terrorist wiretaps. Here the opposition shrieked for days about a “constitutional crisis” even as polls were indicating public support for the Bush program, including 28% who would OK tapping anyone’s phone “on a regular basis” to catch terrorists.

Parties don’t sail against the polling winds. Why this time? Because come November, the “wiretaps” will sit in many voters’ minds not as a debate over Article II but as part of what feels to them like endless “bad news.” The press’s supersizing of the Cheney shooting may look like excess. So what? No matter how voters feel on any one issue — terror, the courts, values — the Democrats, event after event, are building the feeling that the Bush-Cheney presidency and GOP Congress have somehow been 40 miles of bad road…

..collaborating with a willing media to market the opposition party as a haunted house is a cynical, wholly reductionist strategy, with nothing in it for the public good. It dumbs down our politics. As shown with Social Security reform, the system ceases to function. A major U.S. foreign-policy initiative like the Bush Doctrine has to be delegitimized with no serious opposition support at any level. This is the strategy of the phalanx, not politics. If it works, the other side will surely run the same tar-and-pitch strategy against a new Clinton presidency. It deserves to fail.

The democrats have been out of ideas for a long time, and are permanently tied to a radical base reliably functioning as an electoral albatross. The rise of alternative media (AM talk radio, Fox news) and the conservative blogosphere were important blows to their information monopoly, but Abu Ghraib and Hurricane Katrina proved the MSM could still utilize moving images to frame reality in their own terms, and to inflict serious political damage.

FrankJ concludes that there is no hope of victory.

Gagbad Bob offers a must-read reflection on the feminization (and decadence) of contemporary American society:

As it evolved, the Republican party came to represent masculine virtues such as competition, maintaining strict rules (“law and order”), standards over compassion (i.e., not changing the rules for members of liberal victim groups), delayed gratification, and respect for the ways of the father–that is, conserving what had been handed down by previous generations of fathers, and not just assuming in our adolescent hubris that we know better than they…

The Democratic party, on the other hand, came to represent the realm of maternal nurturance–compassion over standards (i.e., racial quotas), idealization of the impulses (just as a mother is delighted in the instinctual play of her child), mercy over judgment (reduced prison sentences, criminal rights, etc.), cradle-to-grave welfare, a belief that we can seduce our enemies and do not have to defeat them with manly violence, and the notion that meaning, truth and values are all arbitrary and subject to change (which is true of the fluid world of emotions in general)…

…we are seeing a collapse of the covenant between mother and father as represented in the previous maternal/paternal two-party system. It is as if we are children living in a home where mother and father no longer get along and are bickering constantly. In fact, that is probably putting it too mildly, because the current situation has gone beyond mere arguing, to the point that the masculine and feminine spheres are no longer communicating at all and are going through a very messy and acrimonious divorce. Both sides are “lawyered up” and ready to go for the throat…

..our two-party political system has now come down to is a battle between the “blenders” and the “separators.” Nothing bothers the blenders more than adult males such as Ronald Reagan, George Bush, or John Roberts–remember Diane Feinstein, who could not vote for Roberts for supreme court justice because she wanted to know how he felt as a man. In short, she wanted him to be more of a male-female hybrid, like herself and her constituents. Simply applying the rule of law is too masculine. We need some female “wiggle room” in the constitution.

The modern conservative movement is not just trying to preserve the traditional male element, but the traditional separation of the various spheres in general–civilized vs. barbaric, animal vs, human, adult vs. child–while the Democratic party is the party of mannish women (e.g., Hillary Clinton, Gloria Allred), feminized men (e.g., Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore), adult children (Howard Dean, John Edwards, Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, et al), and even animal humans (PETA members who believe that killing six million chickens is morally indistinguishable from murdering six million Jews, radical environmentalists, etc.). And it is almost impossible to engage in rational debate with the adult child, who has the cynicism of a world-weary grown up but the wisdom of a child, or with the male-female hybrid, who possesses an emotionalized reason that is easily hijacked by the passions. This is not so much a disagreement between the content of thought as its very form.

