

Too Good to Check - KeepTalking
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/opinion/17friedman.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general

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Aloisius
The brilliance of this tactic is that if you repeat some outrageous number,
the only way to defend it is to produce the real number which is bound to
still be quite large. You can't respond with, "It is only $5 million/day!"
because that is still a lot of money.

It doesn't matter if every President does it to these people. What matters is
that they get to demonize Obama.

~~~
rewind
Agreed, but $5 million a day is a lot for you and your family to take a
vacation. It is NOTHING when the POTUS is on an international trip. Anyone who
thinks that is a big number relative to what it's for is completely out of
touch with reality, and you'll have a hard time arguing about ANYTHING with
them when they don't even have a basic understanding of the way the world
works.

~~~
tomjen3
It may be unrealistic, but personally I can't fault them for having a problem
wasting that much money -- there really isn't a reason he should need
thousands of people, 10% of that should have been enough.

But hey, if you don't have to pay the bill you might as well enjoy the show.

~~~
rewind
The "thousands" figure is part of the bullshit. Clinton did it with about
1,300 people. That is far from "thousands". They talk about this in the
article.

And I'm curious what your experience and understanding of how that all works
is to be able to say something like "10% of that should have been enough". I'm
not being antagonistic. I'm genuinely curious if you understand the role that
all people on this trip play, and how 90% of them could, in your opinion, be
eliminated.

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carbocation
I understand that willful ignorance and propagation of false facts is an
important issue. However, the reason that the story propagated so widely ends
up being mostly political and doesn't really pique my hacker fancy.

~~~
reduxredacted
Agreed. There's this nice gray area about what is "politics" and what is
"politics, but with a huge element of ..." (I really paused for a second
looking for the right words, and not coming up with it, I'll take your words
if you don't mind: "hacker fancy").

When submitting, it would be nice if folks asked the question _Would you find
this interesting if you were diametrically opposed to the political or
religious elements of this article/post?_ If the answer is _yes_ than it's
likely fantastic, if it's _no_ then it's likely to be seen as tea
party/%palin%/%obama/SEIU/ACORN/Fox News/MSNBC/ZOMDL!

Hacker News does a pretty good job of weeding this sort of stuff out, and I'm
guessing this one will float off soon enough.

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aidenn0
200M Indian rupees is about 4.5M USD, that might explain the rumor.

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zone411
I don't disagree with the general premise of this article but I find it ironic
that Friedman says "Cooper also pointed out that, according to the
Congressional Budget Office, the entire war effort in Afghanistan was costing
about $190 million a day and that President Bill Clinton’s 1998 trip to Africa
with 1,300 people and of roughly similar duration, cost, according to the
Government Accountability Office and adjusted for inflation, about $5.2
million a day," without mentioning that this CBO report specifically excludes
the costs of the Secret Service and that the security costs after the 9/11 are
likely significantly greater than what they were previously. $5.2 million/day
is likely just as bad a number as $200 million/day, yet Friendman repeats is
without stipulations, just like Bachmann did.

~~~
cwp
If you want to dispute the numbers, fine. But it's ridiculous to accuse
Friedman of the same dishonesty as Bachmann.

First, he explicitly said he doesn't know the real cost of the trip, and
explained how he arrived at his estimate. Second, his source is a _lot_ more
authoritative than Bachmann's: the GAO, a department of the U.S. government
whose raison d'être is to monitor government spending, vs an unnamed Indian
official cited by an Indian reporter. Third, he provides context that helps
his readers understand the scale of the numbers being thrown around - are we
really to believe that this trip is spending money faster than the war effort
in Afghanistan? Do we really think Obama is spending 40 times as much as
Clinton did for a similar trip?

Friedman may well be wrong, but I'll take his number over Bachmann's any day
of the week.

~~~
zone411
No, it's not any better. This estimate is useless, because of the things I
mentioned. The Secret Service costs are likely the bulk of the spending, so
unless they release them, we won't know the real numbers involved. Clinton did
not spend 40 times less than $200 million/day.

I'm not sure why you don't understand my point. Friedman cited a falsehood
without saying that it was untrue. Clinton's trip did not cost $5.2 million a
day. The CBO clearly specifies that the SS costs were excluded multiple times.
Friedman did not mention this, so he is just as bad as Bachmann.

~~~
ezy
When (attempting to) think critically, you can't just choose to ignore the
entire context. And when you're talking about both the kinds of sources and
the order of magnitude or so difference, one estimate is not "just as
useless".

One estimate is based on the retelling of a made up number by some anonymous
source accompanied, with other information that was verifiably not true.

Friedman's estimate is based on real honest to god numbers produced by the
accounting agency of the government in question minus an unknown amount. He
did not mention the missing amount for SS, true. But given the context, I can
see why he may have not -- it does't really matter when you're at least an
order off [1].

Drawing a false equivalence here is not thinking critically.

[1] The budget for the __entire year __for SS protection was 689M in 2008
[[http://whitehousetransitionproject.org/resources/briefing/Pa...](http://whitehousetransitionproject.org/resources/briefing/Patterson-
Cost%20of%20WH.pdf)].

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noahth
Is a recap of a TV show really worthy of an NYT op-ed slot?

And is it really worth posting here?

IMO, no on both counts.

~~~
rewind
Then flag it.

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tomjen3
Pretty smartly done - but the White House could easily have saved it if they
had told the actual number, now they just look like idiots.

And if the right wing really wanted the story to stick, they should have
invented a much, much more accurate number: $191.635.000 sounds much more
impressive and accurate than $200 million.

~~~
jonhendry
The right wing will gleefully call a complex planetarium projector an
"overhead projector".

They don't care about being accurate, and accuracy isn't needed for their
stories to stick. They've pretty much checked out of reality and into World of
GOPcraft.

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damoncali
What is interesting about this is that the huge numbers being thrown around by
the gorvernment for the last three (or so) years have numbed us to the point
where such an absurd number as $200M/day does not trip the BS meter at first
utterance.

