June 2003 Archive
Thursday 26 June 2003
Boxscore
HOME OF THE REDBUGS: The Lying in Ponds minivan is
loaded up and ready to head west on I-40 this morning to visit family in
Arkansas and Missouri. The usual routine: take the back way to avoid
construction in Greensboro, lunch at Arby's in Asheville, over and
under the mountains, past Dollywood, buzz through the blogging holy city of
Knoxville, past the Hank Williams Jr. museum, past the Loretta Lynn Country
Kitchen, stopping at one of the four thousand Cracker Barrel restaurants so that
Pond Child #2 can order french toast and root beer. Among the places
we'll visit will be my little sister in Fordyce, Arkansas, "Home of
The Redbugs", and also the truly awe-inspiring but calorically dangerous Klappenbach Bakery.
Before browsing through the website, how many fans can name Fordyce's
best-known contribution to the world of sports?
While travelling through the 5th of July, I'll update the website
as best as I can -- which generally means erratically and without the
usual comments.
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Wednesday 25 June 2003
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SPINSANITY ON COULTER, SCHEER: In a complex
critique of both sides in the ongoing debate over weapons of mass
destruction and and the justification for the war in Iraq, Ben Fritz
of Spinsanity
chastises the top two members of the Lying in Ponds Top Ten.
First, he goes after Ann Coulter for impugning the motives of her political opponents:
Some conservatives, meanwhile, have made equally baseless accusations
that ignore the real concerns of liberal critics, instead merely
accusing them of bad motives. "It's transparently political," said
Sean Hannity on the Fox News show "Hannity and Colmes" on June
5. "This is a political witch-hunt. Because they're on the wrong side
of history." Columnist Ann Coulter also chimed in with the accusation
that, "Seething with rage and frustration at the success of the war in
Iraq, liberals have started in with their female taunting about
weapons of mass destruction."
Mr. Fritz also criticizes both Robert
Scheer and "inactive" Lying in Ponds pundit Robert Kagan for hiding the complexity
of the issue by quoting only selective portions of a government
report:
A recent column by Robert Scheer is a typical example of these sorts of liberal
criticisms. He correctly points out that President Bush cited the
aforementioned Niger uranium story (which turned out to be based on
forged documents) and that that the administration has often implied a
connection between Iraq and September 11 that has not been
demonstrated. He also points to recent revelations about a Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) document from last September. He quotes part
of it that reads, "there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is
producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has - or
will - establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities." He
contrasts that with more definitive statements made at the time by
administration officials to conclude that the President and his aides
have been deceptive.
That DIA report, however, is a perfect example of how both sides in
this debate have managed to avoid each other's claims. Robert Kagan
also cited it earlier this month in a Washington Post op-ed defending
the administration against charges of deception. Kagan simply quotes a
different part than Sheer does, which reads, "Iraq probably possesses
chemical agent in chemical munitions" and "probably possesses bulk
chemical stockpiles, primarily containing precursors, but that also
could consist of some mustard agent and VX." Both Kagan and Scheer are
using real evidence, but by only pointing to the portions that back up
their case, they present simplistic cases to the public that ignore
the complexities of the actual document.
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Tuesday 24 June 2003
Boxscore
SPINSANITY ON THOMAS: Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanity
debunks
what he calls a "collective hallucination" -- the notion that
Senator Robert Byrd hypocritically criticized President Bush for the
cost of his recent landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham
Lincoln. While Senator Byrd did accuse the president of exploitation, the
cost issue was actually raised by other members of Congress. Among
the many commentators identified by Mr. Nyhan was
Cal Thomas, who was guilty of repeating
the myth in a May column.
POT/KETTLE: In a column
which begins with the sentence "Politics is full of ironies.", Paul Krugman detects the presence of "raw
partisanship".
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Monday 23 June 2003
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RUMMY, BUSHIES, WOLFY, CHENEY: Maureen
Dowd's most recent column displays some of her well-established
habits. Sunday's
column had three "Rummy"s and two "Bushies". For the year, Ms. Dowd
has used "Rummy" 50 times and "Bushies" 24 times, far more than any other
Lying in Ponds pundit. In addition, she's used "Poppy" a few
times, "W." a couple of times, and "Wolfy" spelled two different ways.
Another Dowd trait is a focus on Vice-President Dick Cheney. For this
year, she has made 32 Cheney references (about two-thirds of them
negative), twice as many as any other columnist.
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Sunday 22 June 2003
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Saturday 21 June 2003
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Friday 20 June 2003
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DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS: I think it's self-evident that
opinion columnists, just as news reporters, should post a correction
in their column when they've made a clear error in a previous column.
