Lying in Ponds

A couple of weeks ago, William Saletan wrote a great column in Slate criticizing those who write as if lying is confined to the other party:

I’m not excusing the games Republicans play. But by projecting all evil onto Republicans, Democrats spread the same political disease: the notion that you don’t have to be wary of lying or cheating unless the other side is doing it. Lying and cheating don’t belong to Republicans or Democrats. We’re all susceptible, and we’re all guilty.

Sure, some people are more guilty than others. But if that’s your obsession, I commend to you the words of my colleague, Jack Shafer: If you’re interested in which wing lies more, you’re probably not very interested in the truth.

Rush Limbaugh and Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler both reacted to Mr. Saletan’s article, prompting him to follow up:

That’s the problem with a punditocracy of Limbaughs and Somberbys. Each side exposes the other’s distortions. But you can’t count on them to see, much less concede, their own. Somerby has done a terrific job of exposing the right’s myths about Gore. But when it comes to the gamesmanship of Gore and Bill Clinton, he loses his critical eye.

. . .
If you want to see the tricks of the right exposed, read Somerby. If you want to hear the tricks of the left exposed, listen to Limbaugh. But if you don’t want to get trapped inside either wing’s echo chamber, read Slate.

Lying in Ponds could not agree more — that’s the problem with a punditocracy of Coulters and Krugmans.

Following up on Ben Fritz’s piece earlier this month on the way that pundits such as Paul Krugman and George Will had been spinning the Wesley Clark phone call story, Bryan Keefer of Spinsanity follows up with more examples of spinning on the same story, adding William Safire to the list of Lying in Ponds pundits they criticize.

Daniel Henninger wrote a new column today, but he said nothing about the “wog” racial slur.

Holly Martins of The Antic Muse urges readers (link via Tapped) to write the Wall Street Journal to complain about columnist Daniel Henninger’s use of the word “wog” in his latest column. Martins says that “‘wog’ appears in the OED as a ‘derogatory and usually considered racially offensive term for foreigner, esp. a non-white or one of Arab extraction.’” Here’s the relevant Henninger paragraph:

You can either get the benign version of the American superpower, the one that comes with American values, such as a belief in self-determination even for the wogs, a version that most likely will include continued support for institutions such as the U.N. Or, amid derision and abuse, you may get the truly realpolitik version, which will be mainly about cold-bloodedly protecting the superpower’s commercial interests, and will include little or no interest in the U.N. and similar platforms. Americans are patient. But they aren’t punching bags.

I wasn’t familiar with the term, but I agree with The Antic Muse that Mr. Henninger is wrong to use what is essentially a racial slur, and he should apologize to his readers. No doubt he intended to satirically mock the supposed attitudes of elite Europeans, but it’s surely wrong to put a tainted word such as “wog” into the mouths of others.

Here’s a Paul Krugman interview on BuzzFlash I had missed.

If you examine the way that the partisanship scores of pundits have changed from last year to this year, a striking trend stands out. A large number of the columnists have moved significantly closer to their own parties. Democratic pundits such as E.J. Dionne and Michael Kinsley have become more Democratic; Republican pundits such as Brendan Miniter and William Safire have become more Republican. This would seem to be evidence of political polarization and radicalization caused by the strong and continuing reactions generated by the war in Iraq. I would guess that the same trend would have been evident during the Clinton impeachment in 1998 — increasingly strident attacks on the President met with increasingly strident counterattacks.

Collin Levey’s score changed the most dramatically, from a high Republican score last year to a modest Democratic score this year. I guess that shows that I should follow the suggestion made to me a while back by reader Michael Kurtz, to rank only those pundits who make some minimum number of references. Peggy Noonan’s Republican score is much higher this year, but that’s because she has written fewer columns, and mostly about the Iraq war. The pundits who have changed the least are either those who have been the least partisan (Robert Samuelson, William Raspberry) or the most partisan (Paul Krugman, Robert Bartley). In the table below, positive changes are shown in blue, indicating scores which have moved in the Democratic direction, while negative changes are shown in red, indicating that the pundit’s partisanship score has moved in the Republican direction.

