Lying in Ponds

I had a great time working on this website in 2003, and many people deserve thanks. Lying in Ponds was mentioned in The Atlantic, National Review Online and The Economist. After a kind suggestion by Andrew Cline at Rhetorica, I moved web hosting to ICD Soft, which has been excellent. Blogging colleagues like Andrew Cline, Dean Esmay, Henry Hanks, Susanna Cornett, Robert Musil and Brendan Nyhan have been wonderful. Readers like Michael Kurtz, John Salmon, Douglas Eichelberger, Andrew Douglass, Bob English, Tom Woolsey, Richard Eriksson, Dan Schaeffer, Beau Barnett, Joel Garcia, Kevin McDonald and Jeff Cetola keep things lively and have often made outstanding suggestions. Finally, thank you to my endlessly patient wife and kids, and of course to Silas the One-Eyed Wonder Dog, who loyally remains close by, even through all of this blogging nonsense.

I keep forgetting to link to Matthew Yglesias’ “Weekend Update” feature on Tapped. He offers quick, witty takes on weekend columns by regular pundits and then recommends one Op-Ed column. Here was yesterday’s entry:

The Columnists

• George Will I. They don’t make presidents like they used to.
• Paul Krugman. It would be good if journalists covering the 2004 election paid attention to actual policy proposals, but I’m not optimistic.
• Bob Herbert. Devious Indians have taken all our high-tech jobs.
• Charles Krauthammer. Bush’s policies have succeeded brilliantly in forcing Iran to agree to inspections, but we have to bomb them anyway.
• David Ignatius. Fundamentally, the president can’t decide what the point of his foreign policy is — it’s “a healthy tension.”
• David Brooks. Michael Oakshott probably wouldn’t have invaded Iraq, but if he had he would have done it without a proper plan so, you see, it’s okay that Bush has screwed everything up.
• Richard Cohen. I probably should’ve written this column about metrosexuals a couple months ago when someone might have cared.
• Thomas Friedman. They may not like us in France, but the USA is big in Poland.
• George Will II. Why mention Howard Dean’s explicit disavowals of a third party candidacy when doing so would ruin a perfectly good column?
• Jim Hoagland. The future’s hard to predict.
• David Broder. Looking back on a year’s worth of criticism of my work, it turns out that I was right.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need to Read

• Juan Cole and Shahin Cole discuss the future of Shi’ite politics in Iraq

After a succession of almost perfectly partisan columns in recent weeks, Molly Ivins has edged past Robert Scheer into third place in the partisanship rankings. Mr. Scheer’s recent columns included one which lavishly praised Nancy Reagan.

With today’s column, Peggy Noonan has 23 for the year, still one short of the 24 (two per month) necessary to qualify for the final Lying in Ponds Top Ten list. Mary McGrory is in the same boat, having written 22 columns before illness prevented her from continuing.

George Will has come under fire, accused of a conflict of interest (link via Romanesko) in an article in The New York Times by Jacques Steinberg and Geraldine Fabrikant:

Mr. Brzezinski’s personal records show that he collected almost $170,000 for attending eight such meetings in the 1990’s, according to an aide. Mr. Buckley estimated that he had earned perhaps $200,000 or more. Mr. Will could not recall how many meetings he attended; an aide later confirmed that the per diem for each meeting was $25,000.
. . .

In a column syndicated by The Washington Post Writers Group in March, Mr. Will recounted observations Mr. Black had made in a London speech defending the Bush administration’s stance on Iraq.

In a rebuttal to Mr. Bush’s critics, Mr. Will wrote, “Into this welter of foolishness has waded Conrad Black, a British citizen and member of the House of Lords who is a proprietor of many newspapers.”

Asked in the interview if he should have told his readers of the payments he had received from Hollinger, Mr. Will said he saw no reason to do so.

“My business is my business,” he said. “Got it?”

Alan Shearer, editorial director and general manager of The Washington Post Writers Group, said he was unaware of Mr. Will’s affiliation with Hollinger or the money he received. “I think I would have liked to have known,” Mr. Shearer said.

Additional criticism is offered by Paul Krugman.

In an article in The Nation, Paul Krugman writes “Goodbye, Horatio Alger. And goodbye, American Dream.” (link via Tapped):

The other day I found myself reading a leftist rag that made outrageous claims about America. It said that we are becoming a society in which the poor tend to stay poor, no matter how hard they work; in which sons are much more likely to inherit the socioeconomic status of their father than they were a generation ago.

