In the spirit of patriotism and self-indulgence, I’m sharing with you an exchange I had with the Times’ public editor about Adam Nagourney’s claim that Bush never actually said “mission accomplished”.
——————
Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2004 23:36:11 -0400
From: XXXXX
Reply-To: XXXXX
To: [email protected]
Subject: recent Nagourney articleDear Mr. Okrent,
In his article “Strong Charges Set New Tone Before Debate”, Adam
Nagourney says “Mr. Bush never actually said “mission accomplished,”
but stood in front of a banner that contained those words.” In fact,
Mr. Bush said “America sent you on a mission to remove a grave threat
and to liberate an oppressed people, and that mission has been
accomplished.” You can check this at
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-06-05-bush-qatar_x.htm
if you like.
——————
From: Public <[email protected]>
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 14:28:59 -0400
Subject: 9/27 Reader Concern
To: XXXXXDear XXXX,
We raised your concern with a senior editor who noted that these are
completely different appearances by President Bush. The speech that
you cited from the Web was a month later than Bush’s “Mission
Accomplished” appearance on the ship. And it is clear in the Nagourney
piece when Mr. Nagourney uses the word “never” he means President Bush
didn’t speak those words in that appearance on that day. Mr. Nagourney
doesn’t mean to be saying that Bush never — anywhere — spoke the
words “mission accomplished.”I hope this is helpful. Thank you for your message and your vigilance.
Sincerely,
Arthur Bovino
Office of the Public Editor
——————
From: XXXXX
Date: Mon, Sep 27, 2004 at 2:39 PM
Subject: Re: 9/27 Reader Concern
To: Public <[email protected]>Dear Mr. Bovino,
Thank you for your prompt reply. My dictionary defines “never” as
“not ever; on no occasion; at no time.” Does the New York Times have
a dictionary that defines “never” as “not on that day but perhaps on
another occasion a month later”?Sincerely yours,
cleek
how dare you question our great leaders on Loyalty Day, of all days ?
treason!
Bulworth
It’s clear that DougJ lacks a certain proper deference…
flounder
That is classic Doug.
Stefan
And it is clear in the Nagourney
piece when Mr. Nagourney uses the word “never” he means President Bush
didn’t speak those words in that appearance on that day. Mr. Nagourney
doesn’t mean to be saying that Bush never—anywhere—spoke the
words “mission accomplished.”
Similarly, when I assured my girlfriend that I never had sex with that girl I met at the bar last week I meant I did not have sex with her at that specific time and place. I did not mean to be saying that I never — anywhere — had sex with her…..
dmsilev
Obviously a Gilbert and Sullivan fan.
Captain.
Though related to a peer,
I can hand, reef, and steer,
And ship a selvagee;
I am never known to quail
At the fury of a gale,
And I’m never, never sick at sea!
Chorus.
What, never?
Captain.
No, never!
Chorus.
What, never?
Captain.
Hardly ever!
Chorus.
He’s hardly ever sick at sea!
Then give three cheers, and one cheer more,
For the hardy Captain of the Pinafore!
Then give three cheers, and one cheer more,
For the Captain of the Pinafore!
-dms
Hunter Gathers
@cleek:
Oh man I forgot it was Loyalty Day. Anyone who doesn’t celebrate Loyalty Day is a pinko commie fascist.
Spazman
God you guys really do miss Bush don’t you? Running on empty?
PeakVT
I miss the Ad Nags blog.
cleek
@Spazman:
running on clean-burning electoral success, actually!
The Grand Panjandrum
Quod erat demonstratum, as it were.
eponymous
@Spazman:
Reading comprehension much? DougJ’s post isn’t about Bush…
DanF
Jeez … When you’re standing under a forty foot banner that says, “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!” you don’t actually need to say, “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!” do you?
Ridiculous on too many levels…
TheFountainHead
@Spazman: Great, now I’m gonna be listening to Jackson Browne all damn day. Thanks!
NonyNony
Classic bit of weaseling from an editor who realizes that someone’s found a mistake he should have caught, but who doesn’t want to own up to the mistake. The use of the word “never” in Nagourney’s context is misleading and hyperbolic at best and a lie at worst, and really the Times would do well to print a correction.
