Lying in Ponds

After mentioning on Monday what I thought was a
serious debate over a recent
Paul Krugman column, I’m dismayed to see that one of the
protagonists, Donald Luskin, has descended to ad hominem (”appealing
to personal considerations rather than to logic or reason”) attacks
on Mr. Krugman. On his weblog, Mr. Luskin gleefully
posts student evaluation statistics from “a pseudonymous informant
on the Princeton campus” to attack Mr. Krugman’s teaching skills, and
repeatedly makes snide
and insulting references to Mr. Krugman’s lack of height. All of
that contrasts with Mr. Krugman’s substantive and mostly dispassionate
arguments on his own
website.

Knowing nothing about economics myself, I’d love to read a vigorous,
intelligent debate on the Bush tax cut proposal and Paul Krugman’s
columns on the subject. But Donald Luskin’s highly personal attacks on
Mr. Krugman are completely irrelevant and just wrong.

If you compare this year’s
rankings to last
year’s, one of the most striking differences is that Collin Levey has dropped from second place
to 28th, and her combined partisanship index is actually a weakly
Democratic value of 7.1. So what happened?

Ms. Levey’s columns have always been mostly about cultural issues
with only a few political references. But in last year’s
columns, she found a way to consistently use those issues to criticize
Democrats and praise Republicans. But in her eight columns so
far this year, she has hardly drawn any connection between an
ecclectic set of issues (e.g. 70’s
music, the muscle
car) and any political figures. The most
political column so far
concerned the smoking ban in New York City; it was mostly critical of
Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It will be interesting to see where
Ms. Levey goes from here.

Partisan columnists very frequently
generate strong reactions, both positive and negative. An example is
the current brouhaha arising from the recent Paul Krugman column, Jobs,
Jobs, Jobs. Donald Luskin wrote an article in the National
Review Online attacking
Mr. Krugman for what he called “a whopper of a tax-cut lie”.
Mr. Krugman then responded
on his personal website, and Mr. Luskin countered with another
piece. Mr. Luskin has more on his personal weblog,
and Mr. Krugman is defended
by blogger Brad DeLong.

NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof has taken the time to look
back at his own Iraq predictions:

Since I complained vigorously about this war before it started, it’s
only fair for me to look back and acknowledge that many of the things
that I — along with other doves — worried about didn’t happen. So
let’s look back, examine the record and offer some preliminary
accountability.

Even though James Taranto isn’t
impressed, Lying in Ponds is always happy to see pundits
acknowledge their own fallibility and wrestle with the implications of
missed predictions. Mr. Kristof deserves credit for stepping up to
the plate.

The guys at Spinsanity are having
a donation
drive this week. I can’t say strongly enough how much I admire
and value their efforts; please support them if you can.

This morning’s Mona Charen column is an example of the
kind that I find difficult to evaluate. Ms. Charen is criticizing
those who “find some reason to bewail U.S. conduct” in Iraq (the title
of the column is “Searching
for the lead lining“). Yet she allows the critics enough space
and respect to make their case in spite of her disapproval:

So the looting would have to do. Eleanor Clift wondered whether
the United States might face war crimes accusations over its failure
adequately to protect the antiquities in the National Museum of
Iraq. NPR commentator Daniel Schorr quoted critics of the White House with approval and added: “The
administration doesn’t like the word
occupation,’ preferring to speak of liberation. Call it what you will;
when you take over a country, you have a certain responsibility for
protecting its heritage.” The Boston Globe editorialized, “The awful
truth is that the U.S. government bears a shameful responsibility for
not preventing this crime against history.” And The Washington Post
gave prominent attention to two resignations from a body it was
pleased to call “Bush’s panel.”

The references in red italics are negative Republican references;
those in plain red text are neutral, and those in bold red are
positive. Later in the column, she refers to more criticism, except
that I evaluated them to be positive (sympathetic) Republican
references, because she is clearly portraying the criticism as unfair:

The looting of the National Museum of Iraq was without doubt
awful. But was it foreseeable, as the critics claim? The U.S. military
certainly was careful in its targeting and war-fighting plans to avoid
places of historical, religious or cultural importance. The Bush critics say the military showed more care for
safeguarding oil than for ancient treasures. Sounds just like a Republican doesn’t it? But in fact, if the
looting was so foreseeable, did the members of the
President’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Property foresee it?
If so, where are the memos showing that they warned the U.S. military
of the likelihood?

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman appeared as a guest on ABC’s
This Week program with George Stephanopoulos and George Will. According to the online
summary, Mr. Krugman discussed, among other things, the Bush tax
cut proposal:

Regarding President Bush’s $726 billion tax cut, scaled-down to $550
in a speech this week, Krugman took aim at the idea of any kind of tax
cut at this time.

“The Bush administration is projecting budget deficits every year for
the next 50 years, and those are over-optimistic projections,” Krugman
said. “We’re no longer in a situation where there’s any plausible
route towards fiscal sanity, given the existing taxes, and here we are
proposing more permanent tax cuts.

“They’ll probably find ways to rationalize it,” Krugman added, “but we
have reached a point of outrage, a point of, ‘Oh my God, how are we
going to handle this thing?’”

I didn’t see it myself, but his performance won backhanded praise from
Mickey Kaus:

Paul Krugman was excellent on ABC’s This Week today. It turns out that
when he’s in a room with high-status people who disagree with him he
tones down his hyperbolic Bushies-are-evil last-angry-man
foaming. Make him a regular! It’s obviously good for him to get out of
the house.

