Lying in Ponds

Daniel W. Drezner cited and linked to a Josh Chafetz post on civility which I like so much that I want to repeat it here:

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.

Well, I’ve finished evaluating all of Ann Coulter’s columns in 2002; here is her 2002 page, which can be compared to this year’s page. The most striking thing about Ms. Coulter’s writing is its consistency — column after column of broad-brush attacks on Democrats and liberals. Her most common negative Democratic references in 2002 were to “Democrats” (101), “Clinton” (97) and “liberals” (42); this year the most common were to “Democrats” (90), “Kerry” (38) and “liberals” (31). Her defense of Republicans is almost as consistent, but in 2002 she did devote three columns (out of 48) to some criticism of her own party. It’s interesting though, that Ms. Coulter’s most frequent Republican target is actually a Democrat, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, but references to him count as Republican while he’s serving in a Republican administration.

I said at the sixth month mark that I was reserving judgment on whether Robert Scheer’s columns were extremely partisan or not, because to that point he had written almost exclusively about one subject, the war in Iraq (same for Peggy Noonan). It’s certainly true that one could take a strongly pro- or anti-war position based on sincere beliefs, and that the resulting partisanship score could be misleadingly high — an artifact really, of the small sample size. In recent months, Mr. Scheer has sometimes turned his attention to other topics, most often to the California recall election. Although he was strongly critical of Arnold Schwarzenegger and supportive of Cruz Bustamante, those non-Iraq columns provide some evidence that Mr. Scheer’s writing is guided more by liberal ideology than by Democratic partisanship. Mr. Scheer has dished out genuine praise of both Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower, and most notably has sharply criticized the Democratic California Attorney General, Bill Lockyer, for his support of Schwarzenegger:

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.

Bryan Keefer adds to the extensive Spinsanity collection of Ann Coulter criticism by analyzing her response to errors found in her book Slander:

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.

I’ll be in Albany, NY (forecast: snow flurries!) on business for the rest of the week, so I may not be able to update Lying in Ponds until I get back. There’s no better time for a business trip than now, with the World Series providing evening entertainment. I wish there was a way that Joe Torre could win without the Yankees also winning.

I know I’ve talked about this a lot, but I continue to be fascinated by the way that various pundits react when faced with a scandal or other seriously negative news which implicates their own party. I’ve just about finished evaluating all of Ann Coulter’s 2002 columns, including one at the end of the year dealing with the controversy over Trent Lott’s praise of Strom Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist presidential campaign. I had previously reviewed the reaction of the punditocracy to the Lott affair, noting that most of the pundits with the highest
Republican partisanship scores such as Robert Bartley and Daniel Henninger simply ignored the scandal entirely, while others like Peggy Noonan and Charles Krauthammer distinguished themselves by sincerely and extensively criticizing Mr. Lott. If the first group hid in the dugout and the second group stepped up to the plate, Ms. Coulter instead took the Manny Ramirez approach — she charged the mound. Ms. Coulter fought back with creative spinning, transforming a column of mild criticism of Trent Lott into a dizzy word association of Democratic criticism leading from Strom Thurmond to FDR to Henry Wallace to George McGovern to Ted Kennedy, and finally (inevitably) to Bill Clinton. I think this is really excessive partisanship at its most obvious — an inability to accept legitimate criticism of one’s own party without simultaneously attacking the other party.

Bryan Keefer of Spinsanity cites William Safire for “an example of our pundit class at its worst“:

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.

Lying in Ponds gets a favorable mention in the Economist today, in a profile on Paul Krugman called “The one-handed economist“. For those visiting for the first time with an interest in Mr. Krugman, my best recent summary of his work is here. Coincidentally, next week I’ll be posting an analysis of his 2001 columns, which I’ve just finished.

I’m leaving today for a short business trip to Asheville, NC, returning Thursday. If I can pull myself away from baseball in the evenings while I’m there, I’ll update Lying in Ponds. Otherwise, I’ll just have to catch up when I get back.

Once again, Paul Krugman has moved slightly ahead of Robert Scheer into second place in the partisanship rankings. Mr. Scheer’s column last week was uncharacteristically moderate, involving serious praise of at least a dead Republican (President Eisenhower):

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.

There’s an old weather joke about a student sitting in a school counselor’s office. The counselor says “Well, Jimmy, I see that you’ve scored about 50% on most of your tests — maybe you should consider becoming a weather forecaster.” As a meteorologist who has occasionally made weather forecasts which were embarrassingly wrong (ask my wife, she’ll be happy to tell you), I have a lot of sympathy for pundits when they prognosticate.

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.

Joan Walsh of Salon sharply criticizes Maureen Dowd for writing columns she calls “valentines” to Arnold Schwarzenegger, accusing her (link requires registration or “day pass”) of being one of a group of “women who’ve emerged to defend the serial groper even as the ugly charges against him mount.”

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.

Yesterday’s election went smoothly in our precinct. Turnout was light, less than 25%, so I made a lot of progress on the latest volume of the Robert Caro LBJ biography. The plot below shows the distribution of voters through the day. Our (Cary, NC) incumbent mayor finished third in a three-person race, and the top two will have a run-off, so I’ll be doing this all over again next month.

Tomorrow is election day — mostly municipal offices and school bonds. I’ll be working at the polls all day (6:30 am - 7:30 pm) and won’t be able to evaluate Tuesday columns until late in the evening or on Wednesday.