This divorce and blending of the male and female produces a new kind of child, one that is neither male nor female, adult nor child. A recent case in point was brought to our attention in the pathetic figure of Joel Stein, an L.A. Times columnist who penned a now infamous piece about his moral contempt for our troops fighting in Iraq. As he put it, it is wrong to blame President Bush for their moral turpitude. Rather, “The truth is that people who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they’re following orders or not. An army of people making individual moral choices may be inefficient, but an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying.” In his magnanimity, Stein is “not advocating that we spit on returning veterans like they did after the Vietnam War, but we shouldn’t be celebrating people for doing something we don’t think was a good idea.”

Vanderleun over at American Digest wrote an outstanding, insightful piece yesterday that absolutely eviscerates the hapless Stein. Entitled The Voice of the Neuter is Heard Throughout the Land, it goes way beyond the vapid and vile (if it’s possible to be both) content of Stein’s essay in order to describe a much wider and more troubling cultural phenomenon. He refers the reader to a radio interview of Stein conducted by Hugh Hewitt. I actually heard the interview in real time, and Vanderleun is exactly right that Stein’s hollow and lilting voice is the voice of the neuter.

Vanderleun describes perfectly the flat, affectless tone of so many of Stein’s generational cohort that “tends to always trend towards a slight rising question at the end of even simple declarative sentences.” Neither identifiably male or female, “there is no foundation or soul within the speaker on which the voice can rest and rise.” But “above all, it is a sexless voice. Not, I hasten to add, a ‘gay’ voice…. No, this is a new old voice of a generation of ostensible men and women who have been educated and acculturated out of, or say rather, to the far side of any gender at all. It is, as I have indicated above, the voice of the neutered…. ”

Here, Vanderleun seems to be describing one of the inevitable consequences of the sexual and generational blending I referred to above. This “new voice that we hear throughout the land from so many of the young betokens a weaker and less certain brand of citizen than we have been used to in our history. Neither male nor female, neither gay nor straight, neither…. well, not anything substantive really. A generation finely tuned to irony and nothingness and tone deaf to duty and soul.”

Hat tip to AJStrata.

The Washington Post today reported on an article by Paul R. Pillar in Foreign Affairs which criticizes the Bush Administration for “politicizing intelligence.”

Pillar’s basic contention is that the Bush Administration didn’t listen to the mandarins at the CIA. They cherry-picked analysis to support their own policy decisions, which were made independently of the opinions and preferences of far-better-qualified people like himself.

In Pillar’s view, the intelligence community has interests and responsibilities of its own, which need to be pursued without being in thrall to the whims of temporarily elected amateurs:

The intelligence community should be repositioned to reflect the fact that influence and relevance flow not just from face time in the Oval Office, but also from credibility with Congress and, most of all, with the American public. The community needs to remain in the executive branch but be given greater independence and a greater ability to communicate with those other constituencies (fettered only by security considerations, rather than by policy agendas). An appropriate model is the Federal Reserve, which is structured as a quasi-autonomous body overseen by a board of governors with long fixed terms.

In a slightly more polite way than the noisiest and most arrogant of the pouting spooks, Pillar is saying exactly the same thing. American foreign policy, decisions of peace and war, belong to an internal government elite, connected with and mirroring a national elite, not to temporarily elected parvenus with unconventional views on these matters, representing a bunch of yahoos from fly-over states.

At the very least, the intelligence community, if mean-spiritedly denied its own liberum veto, should really be entitled to cross the aisles and start vigorously criticizing and actively opposing any elected Administration’s policies, while retaining complete job security. A position in the US intelligence community ought to be rather like a tenured professorship at Harvard. And the collective body of that community should be, in relation to the US government, much like the Harvard faculty. When embarassed by the statements, policies, or behavior of a Bush, (shudder!) a Cheney, they ought to be able to circulate petitions advocating his removal, and vote on motions of censure.