The name of the leftist rag? Business Week, which published an article titled “Waking Up From the American Dream.” The article summarizes recent research showing that social mobility in the United States (which was never as high as legend had it) has declined considerably over the past few decades. If you put that research together with other research that shows a drastic increase in income and wealth inequality, you reach an uncomfortable conclusion: America looks more and more like a class-ridden society.

And guess what? Our political leaders are doing everything they can to fortify class inequality, while denouncing anyone who complains–or even points out what is happening–as a practitioner of “class warfare.”

John Hood is the president of a conservative think tank based here in Raleigh, the John Locke Foundation, which focuses mostly on issues of state and local government. Mr. Hood’s column occasionally appears in the weekly newspaper in my town, The Cary News. In a column a few weeks ago, he had some interesting things to say about partisanship:

The institutions of free, representative government and those of political partisanship have been intertwined — and at odds — since the founding of the American Republic. As with so many other disputes in the public sphere, the primary problem lies in failing to draw bright lines and to keep each category of political activity within its proper confines.
. . .

Basically, the political game will attract public attention and involvement only if there are (at least) two distinct and competitive teams, but it will not command the public trust and confidence without distinct and inviolable rules and nonpartisan referees and commentators.

In journalism and in the public policy business, for example, it’s okay to have strong opinions about issues and to advocate them (though not in a way that warps the news coverage of politics). But it’s not okay for partisanship to intrude in the discussion. Right now, if you’ll pardon the oversimplification, left-of-center folks tend to vote Democratic and right-of-center folks tend to vote Republican. But left-of-center journalists and political activists should be willing to criticize Democrats when they enact bad policies or engage in unethical conduct. Similarly, right-of-center commentators should be willing to criticize Republicans on principle or policy, whatever the short-term impact on public opinion or elections.

Last week I cited criticism of Ann Coulter from Outside the Beltway, and wondered why I never hear from Ms. Coulter’s defenders. Reader John Salmon responds:

Okay, I’ll pick up her tattered banner and defend Ann Coulter on her abortion article…

..what she is saying in her piece, rather clearly, if too starkly for some, is that there is a moral equivalence between killing an abortionist and performing an abortion. You may disagree with this belief, but it’s hardly “kooky”: Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans believe abortion should only be allowed in the most extreme of circumstances, as it is believed to involve the taking of innocent human life. (Among other things, a majority believes life begins at conception-a pretty “kooky” view to the bulk of the out-of-the-cultural-mainstream press: CNN, CBS, and the like).

In truth, Coulter’s article does a considerable service to ideological balance on this issue, given that the pro-abortion media make it seem as if every abortionist’s life is at risk for his line of work. If you saw the numbers in percentage terms, the lack of real risk to abortionists might be clearer-a baby carried by his/her mother into an abortion clinic has a nearly 100% risk of being killed, while seven murdered abortionists divided by some number in the thousands would be some small fraction of one percent.

These are numbers that most of the press would rather ignore, especially the total number of abortions since ‘73-when do you ever see that?

It may seem crude or inept or offensive to make the point as bluntly as Coulter does, but people who consider the question honestly may be persuaded by her argument, which, again, assumes that the abortionist’s life and the aborted baby’s life are equally valuable. If one assumes otherwise, it’s not surprising that offense is taken.

OK, I’ve come up with some possibilities for new columnists to add to the Lying in Ponds roster for next year. Please, please vote for the one you would most like to see evaluated for partisanship. The poll should let you vote once per day, so feel free to do that if you wish. I’ll promise to add at least the top choice. Notice that I included the unsigned editorials from the New York Times; that was suggested a couple of weeks ago. The Wall Street Journal requires a subscription to access their full editorial comment, but the OpinionJournal site puts up one “On the Editorial Page” feature each day, which is often one of their unsigned editiorials. Of course, let me know if you have a write-in vote.

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I wasn’t able to put links on the poll itself, so here they are: Joe Conason, Ellen Goodman, Cragg Hines, Derrick Z. Jackson, Rich Lowry, New York Times unsigned editorials, Robert Novak, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Steyn, and WSJ OpinionJournal.

