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Bush wasn’t wrong: households earning between $40,000 and $50,000 in 2003 had received an average tax cut of $1,012, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. But richer families got a lot more. Households earning over $1 million saw cuts averaging $112,925. Kerry’s definition of “middle class” included those earning as much as $200,000 a year: he promised not to raise taxes on anyone below that level. Dean and Gephardt, on the other hand, proposed to repeal all of Bush’s tax cuts, including even those for people at the bottom of the federal income tax scale. So while all these politicians promised aid to the “middle class,” their policies and definitions were quite different.

Learn to recognize glittering generalities, and you’ll notice them flying at you from every direction. Lots of groups push for “affordable housing” but seldom define what that means in terms of price. A “right to privacy” sounds good, but should it prevent the FBI from asking who took out books on making explosives? Years ago, Vice President Dan Quayle frequently expressed support for “family values,” but his support didn’t extend to unwed mothers and their children. We learned that in 1992, when Quayle famously attacked the popular television sitcom character Murphy Brown, who had become a mother out of wedlock, for “mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.” Some other nice-sounding but vague terms to watch out for: dignity, honor, freedom, integrity, and justice (including both the “economic” and “social” varieties). It’s always good to ask, “What do you mean by that, exactly?”

Chapter 3

“Tall” Coffees and Assault Weapons

Tricks of the Deception Trade

ANYONE WHO HAS EVER STOPPED BY OUR MOST POPULAR COFFEE chain knows that a “tall” coffee does not appear to be tall in relation to anything else on the menu. Things are often not as they are described. “Large” olives are actually medium-sized. The Montana-based Evergreen Foundation is supported by companies that cut down trees, and the Washington-based Center for Consumer Freedom isn’t run by consumers but was set up by a lobbyist for the booze and tobacco businesses. And when a politician talks about a “cut,” he or she almost never means that spending will actually go down.

Such deceptive tricks are so commonplace and obvious we can shrug them off, ordering a “small coffee” or buying bottled olives whose real size can be seen. But others deceive us when we let our guard down. To remain unSpun, we need to recognize the common tricks of the deception trade.

TRICK #1: Misnomers

THE SO-CALLED “ASSAULT WEAPON BAN” SIGNED BY PRESIDENT Clinton in 1994 didn’t really ban assault weapons—at least, not the ones you see pictured so often in the hands of soldiers and terrorists. Fully automatic weapons of all kinds were outlawed around the time of George “Machine Gun” Kelly and Bonnie and Clyde. It has been illegal in the United States to own a real machine gun since 1934 (except with an expensive and hard-to-obtain federal permit). In fact, all that the assault weapon law “banned” was the manufacture and import of certain semiautomatic weapons, which can’t be fired any faster than an ordinary pistol or rifle despite their military-style looks. The very term “assault weapon ban” gave a misleading impression.

When Congress let the law expire in the midst of the 2004 presidential campaign, the misleading name was exploited for political benefit in a TV ad by the liberal political action committee MoveOn PAC. “This is an assault weapon. It can fire up to three hundred rounds a minute,” the narrator said, while a fully automatic AK-47 appeared on screen. “In the hands of terrorists it could kill hundreds.” Those words were punctuated by the sound of a rapid burst of machine-gun fire. “John Kerry, a sportsman and a hunter, would keep them illegal.”

Technically, those words were true: Kerry wasn’t proposing to repeal the 1934 law banning machine guns. But neither