In a probably futile attempt to encourage self-correction, I'm thinking about
creating an ongoing feature here that could be called the Lying in
Ponds Department of Corrections. It would be a table listing each
of the significant errors made by our roster of pundits, and the
status of the corresponding corrections (e.g. "Full Correction",
"Feeble Attempt", "Missing in Action"). If anyone besides me likes
the idea, feel free to send in nominations for the
list. To keep things simple, let's only consider errors made in
columns published this year.
COULTER TAKES THE LEAD!: You would think that a Robert Scheer column comtemplating
a Bush impeachment
would be sufficiently partisan to keep him in first place, even after
a very
partisan column this week from Ann
Coulter. But there were enough procedural positive Republican
references (merely quoting at length both the president and John Dean,
very un-Scheer-like) to drop him behind Ms. Coulter by a fraction of a
point. Mr. Scheer's column is as partisan as ever, but it shows how
difficult it is to maintain a partisanship score that high -- any hint
of non-screed writing (quoting political opponenets before bashing
them) will significantly moderate the score.
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Thursday 19 June 2003
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THE ATLANTIC ON KELLY: The Atlantic has posted a list
of almost twenty articles
written about Michael Kelly after his tragic death during the Iraq
war. They have also posted an excerpt
from Mr. Kelly's book about the Gulf War, and an interview
with him conducted a few days before he left for Iraq.
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Wednesday 18 June 2003
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IS COULTER A SATIRIST? Reader John Salmon asks a question:
I wonder if it makes sense to consider Ann Coulter a highly partisan
political commentator, as your rating system suggests. Yes, she
certainly has the partisanship, but is she doing commentary, or
satire? It seems to me that she is writing very effective satiric
polemics about the Democrats, rather than trying to seriously rebut their
views, or endorse Republicans'.
satire: Irony, sarcasm, or caustic wit used to attack or
expose folly, vice, or stupidity.
It seems to me that satire is just a technique, one of many, which may be
chosen by political pundits to make political arguments. Partisanship
is suggested when those political arguments tend to line up
exclusively in favor of one party and/or against the other. So if Ann Coulter uses satire to attack only
Democrats, doesn't that mean that she is a partisan political commentator?
I'm definitely not qualified to make literary judgements, but
Lying in Ponds' favorite rhetorician, Andrew Cline of
Rhetorica, doesn't think
Ms. Coulter is a satirist. Poking around on her website,
you can find some things which suggest that her intent is serious.
Bill Maher says
: " Even when she's saying something that I
think is outrageous, it's what she really believes and she doesn't
back off of it." From the book jacket of her
book Slander: "With incisive reasoning and
meticulous research, Ann Coulter examines the events
and personalities that have shaped modern political discourse". My
conclusion is that Ms. Coulter is nothing like a Mark Twain or Will
Rogers -- her humor is used as a partisan weapon.
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Tuesday 17 June 2003
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OOPS: A few weeks ago, I was very
pleased to find the Working For
Change website, which maintains a collection of left-leaning
columnists, including Lying in Ponds pundits Molly Ivins and Robert Scheer. But they made a
mistake sometime yesterday by posting a two-month old Scheer column as if
it were new, identical except for a different title. It's unfortunate
that they erred on that
particular column -- it was the one in which Mr. Scheer wrote of
the "complete, and by all accounts preventable, destruction of one of
the world's most significant collections of antiquities" in Baghdad, a
story which now
appears to be substantially false.
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Monday 16 June 2003
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Sunday 15 June 2003
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Saturday 14 June 2003
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Friday 13 June 2003
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RICH UNDER FIRE: New York Times columnist Frank Rich,
who was promoted earlier this
year to a new position on the Arts & Leisure
page, has come under heavy criticism from defenders of the Bush
administration for his
outrage (reading the column requires purchase) over the looting of
the National Museum in Baghdad, now
believed to be greatly exaggerated. Charles Krauthammer takes aim in his column today:
Frank Rich best captured the spirit of antiwar vindication when he
wrote (New York Times, April 27) that "the pillaging of the Baghdad
museum has become more of a symbol of Baghdad's fall than the toppling
of a less exalted artistic asset, the Saddam statue."
The narcissism, the sheer snobbery of this statement, is
staggering. The toppling of Saddam Hussein freed 25 million people
from 30 years of torture, murder, war, starvation and impoverishment
at the hands of a psychopathic family that matched Stalin for cruelty
but took far more pleasure in it. For Upper West Side liberalism, this
matters less than the destruction of a museum.
