For you non-sports fans, the Minnesota Twins is one of America’s finest baseball franchises. “Twins” refers to Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. In 1970, when Harry Blackmun from Minneapolis joined Warren Burger from St. Paul on the U.S. Supreme Court, they were called the Minnesota Twins because of their shared heritage and similar conservative voting records – i.e., they voted the same in 87% of their cases for their first five years. Unfortunately, they grew apart and voted the same in 45% of their cases for their next five years. And finally, they became dysfunctional and agreed on only 34% of their cases for their final five years.
Minnesota has been quiet for a few years, but now it looks like a some new dysfunctional Minnesota twins are getting ready to mix it up.
For those of you who don’t listen to talk radio, Congresswoman Michele Bachman, who represents Twin Cities suburbs, is a rising star in conservative circles and is considered a leader in the Tea Party movement. For those of you who don’t read the NY Times, Tom Friedman, who was born and raised in Minneapolis, is their leading foreign-affairs columnist and the author of two classics – From Beirut to Jerusalem and The World Is Flat.
You might think that a couple of famous midwesterners would get along famously, but that would be wrong. Think about it – Bachman belongs to the Tea Party and Friedman belongs to the NY Times. You can’t get more different than that.
You might also think that Bachman and Friedman travel in different orbits (Bachman in domestic politics and Friedman in foreign affairs), but that would wrong, too. Just today, Friedman went out of his way to take a pot shot at Bachman in his column for her criticism of Obama’s expensive trip to Asia.
Bachman had suggested on Anderson Cooper’s TV show that the trip would cost America $200 million a day. The next day, according to Friedman, Anderson Cooper “expertly deconstructed on his CNN show the bogus rumor” that had started with Bachman. Friedman snarkily quoted Mark Twain – “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
The problem is that neither Friedman nor Cooper proved that Bachman was lying. According to Friedman, Bachman’s “phony story” was:
- “I think we know that just within a day or so the president of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day. He’s taking 2,000 people with him. He’ll be renting over 870 rooms in India, and these are five-star hotel rooms at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. This is the kind of over-the-top spending.”
If you read Friedman’s column at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/opinion/17friedman.html?hp, you will see that Anderson Cooper’s “expert deconstruction” consisted of only the following:
- Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that the cost of the trip is less than $200 million a day and that it is comparable to when Bush-43 and Clinton traveled abroad. How much less? What does comparable mean?
- Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said it is “absolutely absurd, this notion that somehow we were deploying 10 percent of the Navy and some 34 ships and an aircraft carrier in support of the president’s trip to Asia.” Bachman never said any such thing.
- The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that Clinton’s Africa trip, with 1300 travelers, cost $5.2 million a day.
- For his coup de grace, Cooper pointed out that the CBO says that the Afghanistan War costs only $190 million a day. What does the cost of waging a war have to do with the allegedly obscene cost of a foreign trip?
Friedman concludes his column, titled Too Good to Check, with the following pontification:
When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, we have a problem. It becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues — deficit reduction, health care, taxes, energy/climate — let alone act on them. Facts, opinions and fabrications just blend together. But the carnival barkers that so dominate our public debate today are not going away — and neither is the Internet. All you can hope is that more people will do what Cooper did — so when the next crazy lie races around the world, people’s first instinct will be to doubt it, not repeat it.
I would like to know what facts carnival barkers Friedman and Cooper added to this brouhaha. They had an opportunity to rebut Bachman’s factual statement and instead they meekly quote the White House hack as saying the trip cost “less than $200 million a day.” Perry Mason, they’re not.