But then, if the Times had to correct every factual error made on its editorial page, they’d probably have to add a permanent correction feature to the paper. Which would be fun to read (and would maybe even be enough to get me to pay for a subscription again) but fairly humiliating to the editors involved and so they’ll never do it.
TheFountainHead
@DanF: Actually, it would be pretty terrible writing to indicate your visuals quite so directly. Not that Bush never had terrible speeches written for him.
Hunter Gathers
Byron York tries to explain himself and digs a deeper hole.
sgwhiteinfla
Off Topic
I am sure by now most people saw the fearmongering video the House GOP released yesterday asking if you felt safe. But did you know that one off the images in the video was a picture of President Obama meeting with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus? One has to ask why that image was interspersed with images of terrorists right? Well it turns out the CHC is pretty pissed off about the inclusion of the picture as well as the ad itself.
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/05/01/chc-boehner-video/
How is that minority outreach going for you GOP?
Bhall35
Greg Mitchell has a good piece at HuffPo about the Times’ coverage of the “Mission Accomplished” nonsense:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/on-6th-anniversary-of-mis_b_194452.html
Anton Sirius
Oh, a post about a newspaper… how quaint. Were Nagourney’s columns available on eight track too?
Hunter Gathers
@sgwhiteinfla:
The best part?
The GOP. Giving comedians daily material since 1994.
Zifnab
@DanF: But he didn’t actually SAY the words. He didn’t actually SAY it.
If I walk into a McDonalds, are you going to accuse me of having served billions and billions? No, that’s what’s ridiculous. Just because a few silly little Navy officers get it into their heads to put up a banner doesn’t mean the President actually endorses it.
And besides, would you prefer Saddam was still in power? Would you? Huh? Fucking terrorist-lover. I hope you get Obama Recession Pig Flu and die.
aimai
No cannibalism in the british navy. See, that sketch wasn’t funny because although they were talking about cannibalism and gnawing on a human leg at the same time words and pictures can not be understood as taking place in the same universe.
aimai
Whick
Sorry, Doug J, your dictionary is not the complete and final authority on what “never” means in every context. English speakers commonly use phrases like “never ever” and “never in my life” to indicate an absolute sense of “never”, because he word “never” by itself is not always enough.
Can you not imagine a situation where you told someone, “You never said you wanted popcorn,” meaning “You did not tell me you wanted popcorn from the time we got here until now”? Or do you suppose that “You never said you wanted popcorn” means “You never said you wanted popcorn, ever”?
joes527
@TheFountainHead: Yeah, well It looks like I’m stuck with Gilbert and Sullivan in my head today. So count your blessings.
garyb50
That’s pretty funny, DougJ. I’ll bet Bush didn’t even know there was a banner behind him.
Hunter Gathers
@Zifnab:
The only reason Bush didn’t say it is because of the open secret that Bush is illiterate.
Wolverines!
R. Porrofatto
Of course, standing in front of a strategically placed “Mission Accomplished” banner that your own White House arranged to have behind you while you made a speech that went on about operations being “over” and our forces having “prevailed” and such isn’t anything at all like actually saying “Mission Accomplished.” I suspect the only Bush didn’t say it that day is because his handlers thought it might come out that the war in Iraq was “Mis-unaccomplished.”
greynoldsct00
he was probably distracted, what with having his nuts trussed up in that harness and all…
DanF
@Zifnab: Fortunately I’m a vegetarian and none of my terrorist buddies eat pork, so I can’t get Swine Flu (I thought I heard Michelle Bachmann say that but my tinfoil reception only gets one-bar).
Zifnab
@DanF: Damn and blast. Why didn’t we double Gitmo when we had the chance?!
Bob In Pacifica
Truthiness, when examined closely, is not like horseshoes or hand grenades. More like horsesh*t and handjobs.
JK
Doug,
Thanks for schooling the NY Times. Unfortunately, Charlie Rose will continue to bring Adam Nagourney on his program and drool all over him as if he were the most brilliant political reporter who ever lived.