Which didn't even happen! What now becomes of Rich's judgment that the
destruction of the museum constitutes "the naked revelation of our
worst instincts at the very dawn of our grandiose project to bring
democratic values to the Middle East"? Does he admit that this
judgment was nothing but a naked revelation of the cheapest instincts
of the antiwar left -- that, shamed by the jubilation of Iraqis upon
their liberation, a liberation the Western left did everything it
could to prevent, the left desperately sought to change the subject
and taint the victory?
Hardly. The left simply moved on to another change of subject: the
"hyping" of the weapons of mass destruction.
Mr. Rich is a long time Lying in Ponds favorite because of
his ability to take strong ideological positions without partisanship,
Since his columns are not on the Op-Ed page, they are no longer
tracked on this page.
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Thursday 12 June 2003
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STILL NUMBER TWO: Despite writing a
predictably negative Hillary Clinton column, columnist Ann Coulter breaks her string of
perfectly partisan columns by making a few neutral references and one
weakly positive Democratic reference by noting "If you credit news
reports, the public can't get enough of Hillary." So Ms. Coulter remains
in second place, lurking close behind Robert
Scheer, waiting to pounce if he falters.
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Wednesday 11 June 2003
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SHE'S NUMBER TWO, BUT TRYING HARDER: Will Ann Coulter extend her current streak of six
consecutive columns with a perfect partisanship score (100)? She's
on the verge of overtaking Robert Scheer
at the top of the Lying in
Ponds Top Ten. Over those six columns, Ms. Coulter has made 40
negative Democratic references and 28 positive Republican references.
Most of the Democratic references came in one
amazingly partisan column on John Kerry. Here they are, all
negative: Kerry, John F. Kerry, Democrat, Kerry, Kerry, Kerry, Howard
Dean, Democrats, Kerry, Dean, Howard Dean, John Kerry, Kerry,
Democrats, Kerry, Kerry, Democrats, Kerry, John Kerry, Kerry, Kerry,
Howard Dean, Kerry, Kerry, Kerry, Kerry, Kerry, Kerry, Kerry, Teresa
Heinz, Kerry, Kerry, Heinz, Democrats, Kerry, Kerry.
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Tuesday 10 June 2003
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STEVE SHEPHERD RESPONDS: After posting reader Steve Shepherd's views on
partisanship and then Dean
Esmay's criticism of them, I feel obligated to also print
Mr. Shepherd's full response:
I suppose it's a tried-and-true-method for assaulting an idea one
doesn't much like, to distort it by oversimplification and imbue it
with inappropriate moral judgments that were never implied. When Dean
Esmay claims that I must believe, "that one of America's two major
parties is thoroughly corrupt and evil...[and] If only--if only!--the
people would learn the truth, this evil party would be cast from power
forever," because I suggested that the Republican party tends to
advance the interests of an elite minority of the electorate and
therefore must be particularly dishonest in public to garner public
support, he creates the straw man that helps him avoid a reasoned
argument.
I suggested no such moral dimension nor did I speak with the sort of
absolutism that would indicate the zealotry that Mr. Esmay presumes.
Both political parties are guilty of over presenting the interests of
thoroughly self-sufficient Americans and many Democratic-supported
policies secretly favor moneyed interests that support them in
office. What I suggested was that a complete and honest reading of the
factual record of neo-conservative statements and policy-making, as
practiced predominately by the Republicans over the past generation,
demonstrates (for one thing) an intentionally hidden agenda to starve
the government of revenue to limit it's ability to act in the public
interest as a counterweight to corporate (elite) power. Further, the
fact that this over-arching agenda is not widely discussed by
mainstream media or generally understood by the public (and may
actually be dismissed as "arrogant" partisanship), is the product of a
bias in favor of the idea of non-partisanship that works against
truthful and enlightening journalism.
The two obvious ironies here are: 1) as a rhetorical device, using
character attack and moral imperative to deflect reasoned debate is
the hallmark of neo-conservative policy "argument" and 2) Mr. Esmay's
counter-argument isn't an argument at all; it's a technique for
avoiding the real debate [who's interests do Republicans generally
represent and how accurately is that portrayed by them and the
mainstream media] which suggests fear or ignorance of the facts and
both reflects and is the exact product of "non-partisan journalism".
Mr. Shepherd and Mr. Esmay have continued the discussion in the
comments
at Dean's World.
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Monday 9 June 2003
Boxscore
DEAN ON POLITICAL ARROGANCE: In response to a post here last Thursday,
the always-fascinating Dean Esmay
contemplates those who believe that "one of America's two major
parties is thoroughly corrupt and evil":
As I've gotten older I've realized that this is a titanic form of
arrogance.