There is a long and thoughtful discussion (scroll down) of Lying in Ponds on the blog Philosoraptor; here’s a part:

This brings me to a general problem about the approach of Lyinginponds.com. They only count up pro-and-anti-Democratic and pro-and-anti-Republican comments. This approach assigns to everyone a numeric score that is, of course, an abstraction. Nothing wrong with abstraction so long as you don’t forget that that’s what it is. If you forget that you are dealing with an abstraction, then you commit–I think this is right–what Whitehead called “the fallacy of mis-placed concreteness.” Well, never mind about that part. But mistaking something more abstract for something less abstract is an error, anyway. The weakness of the Lyinginponds approach (and remember, I like that site and find it helpful) is that it abstracts away from all content other than the pro- and anti- references aforementioned. That means that somebody smart, knowledgeable, and seemingly well-intentioned like Krugman gets put into (roughly) an equivalence class with people like Michael Moore and Anne Coulter. So, though this is informative, it isn’t very informative.

Although it pains me greatly to be forced to discuss baseball, I’m willing to endure the pain for the greater good. The batting average is the statistic most often used as a simple measure of hitting prowess. But by no means should it be assumed that the two players with the highest batting averages in the league are the two best overall players, because the batting average does not account for power, is only slightly affected by speed, and does not even attempt to take into account fielding or intangible assets. I believe that the batting average is a useful abstraction, even though it is not comprehensive.

I also believe that the Combined Partisanship Index is an abstraction which does a reasonable job of detecting actual extreme partisanship which goes far beyond ordinary party preference. So I believe that the recent writings of Mr. Krugman and Ms. Coulter are both extremely partisan, as clearly shown by this imperfect analysis of dozens or hundreds of columns on a multitude of topics over two years or more. But the two pundits are certainly different in other important ways, which the Lying in Ponds rankings do not attempt to address. My favorite source of information for some of these other characteristics is Spinsanity. While Paul Krugman is only rarely criticized there, Ann Coulter suffers the indignity of her own section on the Spinsanity topics page.

I had a little difficulty with David Brooks‘ Saturday column, “A Fetish of Candor”. Most of the column is clearly praising the Bush administration by pretending to criticize it for honesty in its foreign policy:

I think we are all disgusted by the way George W. Bush administration has allowed honesty and candor to seep into the genteel world of international affairs.
. . .
Now his administration has taken to honesty like a drunken sailor. It has made a fetish of candor and forthrightness. Things are wildly out of control.

But the tone shifts at the end and Mr. Brooks seems to acknowledge that too much honesty might not be a good thing after all:

Sometimes you’ve got to be slippery to accomplish real good. The Bush administration is thus facing an insincerity crisis. It has become addicted to candor and forthrightness. It needs an immediate back-stabbing infusion.

Perhaps Al Gore could be brought in to offer advice.

So I evaluated the first 9 references to George W. Bush and the administration as positive, and the last 4 as neutral or negative. But it’s possible that I misinterpreted Mr. Brooks’ tone, and he was still being sarcastic by saying “you’ve got to be slippery to accomplish real good.”

James at Outside the Beltway thinks that an Ann Coulter column is an example of “How Not To Win An Argument” (link via the Carnival of the Vanities at Signal+Noise):

Ann Coulter seems happy to continue to fill the kook niche. How’s this for a column intro?

THE FIRST killing of an abortion doctor by an anti-abortion activist happened in 1993. Since then, six more people have been killed in attacks on abortion clinics, which is fewer people who ended up dead by being in the vicinity of recently released Weatherman Kathy Boudin. Most of the abortionists were shot or, depending upon your point of view, had a procedure performed on them with a rifle. This brings the total to: seven abortion providers to 30 million fetuses dead, which is also a pretty good estimate of how the political battle is going.

I guess stuff like this sells books to fanatics. But one wonders how many fence-straddlers on the abortion issue are going to climb over to Coulter’s side after reading that?

I’ve always wondered why I hear so often from defenders of Paul Krugman but no one ever writes me to defend Ann Coulter. I guess it means that even her fans don’t dispute the partisanship of her writing.

Yesterday brought the sad news of the death of Wall Street Journal columnist and editor emeritus Robert L. Bartley. Mr. Bartley won a Pulitizer Prize for his commentary in 1980, and just a week ago was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bush. Mr. Bartley is widely credited as the driving force behind making the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page “one of the nation’s most influential conservative voices during his 30 years as its editor”. In today’s OpinionJournal, there is an editorial tribute, another tributte from colleague Peggy Noonan, and a collection of excerpts from Mr. Bartley’s writing.

Robert Bartley was an occasional target of criticism from Lying in Ponds because of his partisan commentary. He finished in fourth place in the partisanship rankings last year, and was currently in ninth place this year.

UPDATE: More from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The National Review, Daniel Henninger, Mona Charen, and Slate.