Lying in Ponds

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.

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.

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.

In a column
which begins with the sentence “Politics is full of ironies.”, Paul Krugman detects the presence of “raw
partisanship”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.