Apparently, today is National
Columnists Day. Link via Romenesko, which pointed
to a column
which mentioned it.

Looking at Ann
Coulter’s columns, here’s something that jumps out:

• 2: Number of positive references to “Republicans”
• 0: Number of negative references to “Republicans”
• 1: Number of positive references to “Democrats”
• 40: Number of negative references to “Democrats”

Ms. Coulter’s tendency to make broad attacks on “liberals” (or
“Democrats”; she seems to use both terms frequently and interchangeably) was
noted by Spinsanity’s Brendan Nyhan in a 2001 article; he
described her as “The Jargon
Vanguard“:

. . Coulter’s writing is full of the sweeping generalizations attacking
liberals that are the stock in trade of many conservative
pundits. These arguments take a particular case (often presented in a
distorted way) and use it to attack all liberals, erasing any some/all
distinction.

Among many examples of Ms. Coulter’s scattershot approach, here’s
one from a January column entitled “War-torn
Democrats“:

The Democrats’ jejune claim that Saddam Hussein is not a threat to our
security presupposes they would care if he were. Who are they kidding?
Democrats adore threats to the United States. Bush got a raucous
standing ovation at his State of the Union address when he announced
that “this year, for the first time, we are beginning to field a
defense to protect this nation against ballistic missiles.” The
excitement was noticeably muted on the Democrats’ side of the
aisle. The vast majority of Democrats remained firmly in their seats,
sullen at the thought that America would be protected from incoming
ballistic missiles. To paraphrase George Bush: If this is not treason,
then treason has no meaning.

Lying in Pond’s favorite
rhetoric scholar, Andrew Cline of Rhetorica, responds to yesterday’s
question — What makes a columnist good?

This is an interesting question. Before it can be answered, however,
one must deal with intention. What does a columnist intend to do?

From a rhetorician’s perspective, I’m interested in the politics of
intention. In other words, what changes to the hearts and minds of an
audience does the columnist wish to make? Some such intention is
always present. And, as I would argue, it is always political (if not
always in the overt sense of partisanship).

I often challenge my students with this True/False assertion: Any
rhetoric that works is good rhetoric. It takes them about 2 seconds to
discover that this is more than an assertion about persuasion; this is
an assertion about definition and moral philosophy.

What does a columnist intend to do? What fascinates me about your site
is that you catalog columnists by partisanship and thereby call
attention to what I would call overt political intentions, i.e. these
folks want to overtly affect the political process for their
party/ideology.

Now, if they succeed, if they gain a big and growing audience, if
they sway public opinion, then I would suggest that, in terms of
utility, they have achieved their intention and are then, by
definition, good columnists.

But, what of the intention that inheres in professional practice? Are
not columnists supposed to be journalists, opinionated to be sure, but
still bound by certain professional practices? Such a question begins
to muck up the “clarity” of my original assertion.

We might also question the morality of a columnist’s
ideology/political practice. More muck.

Prof. Anthony Downs demonstrated many years ago that people will
seek out political information that offers the most utility, i.e. easy
to get and easy to use. Partisan columnists play a large role in
political utility.

Please remember that the rankings
on Lying in Ponds are not intended to show which columnists are
the “best”, only those who seem to write the most partisan columns.
There are obviously other characteristics such as accuracy, clarity,
perspective, curiosity, creativity, etc. which are important. For me,
excessive partisanship is a fatal flaw, because it indicates that a
columnist has been unable or unwilling to portray the complex political world
without resorting to “good party/bad party” distortion and oversimplification.
I recognize that others will see partisanship as a more minor sin.
In any event, my goal is to quantify and analyze partisanship, and
then allow the readers to draw their own conclusions from there.

Greetings to those surfing in from the Librarian’s Index to the Internet.
Lying in Ponds is listed on their New This Week page; lots of
interesting stuff there.

Here are the current top ten search strings
which bring visitors to Lying in Ponds: “ponds”, “maureen
dowd”, “frank rich”, “michael kelly washington post”, “michael kelly”,
“charles krauthammer”, “colbert i. king”, “paul wolfowitz”, “bob
herbert”, and “robert scheer”. “maureen dowd” ranks nearly as high as
“ponds” and is more than twice as common as the next on the list. The Maureen Dowd page is also second in
popularity only to the main page. Even
though I know that Ms. Dowd is a popular columnist, I’ve never really
understood why she’s so far ahead of the more partisan columnists
who dominate most of the discussion on this site.

Congratulations to Washington
Post columnist Colbert I. King
for winning the
2003 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary:

Awarded to Colbert I. King of The Washington Post for his
against-the-grain columns that speak to people in power with ferocity
and wisdom.

The Post says
this about Mr.
King’s weekly columns:

King, who also writes editorials for The Post, said he focuses on “the
part of this town where people don’t have power, they don’t have much
of a voice, they feel no one knows that they’re there. I really try to
put a megaphone there and let them speak about who they are.” Through
his column, he said, the young and the poor and minority-group members
“feel a sense of ownership of the paper. They can talk back to
us. They can talk back to the folks downtown.”

Mr. King’s weekly columns were analyzed last year,
but he was changed to “inactive” this year because of his focus on
local issues rather than national politics. This means that his
columns appear on Lying in Ponds, but are not evaluated for
partisanship.