Arrogance? Yes. Because here's what it boils down to: "if only people
would listen to me then they would have to agree with me, because what
I believe is obviously right."
It's hard. I think we all sometimes fall prey to this. Some of us just
do it more than others, or more intensely than others. One cure is to
be confronted with the fact that you're wrong about one of your core
beliefs. Sooner or later, most of us are confronted with such
evidence. The question is, do we ignore it, rationalize our way around
it, or take the blow and allow our minds to be changed?
Read the whole thing. Dean also says some remarkably kind things
about Lying in Ponds, and provocatively writes that " it might
even be said that political partisanship, in the Western Democratic
style, is the greatest cultural achievement of the past three or four
centuries". I probably won't be able to resist commenting on that.
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Sunday 8 June 2003
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Saturday 7 June 2003
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Friday 6 June 2003
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AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: About a block from
my office on the campus of North Carolina State University, a research
project on control of the remarkable kudzu vine has
resulted in a temporary visit by about 15 of these kudzu-eating goats. Judging by the way they've mowed
through the kudzu in their pen so far, I think the goats are clearly winning;
maybe they can reclaim
the Southeast some day. And as Dave
Barry would say, "Kudzu-Eating Goats" would be an excellent name
for a rock band.
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Thursday 5 June 2003
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PARTISANSHIP WOULD BE GOOD IF . . : Reader Steve Shepherd eloquently
expresses a common objection to partisanship rankings -- what if one
party is so bad that partisanship would be a virtue?
. . I don't mean to suggest that politics is simple or that one political
party is intrinsically either good or evil. However, I do believe
that one party, now more than ever, generally tends to represent the
interests of a tiny segment of the American public (less than 1%, in
fact) and therefore, must rely on a high degree of deception to garner
the support of an electoral majority - roughly. The leadership of
that party, as well as most of its members, is particularly dishonest
about its policies and the intentions behind them. Essentially, they
are regularly lying to the public to advance policies that may
actually be contrary to basic public interest.
I'm suggesting that, if full (let's say an equal number of comments
about each party and its members) and unbiased (just facts and
fact-based conclusions about political rhetoric, and policy origins
and possible effects) political reporting were taking place at the
moment, those practicing journalists would be off the chart on the
Lying in Ponds partisanship scale. I fear that (at best) it may be
the desire by mainstream journalists to appear "non-partisan" that
keeps the public mostly in the dark about contemporary politics and
politicians. At worst, it is a self-protecting rationalization but,
either way, it enables great deception - and possibly great harm - to
be perpetrated.
If I believed that one of the major parties represented the
interests of less than 1% of the American public, then
the whole premise of my approach wouldn't make sense. Obviously
I don't think that. I believe that both liberal and conservative
ideological viewpoints have substance and legitimacy, and that each approach
tends to work well in some cases and poorly in others. Aside
from issues, I don't think that it's difficult to notice that both parties
have their share of war heroes (John Kerry, Bob Kerrey, Bob Dole, John
McCain, etc.), and also those who have been convicted of crimes (Dan
Rostenkowski, Oliver North, etc.) -- the full range of human behavior.
I think that an honest, independent columnist who strongly believed that
one party is better than the other would still have a modest partisanship
score. The only way to get an extremely high score is to relentlessly
focus on negative stories about the other party and systematically
avoid anything which inconveniently contradicts the simple good
party/bad party formula.
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Wednesday 4 June 2003
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QUOTE, UNQUOTE: Robert Scheer and
Molly Ivins each had columns
yesterday with partisanship scores much lower than usual. Ivins' The
Orwell award and Scheer's How
their big lie came to be were the usual predictably
anti-Republican fare, but in each case administration figures
were quoted several times, which at least allows readers an
opportunity to consider the opposing position.
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Tuesday 3 June 2003
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NOONAN BREAK: Yesterday's
Peggy Noonan column was not really a
column; it was the introduction to her new book. Like Mary
McGrory, she hasn't written an actual column in a couple of
months. The WSJ says that "Ms. Noonan's column returns in the
fall"; she is currently ranked fifth on the Lying in Ponds Top Ten.
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Monday 2 June 2003
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"THE MAGAZINE WASHINGTON LIVES BY": I need to pay more
attention to the Washingtonian
magazine, because it seems to be a good source for pundit-related
material. In February, Catherine Seipp wrote a scathing
piece on Maureen Dowd. In April, Harry Jaffe wrote
a sympathetic
story about Mary McGrory and her recent health problems, and the
Washingtonian also remembered Michael Kelly by reprinting a
friendly
1997 profile of him.
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Sunday 1 June 2003
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