Paul Krugman’s book The Great Unraveling continues to generate strong reaction from the right and the left. Bruce Bartlett of the National Review Online says that Mr. Krugman is “bent out of shape by supply-side economics“:

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is an angry man. If he were a cartoon character, he would probably look like Donald Duck during one of his famous tirades, with steam pouring out of his ears every time he hears someone say “tax cuts” or “George W. Bush” or “supply-side economics.” All these things seem to set him off so much that he becomes just apoplectic, which he pours into twice-weekly columns that have become must reading for those on the left-wing fringe.

Oliver Burkeman of The Guardian on the other hand, sees his critics as “hysterical”, and Mr. Krugman as “a mild-mannered university economist“:

Still, there’s an important sense in which his views remain essentially moderate: unlike the growing numbers of America-bashers in Europe, Krugman doesn’t make the nebulous argument that there is something inherently objectionable about the US and its role in the world. He claims only that a fundamentally benign system has been taken over by a bunch of extremists - and so his alarming analysis leaves room for optimism, because they can be removed. “One of the Democratic candidates - who I’m not endorsing, because I’m not allowed to endorse - has as his slogan, ‘I want my country back’,” Krugman says, referring to the campaigning motto of Howard Dean. “I think that’s about right.”

Michael Tomasky continues to argue, as he did in his recent
report, “Whispers and Screams: The Partisan Nature of Editorial Pages” (link downloads PDF file), that liberals need to “push back” (link via Tapped) against conservatives, because “the avatars of contemporary conservatism want to wipe every vestige of liberalism from the face of the earth, just as Rameses ordered Moses’ name removed from every obelisk.”

I would not argue that liberals should abandon self-criticism; I’ve engaged in a lot of it over the years, and will continue to. But why should that be the definition of credibility? Aren’t there others? Rush Limbaugh spreads vicious lies about the Paul Wellstone memorial. Al Franken corrects them. The Republican right doles out phony propaganda about its history on race, class politics, a whole host of things. Conason calls them on it — as he did on Whitewater, about which he was prescient and dead right (though he suffered no small amount of ridicule back in 1995 and 1996 for having the courage to say so). From the one side, lies; from the other, attempts to correct the historical record. That, too, is a form of credibility, and I have trouble seeing why such authors are supposed to give equal time to liberalism’s flaws in order to get their credibility tickets punched. . .

I think that Mr. Tomasky is guilty of a fairly common straw man argument in that last sentence, one that I often hear as a criticism of Lying in Ponds. The pundits at the very top of the partisanship rankings are not criticized because they fail to give equal time to the flaws of their own parties, but because they give virtually no time to such self-criticism. I’ve previously argued that some columnists reveal their partisanship when they find ways to refrain from criticizing their own party even during scandals which draw broad bipartisan criticism. A couple of examples from last year were the failure of some Republican pundits to criticize either Trent Lott’s comments on Strom Thurmond or Republican complicity in the Enron scandal.

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.”

Todd Gitlin takes a mixed look at David Brooks in The American Prospect:

Bobos unimpressed by Paul Krugman’s crusades will relish Brooks’ new appointment as an op-ed columnist at The New York Times. Stationed at column right, he’s likely to outlast William Safire, whose career-long cover-up exercises on behalf of Richard Nixon, Ariel Sharon and various intelligence sources have made no small contribution to Republican morale over his 30 years on the page (though Safire has also broken ranks to display a tender spot for civil liberties). Brooks, despite his Washington years, probably won’t channel insider talk with Safire’s gusto. What besides good fun can he bring to his coveted niche?

Here’s one idea: “national greatness conservatism.” In a co-authored 1997 Wall Street Journal piece, Brooks and William Kristol updated Teddy Roosevelt’s nationalism to include “a neo-Reaganite foreign policy of national strength and moral assertiveness abroad.” They advocated using “federal power to preserve and enhance our national patrimony — the parks, buildings, and monuments that are the physical manifestations of our common heritage.” And they weren’t “unfriendly to government, properly understood.” “Efforts to get big government off our backs, to strengthen families and to invigorate are healthy responses to the threat” of “the complacent mediocrity and petty meddling of the nanny state. But they are insufficient without the ambitions and endeavors of a conservatism committed to national greatness.”

At 10:00 am here in Raleigh, we have light rain and north winds at 15 MPH gusting to 24. Being a member of the Axis of Isabel, all the schools are closed, as well as NC State. I have my digital camera ready in case there’s anything worth recording. Poor Silas the One-Eyed Wonder Dog will be nervous for a week after this — well okay, Silas is nervous all the time anyway.