Hunter Gathers
@Whick:
Why would you bother to defend a known hack like Nagourney? If these assholes actually did thier jobs instead of just repeating whatever headline might be on Drudge or Halperin, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now.
Hunter Gathers
@DanF:
You have that problem too? Mine has been on the fritz so often lately that I’m starting to believe that the Jews were not responsible for 9/11.
Oh crap. I’m going to get kicked off of Stormfront now. Just what I need.
Free masons run the country!
DougJ
Thanks for reformatting this, John or Tim. I really had no idea what would be a good format for a string of emails but this looks much better.
Farley
@dmsilev: Ha! I went to the same place.
wasabi gasp
That was a pretty big banner. You could probably roll up a whole political party in it and then dump it in the river.
Steve
Yeah, I’m gonna have to back the NYT on this one, people use “never” all the time in the context of a specific occasion. It was still a dumbass thing for Nagourney to write though.
Comrade Kevin
This whole thing depends on what the definition of “is” is.
Ajay
Never to some means “not” in a very finite time period which only they can define.
Faisal
This. (and this)
TheOfficialHatOnMyCat
This isn’t exactly new. The whole spin drill on the banner and the statement have been out there for a while.
I’m having a really busy day dealing with actual problems.
Can somebody give me the executive overview on why this is topical today?
Thanks so much.
omen
pretty elemental rule of thumb: when taking multiple choice exams, you can usually count on anything that asserted “never” or “always” was sure to be the wrong answer.
Mattski
You mean for the past 34 years my birthday has also been Loyalty Day. Man the things I learn hear!!
edit: (the proper use of homonyms is not one of them)
Mike
Recall what a disaster Armando Benitez was as the Giants’ closer? The joke was that when Eric Gagne came in to save a game for the Dodgers, the scoreboard said GAME OVER, but when Benitez came in, it said MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
Dave
@TheOfficialHatOnMyCat: The title of the post itself didn’t clue you in?
Chris Baldwin
Happy May Day (not Loyalty Day)!
TheOfficialHatOnMyCat
@Dave:
Hey, it surely did.
I think we should examine every day on the calendar for hoots from the past and spend as much time as possible hooting about those things.
I know it’s just me, but I just detest anything forward-looking. I mean, I have enough goddam trouble keeping up with all the slights, outrages, and tragicomedies that have already happened, and the important messages that those send, to worry about the future.
The future is for … futurists. Funny people who are always promising us energy from dirt and cars that fly. Waste of time!
Laura W Darling
@TheOfficialHatOnMyCat: Are you an Aquarian like me? You know we are all about the future, being Visionary Humanitarians and all.
Did Dr. Haynes deliver you at St. John’s? He was pretty old by the time he dragged his ass off the golf course and put my petite mother out of her 10lbs of misery, so I figure that might be one more of the many things we have in common.
binzinerator
@Steve:
That’s why we have words like ‘disingenuous’ and ‘dishonest’.
I do notice when people I meet or do business with or socialize with use ‘never’ when mean ‘not at that time’ because I always call them on it. And it’s been very few people. I notice how many because when people use this ‘never’ bullshit I ask them ‘you mean you never in your whole life never did that?’ And they often get a bit pissy because they know ‘never’ wasn’t true and they’re annoyed I didn’t accept their lie.
And it is a lie. At the core of it, it is a falsehood, and they often know it.
Fortunately, I don’t run into many people like that.
Maybe your impression that people use it all the time is more a reflection of the kind of people you surround yourself with than of actual widespread usage.
Dave
@TheOfficialHatOnMyCat: shorter: “Sometimes you just have to keep walking!”
TheOfficialHatOnMyCat
@Laura W Darling:
I like a good aquarium as much as the next person. The bubbles are just hypnotizing and relaxing.
I don’t know who delivered me. I think they just sent me to General Delivery, To Whom It May Concern.
For that reason, I am a To Whom It May Concern troll now.
TheOfficialHatOnMyCat
@Dave:
Very original. I think blogging is good for you.
Bill Teefy
@Spazman: I think this is a poke at the New York Times but if you want to make it about Bush then who am I to argue.
