Hugh Hewitt Pimps the Surge

The propogandists of the right are still pimping last week's big surge event--a NY Times article by Brookings think tankers Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack recommending that the surge be extended by another six months.

Today, I looked at Hugh Hewitt who is probably the most significant of the right-wing bloggers because of his ability to score interviews with big guns like Dick Cheney and General David Petraeus that other bloggers can't hope to get. And there's good reason from the right-wing point of view to like Hewitt. Of all the right-wing bloggers I've seen (admittedly a limited sample), Hewitt is the most smoothly deceptive. Here's an example of how he works.

Since David Petraeus took over operations in Iraq, America has had a clear and coherent strategy. From the top down the American military has functioned more effectively. As a consequence, America as a whole is now feeling better about the war; for obvious reasons, this change scares the stuffing out of the left.

Every bit of this three sentence sequence is wrong and intentionally so. In claiming that the U. S. has a "clear and coherent" strategy since Petraeus took over, Hewitt implying that Generals Casey and John Abizaid, had no clear strategy. The Casey/Abizaid plan was to train the Iraqi army to take over the fighting and the Bush administration was touting that plan as securing 14 out of 18 provinces right up to election day 2006. Likewise, there is no evidence that the American military is "functioning more effectively." In fact, the military had been extremely successful in its previous sweeps operations in places like Tal Afar and the Bush administration was claiming that 14 out of 18 provinces were secure.

What makes Hewitt so smooth is that he's not arguing against anybody. Instead, he's creating a narrative of the American military that simply assumes that what he's saying is true. This is particularly effective with conservative audiences. Right-wing readers want to see these kind of narratives and find their world-views affirmed in a satisfying way when the author makes the factuality of the narrative seem easy.

It's when Hewitt gestures toward American public opinion that the disconnect between his smoothly cast assumptions and reality diverge most. Hewitt writes that "America as a whole is now feeling better about the war" as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. But the only people who feel better about the war are people on the right. Americans as a whole still think the surge isn't making much difference and that we should get out of Iraq. According to a Fox poll, only 18% of the public, the hard core right-wing in other words, believes that the surge is leading to "major improvements." A full 72% of the public thinks that the surge has made either no difference or resulted in only minor improvements while 61% support withdrawing American troops by April 2008. Other polling numbers also belie the idea that Americans are feeling better about the surge. Given that the surge is President Bush's policy, one would expect that feeling better about the surge would improve the president's job approval ratings. To the contrary, President Bush's approval rating was at 32% in Fox Polling last week and stands at a similarly anemic 32.5% in the RCP average. Americans don't feel any better about the Republicans either. More Americans trust the Democrats to manage the war in Iraq more than they trust the Republicans who are doing their best to prolong the war.

It's only at the end of the sequence that Hewitt bashes the left with the idea that all of his fictions "scare the stuffing out of the left." By this point, we all know that Hewitt isn't going to produce any evidence that anybody on the left is afraid of the surge's success. But he has "projected" enough success that his conservative readers will be with him in assuming left-wing anxiety.

Of course, the reason Hewitt can be so smooth as he's pimping the surge is that he's always playing for the home conservative crowd. For the most part, bloggers are always preaching to the converted. But these kinds of deceptions don't play so well when Bush, Cheney, and Gonzales are forced to confront the mainstream media, Democrats, and the public.