Nancy Scola, writing in The Atlantic, remembers how Obama's lastest economic adviser, the "jobs guy," called the Bush administration out on some blatant and very political lies.
Alan Krueger's challenge was effective.
Along with Stanford political scientist David Laitin, Krueger in 2004 challenged one of the central premises of the Bush doctrine on the year-old war in Iraq: that going into that country would reduce global terrorist attacks. During its early years, the administration had largely successfully avoided charges that it was manipulating data and evidence to fit its post-9/11 narrative. But the criticisms from Krueger and Laitin stuck, forcing the Bush administration to issue a rare reversal.
The scene: April, seven years ago. Up for re-election, Bush was arguing that only he, not soon-to-be Democratic nominee John Kerry, could keep America safe. The proof? Among other things, the State Department's 2004 Patterns of Global Terrorism Report, an annual accounting required by Congress, which was released to great fanfare. "You will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight," said Deputy Secretary of State Dick Armitage at its release. Added Cofer Black, Bush's Coordinator of Counterterrorism: the report confirmed that terrorist attacks were as rare as they'd been since 1969.
But Krueger and Laitin cried foul. In an early-May Washington Post op-ed, they said that the report's claim that there was a 45 percent drop in terrorist attacks in the past two years was complete rubbish. "The number of significant terrorist acts increased from 124 in 2001 to 169 in 2003 -- 36 percent -- even using the State Department's official standards," they wrote.
There was a good deal of embarrassment at State, embarrassment shouldered mostly by Colin Powell, who then turned on the CIA. In the end, President Bush had to back down.
The Bush administration was forced to acknowledge that, based on their own data, deaths from terrorist attacks were more than twice what they had earlier reported.
Nice going! Scola adds: "It was one episode, yes. But it suggests that Alan Krueger a) really knows how to count and b) knows how to make that skill count in the political arena."
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