But I am a bit frustrated that I didn’t have this type of snappy comeback for the years from 1981 through the last Presidential election for the Carter references. I am amazed that, although Conservatives claim Carter was ineffectual, he is still today claimed by some of them to be responsible for almost every problem in America today. He far outstrips Clinton and FDR when it comes to legacy.
Ah well. I do miss Bush, his adorable smirk, his vows to do somethin’ Decidery, and his massive FAIL, like a train wreck, horrible yet compelling. But I don’t miss him as much as Cheney. Love and Acorns.
Bill Teefy
@binzinerator: I think it all depends what your definition of “is” is.
Ah the good old days when not accepting responsibility for a minor dalliance was a criminal act and being misleading WAS “lying” and an impeachable offense. Thank god we drug that drama out to the Nth degree…not to do so would have set a horrible precedent.
If only she had been forced to swallow water.
OldK
@Whick:
I agree. The original Nagourney line was hackishly written, in that it could give the impression that he was asserting that Bush had never spoken those words at all.
But look at the context.
I think it’s clear that the meaning is “But the scene Kerry described did not happen exactly as he described it, and the detail Kerry got wrong was that Bush never said ‘Mission Accomplished.'” In this use of “never”, I think it’s clear he meant “never within that scene.”
@Hunter Gathers:
For reasons that have nothing to do with Nagourney, or “defending.” Because we think facile parsing of quotes is a bad idea, no matter who does it.
Xanthippas
Man, you give somebody a guest spot at a blog and next thing you know he’s sassing editors of major newspapers…
bvac
Oh, fun! Let me try.
“Bush never actually tortured people, but got behind a policy that led to people being tortured.”
“Palin never actually said she could see Russia from her house, but stood behind the air space where the sound of those words were emitted from.”
Brilliant!
kay
@bvac:
“An innocent’s life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy.”
Justification for torture. I knew it. It’s slippery slope time.
Now it’s “has information” and “bad guy” and “an innocent’s life is at stake”.
That’s where the ticking time bomb scenario had to end up.
“A life at stake”, (whatever that means) and “bad guy” and “has information”.
With this rationale, the state can torture the family members of a kidnapper. With this rationale, the state can torture the friends or family members of an unstable parent who grabs a child in a custody dispute.
the ticking time bomb scenario is endless.
Kyle
“Cheney never tortured people, he just masturbated to the videotapes of people being tortured on his orders.”
Comrade Darkness
@OldK: It’s still sloppy writing. Clarity would be trivial to achieve, so it reeks of the usual right wing half-truth machine, whether it is a conscious product of it or not.
“But did not use those words in the course of that speech”
Clarity, just like journalism, are getting harder to find at the NYT. Perhaps senility is setting in on the grey lady.
HyperIon
@Bill Teefy:
Hmm. I did not know that the “spits or swallows” question had ever been asked of or answered by Ms. Lewinski. Is there a linky?
kay
“An innocent’s life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy.”
I think you can torture the bartender who chatted-up the drunk who then left the bar and got in his car with this rationale.
“Where was he going? Get the waterboard”.
I’m going to ask Judge Bybee to draft a memo.
KevinNYC
Also remember that Mission Accomplished was in the Speech. Rumsfeld, of all people, told Bob Woodward he called the White House and told them to take it out. The idiots at the White House based Bush’s speech on the speeach Gen. MacArthur gave when he accepted the Japanese Surrender. The White House Producer and Cinematographer (yup, there is one.) were on that ship for days preparing for that speech. Do we think they went rogue and just happened to choose that banner?
Can you image how bad it is when Donald Rumsfeld calls “Bullshit” on you? I remember some general saying he was in active combat in the Sunni Triangle while that was going on. 37 Americans died in May 2003. Also do you think the 2 days Bush spent training for his stunt could have been better spent?
sponson
What’s next for the New York Times? Will they inform us that Bush never said “bring it on” because what he said in fact was “bring ’em on?” As if there is any significant difference at all. This use of “never” is actually worse then the difference between “it” and “them” because the primary and immediate interpretation by most people is going to be that Nagourney means what he says. And Nagourney said “never.”
mp1900
@sgwhiteinfla:
I grew up in NM with kids whose fathers had survived the Bataan Death March. Thanks for the link.
