{"id":5525,"date":"2005-10-13T12:34:07","date_gmt":"2005-10-13T16:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=5525"},"modified":"2005-10-13T12:34:07","modified_gmt":"2005-10-13T16:34:07","slug":"about-those-terror-alerts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/about-those-terror-alerts\/","title":{"rendered":"About those terror alerts…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Almost exactly a year ago, Kevin Drum noted<\/a> a Cornell study that highlighted a point many of us suspected throughout the campaign: whenever the government would issue a terrorist warning, Bush’s poll support got a bump. <\/p>\n

The full report is here<\/a>, and the basic result is simple: a terror warning leads to an average increase in the president’s approval rating of 2.75% and the increase lasts for about a week — possibly two weeks at the outside. The results are statistically significant at a very high level and (assuming I read the report correctly) Willer properly controlled for major events like 9\/11 and the capture of Saddam Hussein.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Bush administration, therefore, had a political incentive to issue warnings at convenient times. And when former DHS Secretary Tom Ridge later acknowledged that the administration periodically put the nation on high alert based on “flimsy evidence<\/a>,” the picture that emerged put an apparent abuse into focus.<\/p>\n

What’s worth noting now, however, is that the practice may not have been an election-year stunt. As C&L noted<\/a>, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann did a special feature<\/a> on terror alerts last night. The results — documenting at least 13 coincidences of timing between bad political news followed by a “terror event” such as a change in alert status, an arrest, or a warning — were pretty interesting.
\n
\nIt’s important, of course, to avoid a “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy, whereby people connect two unrelated events and find a correlation that doesn’t exist. That said, there sure are a lot of coincidences in Olbermann’s review.<\/p>\n

I won’t republish the whole list — it’d be too long — but C&L has the video<\/a> and Olbermann posted the text<\/a>. For me, some of these coincidences are more far fetched than others, but at a minimum, it raises some compelling questions.<\/p>\n

To his credit, Olbermann didn’t claim to have proven anything.<\/p>\n

To summarize, coincidences are coincidences.<\/p>\n

We could probably construct a similar time line of terror events and warnings, and their relationship to – the opening of new Walmarts around the country.<\/p>\n

Are these coincidences signs that the government’s approach has worked because none of the announced threats ever materialized? Are they signs that the government has not yet mastered how and when to inform the public?<\/p>\n

Is there, in addition to the “fog of war” a simple, benign, “fog of intelligence”?<\/p>\n

But, if merely a reasonable case can be made that any of these juxtapositions of events are more than just coincidences, it underscores the need for questions to be asked in this country – questions about what is prudence, and what is fear-mongering; questions about which is the threat of death by terror, and which is the terror of threat.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Good points, all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Almost exactly a year ago, Kevin Drum noted a Cornell study that highlighted a point many of us suspected throughout the campaign: whenever the government would issue a terrorist warning, Bush’s poll support got a bump. The full report is here, and the basic result is simple: a terror warning leads to an average increase […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5525\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}