October 2003 Archive

This really amazes me. Are people really so sure of themselves that they simply cannot acknowledge that anyone who disagrees could be intelligent? Have they no humility whatsoever? Of course we all think we're right -- if we didn't think we were right, we'd change our opinions until we did. Maybe I'm just naive, but it really does amaze me when people claim that everyone who disagrees with them (on topics where general opinion is relatively divided -- I'm not talking about largely uncontroversial opinions like "slavery is wrong") is either malevolent, stupid, or both.

Why is it so hard to acknowledge that, on almost every issue, there are people on both sides who are both intelligent and well-meaning? That doesn't mean that neither side is right, or that you should give up arguing for your side. It just means paying the other side some respect, listening to their position, trying honestly to grapple with it. I'm not saying that there aren't malevolent and/or stupid people out there -- but they're on both sides of every issue, and on almost no issue is everyone on one side stupid and/or malevolent. It's fine to point out when someone is saying something stupid (or when someone is being malevolent). If they're malevolent and/or stupid often enough, it's fine to conclude that they, as people, are malevolent and/or stupid. But to conclude that everyone who disagrees with you is ipso facto malevolent and/or stupid ... well, I envy your certainty, but you frighten me. That kind of certainty is precisely what extremist movements of all kinds -- left and right -- are made of.

In perhaps the most bizarre turn yet in California's season of political madness, the state's highest law enforcement official has said, in effect, that allegations of sexual harassment and even possible assault of women do not constitute serious offenses if perpetrated by his "good friend" Arnold Schwarzenegger.

As a result, his score has now dropped five points lower than Paul Krugman's. His ratio of 2-to-1 positive-to-negative references to his own party contrasts with the 6-1 ratio of Mr. Krugman and the 10-1 ratio of Ann Coulter. While Robert Scheer is certainly a partisan Democrat, he has shown at least an occasional willingness to hold his own party accountable for its shortcomings which separates him from the two titans of partisanship who precede him in the rankings.

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Coulter's corrections do little to correct her numerous misrepresentations and distortions. Nor does she deal with the flawed methodology that she used for a number of claims based on results in the Nexis news database. The trivial number of corrections to Slander, as well as Coulter's refusal to engage her critics on most of the substantive issues they have raised, suggest that she's more interested in advancing her political agenda than factual accuracy.

THAT WAS CLOSE: Titan of partisanship Paul Krugman came very close today to an actual mildly contrarian column. He praised the White House for promptly denouncing "hate-filled remarks" of the Malaysian prime minister, but then recovered his footing at the last minute and salvaged a Partisanship Index of zero for the column with "Donald Rumsfeld has gone a long way toward confirming the Muslim world's worst fears."

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In what has now become an all-too-common occurrence, a lazy press corps, combined with intellectually dishonest partisan pundits, have once again combined to invent a story about a presidential candidate. New York Times columnist William Safire took Democratic presidential candidate and former Vermont governor Howard Dean to task yesterday for supposedly attempting to deny a comment he made disparaging the killing of Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay. Safire and a number of other reporters are the ones who should be taken to task, however, for spinning another media myth.

In hindsight, though, I was right -- the genial general-turned-president proved to be a warrior for peace and an important critic of what he saw as a "military-industrial complex" that threatened the very fabric of democracy: "We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

Mr. Scheer's column was moderate, but not very modest (once I thought I was wrong, but in hindsight I was actually right). Meanwhile, Mr. Krugman's columns have been steady as a rock -- there have been no negative references to a Democrat, dead or alive, since July.

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Usually when a pundit makes a prediction in a column, some time passes before it is proven true or false. But this week Thomas Oliphant unfortunately made a very specific prediction in Tuesday's column which went down in flames later the same day:

Worst of all, for those out here with the quaint notion that elections resolve disputes, the arithmetic likelihood borders on certainty that "victory" by Bustamante or Schwarzenegger after approval of Davis's recall would occur with fewer voters having picked his successor than chose to retain Davis. That's some mandate in a flawed system that failed to provide for a majority-producing runoff between the top two finishers.

If I'm understanding Mr. Oliphant's prediction correctly, he should be feeling a little better about the flawed system after Arnold Schwarzenegger received about 3.7 million votes, almost 200,000 more than voted "No" on the recall of Gray Davis.

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Yet none of it seems to trouble the New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd, one of the actor's alpha-female defenders. Now I admit that even Dowd's admirers know to ignore her columns about Hollywood -- would that her editors knew to kill them -- because despite her trademark cynicism, she's so starstruck when she comes to California she loses her critical faculties. Palm trees make her stupid. Dowd's Hollywood columns are always vanity affairs, strange goo-gahs you can mostly skim and ignore, but on the California recall, her vapid star-worship makes her dangerous.

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KRUGMAN CORRECTION: After Donald Luskin and others called attention to Paul Krugman's misquote of Winston Churchill in a recent column, Mr. Krugman issued a correction at the end of today's column. Lying in Ponds commends Mr. Krugman for acknowledging the error.

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It has become a left-wing bromide that the Bush administration's problems in iraq all stem from a shunning of the international community. Dionne himself has recently taken this view here and here. So, on some international matters, we're supposed to be multilateralists, suborning American interests to those of the international community. But then on trade, we're supposed to be insular and closed off, because we need to prevent those jobs from going to - and providing food for - the people of (to use an example from the quote above) - China. We're supposed to ignore the good that free trade would actually do for the world's poor, as explained (just for a few examples), here and here.

Is it really evident that it is the free traders who have "prejudice rooted in their own self-interest"?

PUNDITS IN THE PIEDMONT: For the second time this week, one of the Lying in Ponds pundits spoke nearby and I didn't even know they were coming. Last night it was Ann Coulter in Chapel Hill.

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Saddam's WMD never a serious, immediate, undeterrable threat to us. "We invaded Iraq because we could." This was the right thing to do because we need a space within the Islamic world where Islamic progressives can wage a war of ideas within their own culture. It sent a message we needed to send about our willingness to use force to remake the region and "burst the terrorism bubble" that inflated through the '90s, culminating in 9/11.

Iraq "post-war planning was pathetic." Major intelligence failure, aided by media, missed depth of Iraq's impoverishment. "We defeated the Flintstones, and we inherited Bedrock." Not enough troops there, for policing or secure borders. "We have dug ourselves a mighty deep hole." Cutting the $20 billion in aid for schools, roads etc. would be "greatest mistake we could make."

As the father of a high school senior who is considering Elon, I was amused by this:

Friedman gave a very lucid talk, and he was a good speaker -- he's improved since we last saw him at Guilford College a few years ago. The only thing he muffed was not mentioning that Elon's teams were until recently known as the Fighting Christians, once coached by Archie Israel. Surely that's a metaphor for something.

I wonder if the Fighting Christians ever played the Demon Deacons? Elon's teams are now apparently called the "Phoenix".

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