It seems to be all Krugman, all the time this week. Kevin Drum interviewed Paul Krugman for his Calpundit weblog, which generated hundreds and hundreds of comments. Here are a couple of quick things at the end of the interview:

Let’s finish with some quickies. What are your three favorite Bush lies?

On economics, the one that got me going was Social Security during the 2000 campaign, when Bush basically said, I’m going to take a trillion dollars away and it’s going to strengthen the system. Another one is the distributional stuff, just the raw lie that this is a middle class tax cut. I could come up with another economic one, but obviously I’m really exercised about the Iraq war. Even if you think the war was worth fighting, and I think that’s a diminishing perception among people, we were lied into it, and that’s scary, that’s never happened before.

What are the three biggest problems the United States faces right now?

The budget deficit, joblessness, and, ultimately, what really, really scares me, even though I can’t write about it all the time, is the environment. That’s more important than anything.

Daniel Drezner commented on the interview, and that initiated a wave of comments on his weblog.

A lengthy article by Paul Krugman appeared in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday. In The Tax-Cut Con (link requires registration), Mr. Krugman argues that conservative tax-cutting will eventually (and deliberately) lead to a painful crisis:

In Norquist’s vision, America a couple of decades from now will be a place in which elderly people make up a disproportionate share of the poor, as they did before Social Security. It will also be a country in which even middle-class elderly Americans are, in many cases, unable to afford expensive medical procedures or prescription drugs and in which poor Americans generally go without even basic health care. And it may well be a place in which only those who can afford expensive private schools can give their children a decent education.

But as Governor Riley of Alabama reminds us, that’s a choice, not a necessity. The tax-cut crusade has created a situation in which something must give. But what gives — whether we decide that the New Deal and the Great Society must go or that taxes aren’t such a bad thing after all — is up to us. The American people must decide what kind of a country we want to be.

A while back the weblog Sadly, No did a thoughtful critique of Lying in Ponds and I responded. Last week, Sadly, No followed up:

The definition of a partisan on LIP is:

a firm adherent to a party, faction, cause, or person; especially: one exhibiting blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance

We think that the definition that drives the methodology of LIP however (which counts all references) is the former. And nothing more than a firm adherence to a party, faction or cause is not sufficient to make a columnist’s writing the kind of “blind, prejudiced and unreasoning allegiance” that we associate with excessive partisanship. What makes (many) Krugman and (all) Coulter columns so painful to read is not their allegiance, but their propensity to misrepresent, mischaracterize, mislead, use dubious data, etc… in their arguments. But that they nearly always only criticize Republicans and Democrats respectively isn’t in and of itself indication of partisanship in the negative sense of the word. [It's worth noting that in his 1994 Peddling Prosperity Krugman had many unkind words for prominent Democrats, including Labor Secretary lawyer but wannabe economist Robert Reich, and economist Lester Thurow, whose then most recent book Clinton read on the campaign trail.]

We agree that a columnist that would only ever criticize one party might get tiresome to read — and all too often those that do end up writing predictable (and excessively partisan) tripe. But both parties provide endless opportunities for criticism — focusing one’s attention on either may very well be tiring — but it need not make one an unreasoned partisan.

I think that our positions are not that far apart. It’s true that the method here is designed to measure party adherence (considering opposition to the other party as equally indicative of adherence to one’s own) and not whether that allegiance is blind, prejudiced or unreasoning. As I’ve said before, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature! Although I sometimes comment on obvious (to me) examples of partisan nastiness, the focus here is on trying to discern the difference between the normal ideological preference for one party and actual partisanship. I would argue that Ann Coulter and Robert Scheer are both partisan and unreasoning, while Paul Krugman is far more reasoned but still very partisan. For me, the excessive partisanship of all three renders them unreliable and nearly unreadable, but it doesn’t surprise me that some readers find partisanship tolerable when they believe that it’s outweighed by other factors. Spinsanity is an outstanding source of nonpartisan, more qualitative analysis of excessively manipulative rhetoric. I’ll be content if Lying in Ponds can be successful in its core mission of quantifying simple partisanship in a meaningful way, and readers can judge for themselves whether that partisanship is acceptable in light of other factors.