Cedwyn
i think i’m with steve. i take the context to clearly mean never in that speech on that day.
the only analogy i can muster is that “quote” from Casablanca, “play it again, sam.”
that line does not appear in the movie. the actual quote is closer to “oh, play it sam. play it once for old times’ sake.” so if i say to someone “she never said that,” do i mean never never? do i mean that ingrid bergman never said it? that the character ilsa never said it? is there an outtake somewhere where she does say “play it again, sam”?
but most people take it to mean never within the movie. sure adnag could have made judicious use of some modifiers, but oh well.
it is an interesting exploration of maybe people are overusing “never;” we’re so given to hyperbole as a society. *sigh*
oh yah – palin never did say she could see russia from her house. that was tina fey.
; )
r€nato
@OldK:
As satisfying as it is to bash hack reporting, I’m with you and I think DougJ is picking a nit. I prefer to assume good intentions by default rather than conspiracy theories, unless the subject has a proven track record of ill intent; it also seems to me that Nagourney was simply trying to be precise about what actually happened that day. I myself am somewhat prone to a bit of anal-retentiveness with regards to relating facts correctly.
I think it would be another thing entirely if Nagourney had spun that, “Bush never actually said ‘Mission Accomplished'” into a, “Kerry is a liar!” story. This is the precise kind of red herring which the hacktacular John Ziegler has used to spin, “Palin never said she could see Russia from her house!” into, “Obama only won because libruhls are stoopid!”
I have an ex-family member who pulled this same kind of shit, I’m sure a rhetorician would have a term for it. When he and I used to get into it – because he was infamous for denying facts, incidents and things he said or did which were inconvenient or made him look bad – one of his favorite misdirection tactics was to completely discount whatever I had to say if I could not recite the exact date, time and GPS coordinates where whatever it was I was talking about took place, as well as a 100% exact, word-for-word verbatim recitation of whatever was allegedly said. And even if I could (because I really do have an excellent, photographic memory) he could always fall back on, ‘my word against yours so whoever is the biggest bully wins’.
r€nato
@Comrade Darkness:
Maybe even highly-paid journalists make mistakes under deadline pressure. I’ve written quite a bit, I like to think I catch all my mistakes and I nearly always do but sometimes I amuse myself with the errors and less-than-clear writing I later find, which I didn’t notice on the first, second, third or fourth drafts.
Journalists seldom have the luxury of time to re-read and refine one’s writing, which other types of writers such as novelists and long-form feature writers have.
RockyJ
Ok, so he clearly may have told somebody to lie, but does this mean that because he never said he never had sexual relations with that woman, he never did? Geez, it’s like you need an MBA from Yale to figure this stuff out.
r€nato
@RockyJ: If your first reaction to any topic of discussion is to say, “Oh yeah? What about Clinton?”… you just might be a wingnut.
Bill Teefy
@OldK: Your bringing context to it is important because it lowers the level of douchery [or is it douchebaggery]. But, it is funny that in context, it appears to assail Kerry as stretching the lie by relating the story.
The story switches the focus from a truth, Bush did indeed try to play up his victory with a big PR stunt that one could refer to as his “Mission Accomplished Moment,” to Kerry being wrong in his exact wording.
Sometimes the way one displays the facts leads to an untruthful conclusion and the way one mistates the facts comes closer to the truth.
Bill Teefy
@HyperIon: I guess I should have said, “…forced her to breathe water.” Because then conservatives would have loved President Clinton and told us to walk on by or just keep swimming, swimming, swimming…
Anyway. I would provide a link but the CIA destroyed the tapes.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
Doesn’t matter if he said it. Doesn’t matter if you have tape of him saying it. The GOP works on Bart Simpson’s Principle:
“I-didn’t-do-it-nobody-saw-me-do-it-you-can’t-prove-a-thing!”