Frankly, the more I read of this sort of arrogance, the more I feel like I’m revisiting some of the earlier sections of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Murray Waas, at National Journal, is reporting that:

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been “authorized” by Cheney and other White House “superiors” in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records…

Libby also indicated what he will offer as a broad defense during his upcoming criminal trial: that Vice President Cheney and other senior Bush administration officials had earlier encouraged and authorized him to share classified information with journalists to build public support for going to war. Later, after the war began in 2003, Cheney authorized Libby to release additional classified information, including details of the NIE, to defend the administration’s use of prewar intelligence in making the case for war.

Libby testified to the grand jury that he had been authorized to share parts of the NIE with journalists in the summer of 2003 as part of an effort to rebut charges then being made by former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson that the Bush administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make a public case for war.

All this seems to go without saying.

L’Affaire Plame has been operating from the outset on the basis of a kind of bizarre hyper-legalism, in which senior officials of the Executive Branch of the government are being targeted for indictment, and prosecuted, on a strange theory that the principal functionaries of government, the ultimate users and proprietors of classified information, can be deemed to have injured or offended the government, i.e., themselves, by using classified information to inform the public.

But, of course, the Executive Branch is itself the actual owner of all US classified information, and the employer of every participant, so we are regarding the preposterous unfolding of a scenario in which subordinate members of the Executive (the CIA, the Department of Justice) are seeking to indict and/or convict their superiors (The Vice President’s Chief of Staff; and in the left’s happiest and wildest dreams, also the President’s Policy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove, and the Vice President himself).

Obviously the Executive Branch at its highest levels ought to be (absent a particular law) assumed to be entitled to use classified information in any manner it finds necessary or desirable in support of the policies of the Government, i.e., itself. At its most senior levels, the Executive branch can, in theory, classify or declassify at will.

So how can the Executive Branch be prosecuting the Executive Branch over its own classified information?

It is as if we find there were a dispute among the king’s servants in the royal castle over the proper arrangement of some table settings, and a coterie of disgruntled footmen had complained to the castle warden that the king’s chancellor’s seneschal was misusing the silver, and were trying to persuade him that the chancellor should be held responsible for this outrage as well, along with another principal crown minister, and all of them should be sacked and flung into the dungeon for their offense against the footmen.

The only possible rational basis for a possible crime would have to be the Intelligence Identities Act of 1982, which was enacted to protect genuinely covert intelligence officers, working overseas and consequently particularly vulnerable, from being endangered by having their identities disclosed by adversaries of the US Government. There has considerable public confusion concerning Mrs. Wilson’s employment status, but public information makes it clear enough that she has been working in Washington for more than the five years, stipulated in the Act.

In relation to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the special counsel refers to Plame as “a person whose identity the CIA was making specific efforts to conceal and who had carried out covert work overseas within the last 5 years”. (8/27/04 Aff. at 28 n.15.)

Mr. Fitzgerald’s unspecific reference to Mrs. Wilson’s “covert overseas work” is very probably merely a desperate and highly disingenuous attempt to obfuscate the inapplicability of the statute serving as the basis for his entire investigation by so defining Mrs. Wilson’s employment as ipso facto covert, and treating any sort of trip abroad on Counterproliferation issues for consultation, or even conferencing, however brief, as sufficient to meet the terms of the statute.

If there is no violation of the 1982 Act, there was never a crime in the first place, and the entire affair represents a Kafka-esque spectacle of out-of-control partisan elements of government run wild, of government devouring its own tail.

The Washington Post reports today that Lewis Libby’s defense team has taken the obvious step of trying to force the prosecution to disclose the factual circumstances of Valerie Plame’s employment:

Attorneys for Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff urged a court yesterday to force a prosecutor to turn over CIA records indicating whether former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s employment was classified, saying the answer is not yet clear.

