Another Anti-Bush Factoid Bites the Dust
The favorite gotcha talking-point of the lefty-with-a-conscience crowd--that the abortion rate went up under the presidency of George W. Bush after falling under Bill Clinton--turns out to be bogus. For an extremely thorough debunking you should check out the article "The Biography of a Bad Statistic" at the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org site ( factcheck.org/article330.html).
The progenitor of the claim was Glen Harold Stassen, an ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary (and son of the perennial presidential candidate Harold Stassen). Last October on the website of Sojourners magazine, Stassen published a short piece, "Pro-life? Look at the fruits." After noting that he was "trained in statistical analysis," Stassen allowed that the data were spotty but asserted that there were still enough to "identify trends": namely, "Under President Bush, the decade-long trend of declining abortion rates appears to have reversed. Given the trends of the 1990s, 52,000 more abortions occurred in the United States in 2002 than would have been expected before this change of direction. How could this be?"
We'll simplify: Because President Bush isn't a liberal, he failed to provide "health care, health insurance, jobs, child care, and a living wage" for all Americans. The ensuing economic stresses convinced more women to put the "off" back in "offspring." As Stassen reasoned, "women worry about health care for themselves and their children. Since 5.2 million more people have no health insurance now than before this presidency--with women of childbearing age overrepresented in those 5.2 million--abortion increases." By this logic, not to put too fine a point on it, Ted Kennedy is one of America's leading pro-lifers, and George W. Bush a veritable Herod.
Needless to say, Stassen's statistics were like catnip for Democrats. As the FactCheck.org article notes, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Howard Dean were prominent in touting the Bush-abortion connection. Among other examples, "in an interview on NBC's Meet the Press on January 30, 2005, Sen. John Kerry claimed that abortions were up, period: Kerry: 'And do you know that in fact abortion has gone up in these last few years with the draconian policies that Republicans have?' A Kerry spokesman confirmed at the time to FactCheck.org that Kerry was relying on the Stassen article for his information."
The Annenberg fact-checkers continued: "As recently as May 22, 2005, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean also asserted on NBC News's Meet the Press: Dean: 'You know that abortions have gone up 25 percent since George Bush was President?' Dean's 'statistic' went unchallenged by moderator Tim Russert, so millions of viewers probably got the impression that Dean's very specific 25 percent figure was correct. But Dean was wrong--and by a wide margin. We asked the Democratic National Committee repeatedly where Dean got his 25 percent figure, but we got no response. Even if Stassen's estimate of 52,000 additional abortions were correct, that would figure to an increase of less than 4 percent. And in any case the rate is going down, not up, according to the most authoritative figures available."
The FactCheck.org piece is well worth reading in its entirety. As they note, statistics on abortion rates are not ironclad. But "Stassen's numbers, and the widespread acceptance they seemed to be getting, prompted the Guttmacher Institute to conduct a special analysis to update its comprehensive census of abortion providers." Guttmacher, no friend of the Bush administration, found "that the number of abortions decreased nationwide--by 0.8 percent in 2001 and by another 0.8 percent in 2002. The abortion rate, which is the number of women having abortions relative to the total population, also decreased 1 percent in 2001 and 0.9 percent in 2002."
Deep Throat--the View from Iran
Like The Scrapbook, you too may be suffering from an advanced case of Media Self-Infatuation Overload Syndrome, aka "Enough already about 'Deep Throat' and the saviors of civilization at the Washington Post." Although we must admit that it was amusing to learn that the famous anonymous source who worked hand-in-glove with the sainted investigative reporters of liberal myth to bring down Nixon was in fact a top aide to liberal bogeyman J. Edgar Hoover, aggrieved that Nixon hadn't picked him to succeed Hoover atop the FBI.
And in case you were wondering if the unveiling of the source would shut up the conspiracy theorists, we have one word for you: Ha! You may or may not be surprised to learn, for instance, that Iranian TV has uncovered a deep malevolent force underlying Nixon's woes. That's right: the J-double-o-z's. According to the good folks at the Middle East Media Research Institute, the Iranian News Channel (IRINN) has discovered that the "Jewish Lobby Set Watergate Trap for Nixon."
IRINN Reporter: "Today, it has become clear that Nixon's dispute with Israel and the Zionist lobby was among the main causes for his downfall. In fact, the reporters who exposed the Watergate affair and blew it out of proportion were Zionists, recruited to the ranks of the Zionist lobby. By using the media as its tool, Zionism tried to get one of its main opponents out of the way. . . . Along with Kennedy, [Nixon] is considered a victim of a major political coup carried out by the Zionist lobby."
You can view this lunacy at www.memritv.org/search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=689.
Congratulations!
The seventh annual Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Journalism has been awarded to Claudia Rosett for her peerless--and tireless--reporting on the scandalous palm-greasing and bribery engaged in by Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime under the U.N. Oil-for-Food program. Rosett's award-winning writings on the subject have appeared in many publications, including The Weekly Standard.
Sponsored by the Eric Breindel Memorial Foundation, and generously supported by News Corporation, Breindel's longtime employer and this magazine's corporate parent, the award is the richest honor in opinion journalism, carrying a prize of $10,000. It is presented each year to the columnist or editorialist whose work best reflects the spirit that animated Breindel's own writing: love of country, commitment to democratic institutions, and determination to bear witness to the evils of totalitarianism.
The Scrapbook's Decline and Pratfall
We must shamefacedly retract last week's item--"The BBC's Decline and Further Decline"--which unfavorably compared the BBC's coverage of the International Institute for Strategic Studies annual report to Reuters's coverage of the same. The BBC story that The Scrapbook mocked was actually a year old, from May 25, 2004, and covered the release of the IISS's "Strategic Survey 2003/04."