Archer
Leave Mr. Bush alone. We taught Iraq a lesson 6 years ago and they hardly ever bothered us after that. Also we found a bunch of WMDs but it was secret, read JOHN XI:3!!! So wake up America before it is too late.
SGEW
?
So, uh . . . Iraq is ill, and we loved it? [We loved the hell out of it] Perhaps you meant John XXI:3?
Ah, now that’s biblical relevance! [freakily enough]
Jen R
@sgwhiteinfla: I hadn’t seen that. Thanks for the link (I guess).
Sent an email to Boehner:
Comrade Darkness
@r€nato: Yeah, except this is the NYT. They should expect to be cited, in little snippets, as fact.
Sure, journalism is a high pressure, time-constrained operation. That just means writing habits and style should include precision from draft one.
binzinerator
@Bill Teefy:
I don’t know how you got that from what I wrote. Clinton lied about the blowjob. I don’t consider that lie an impeachable offense, nor the blowjob.
But FFS when is telling a falsehood not lying? If someone is telling you something that is not true and is intended to mislead you it means they are lying to you.
So lets see…apparently we have grown up from that episode and have gotten so much more sophisticated about truth and lies: Now lying is only being misleading. Bush and Cheney et al merely mislead us when they told us mushroom clouds over our cities were imminent. Bush was merely misled when he said ‘we do not torture’. Ditto for secret prisons, warrantless wiretapping and insisting anyone who was involved in the Plame leak would get the boot. The media replayed this same relativist game of not calling the thing what it damn well was. They still do.
I think it says something that a number of people don’t see this misleading, this disingenuousness or equivocation, as lying. At the core of these things they are still not true, they are falsehoods, lies. And if you accept that these are not lies and think such people are at worst only making misleading statements, then you are agreeing to accept their dishonesty. You let them define what the meaning of truth is. You’ve agreed to their lie. (Accepting that ‘never’ means something other than never with some people — at their discretion — is an example. You’ve accepted that ‘never’ means whatever they want it to mean.)
And this could very well be why we ended up with people like Bush and Cheney and an entire political party that specializes in this kind of lying. Maybe their lies were accepted by enough to get them in positions of power because they did not consider them to lying anymore. We were ‘mislead’ into war, not lied into one.
The right has succeeded in redefining ‘lie’ (and apparently what is impeachable as well). Or likely they saw where this shift, pushed it and got in front of it. Because they pretty much did it with permission, didn’t they? So the irony is, back in your ‘good old days’ ‘misleading’ was lying (which was true), and lying about a blowjob is an impeachable offense. And now lying is merely being misleading, (which is false) and lying about war, torture and other capital crimes are not impeachable offenses. The right has really succeeded in warping this society by warping the meanings of things (or perhaps by exploiting a cultural trend to accept the put-on, the ersatz as the genuine) to suit their agenda.
It is really difficult to find instances either in the media or in congress or even by people who were whistle-blowers where the lies of the last 8 years were called out for what they were — lies. That ought to tell us something.
binzinerator
“Bush was merely misled” should be “Bush was merely misleading us”.
And “Maybe their lies were accepted by enough to get them in positions of power because they did not consider them to lying anymore.” should be “Maybe their lies gained and kept them in positions of power because enough people accepted those lies as not lies, only misleading statements.”
And “Or likely they saw where this shift, pushed it and got in front of it. ” should be “Or likely they saw a recent malleability in what people were wiling to accept as truth, and saw where this shift was going, pushed it and got in front of it. ”
Frackin’ editor says I don’t have permission to edit my own frackin’ comment.
sparky
in reading this thread, and looking at the original article, i get the sense that the complaint was misdirected. it should have been at the editor who let a tangential factoid go through, thus changing the thrust of the article. my guess–and it is only a guess–is that Nagourney thought he was being clever and valued his cleverness over how the story would read. a more aggressive editor would have struck that out as not relevant. perhaps the real problem here is that as with so many other big names at the paper, the editors are far too deferential to them (Judith? Anyone home?). maybe the NYT should go back to the anonymous “Special to the Times” and the hell with the “stars”.
Lisa
That was a hilarious, yet alarming exchange.
The comments are all wins as well.