As we have previously discussed here and here, it seems unlikely, on the basis of what we know, that Valerie Plame really was employed as a covert operative in the sense refered to in the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

We were just discussing the noisy demands of the leftwing blogosphere that democrat senators hold their breaths until they turn blue to prevent the confirmation of Samuel Alito. James Lileks says these rules are for making a fool of yourself, but I’d say he has really just identified several of the characteristic features of the customary literary style of the leftwing blogosphere. It always amazes me that anybody can take the ravings of those foulmouthed trolls seriously:

Make Up Funny Names. If a right-wing figure’s name starts with K, like Kate, by all means call her KKKate. Everyone on the right probably shares the values of the Klan, anyway. Especially if they’re against affirmative action and don’t believe in judging people on the color of their skin. (This goes for the other side, too: Hillary Clinton is so much funnier as “Hitlery.” Wanting single-payer health insurance, wishing to enslave Europe under Aryan yoke — what’s the diff?) Remember: Boil down the object of your hate to a single phrase that betrays your incomprehension of the fundamental issues, but lets others know where you stand right away.

Swear angrily. Not just the classics, but the ones relating to excretion and genitalia. Nothing shows you’re a serious thinker like a torrent of obscenities. It’s the reason Courtney Love is invited to speak to the U.N. so often. Added bonus: Lots of cursing means no one will suspect you’re a Christian. If you are a Christian, you’ll be one of the cool ones who listens to Howard Stern spank lesbian midget strippers. Which automatically means you’re pro-choice, so whatever with the G-d thing.

Hyperbolize everything. Granted, everyone punches a little too hard sometimes; everyone throws too deep. Feisty debate is energizing. Nothing is more boring than the torpid droning you get in the Senate, where solons are duty-bound to call each other “my good friend” even if they were stabbing each other with Bic pens in the cloakroom five minutes before. But the pestilential keyboard pounders had best realize they’re just screaming to the choir. Persuading the middle means acknowledging that the opposition is not composed of subhuman Moorlocks who hope global warming drowns coastal-dwelling gay stem-cell researchers. People on the right may be wrong, but it’s quite possible they don’t actually want a fascistic corporate state where the elite tour the country in giant hovercraft, vaporizing Wal-Mart labor organizers with microwave rays. You could treat them like fellow human beings. But where’s the fun in that?

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Vasko Kohlmayer explains What Liberals can Learn from George W. Bush.

A relative few presidents in this country’s history have endured the kind of vicious and spurious attacks that have been leveled against George Bush. Completely abandoning any sense of decorum or statesmanship, some of the highest officials in the Democratic Party have repeatedly called him a liar, a loser, an election-thief, an airhead, and a fraud. Regularly likened to Hitler, there have been books discussing his assassination. Recently he was even dubbed the world’s greatest terrorist by one of America’s once-prominent entertainers . There are just a few of examples. Sadly, such views are increasingly becoming part of the mainstream liberal outlook.

But no matter how malicious they have been, George Bush has always faced his critics with affability and goodwill.

We Killed the Patriot Act! declares Harry Reid.

John Lofton notes some of the ironies of Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts sitting in judgement on Samuel Alito’s ethics and integrity:

Kennedy among other things:

— Was suspended from Harvard because of cheating when he was caught getting another student to take a Spanish test for him.

— Had his father get his Army duty changed to two years from the four years he signed up for. He ended up a guard at NATO headquarters in Paris rather than in Korea where a war was going on.

— Was turned down by Harvard Law School because of poor grades.

— Was arrested four times, while a student at the University of Virginia, for reckless driving, racing with a cop to avoid arrest and for operating a vehicle without a license.

MARY JO KOPECHNE might have been saved if help summoned immediately, according to underwater diver who retrieved her body— Killed a young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, by driving her off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969. Following this “accident,” which was, arguably, negligent homicide, Kennedy made 17 credit card phone calls. But it was not until the 18th phone call, nine hours after his car ran off this bridge, that Kennedy reported this “accident.” The frogman who retrieved the dead girl’s body said that he believed she might have been saved if help had been summoned immediately. Kennedy received a two-month suspended sentence, serving no time in jail.