Lying in Ponds

Well, I celebrated my second blogiversary this month by cluelessly allowing the Lying in Ponds domain name registration to lapse, causing the site to be offline for two weeks. I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience. I could have brought it back more quickly, but I was balking at having to pay a $150 fee to my registrar to “redeem” the domain name. I decided to pay after concluding that I would almost certainly lose the domain name otherwise. Robert Cox at The National Debate posted a note letting people know about the outage and generously helped in several ways; a big thank you to him.

Part of the slow recovery was due to the fact that our daughter is graduating from high school on Saturday (one down, two to go), and I made a trip to Little Rock to help my parents (the greatest on the planet) celebrate their 50th anniversary — their wedding picture is shown below, from Alexis, Illinois in 1954.

For the first time in a while, a columnist for the WSJ OpinionJournal has cracked the Lying in Ponds Top Ten. Brendan Miniter has moved into ninth place after a series of one-sided columns, many of them sharp attacks on John Kerry. His column yesterday was another example of narrowly criticizing the abuses at Abu Ghraib while leaving the Bush administration untouched. Mr. Miniter finished in 14th place in the partisanship rankings last year, and in 13th place in 2002. Peggy Noonan and Daniel Henninger, regular residents of the Top Ten in previous years, have had somewhat lower scores so far this year.

After a second consecutive relatively nuanced column on Ronald Reagan, Paul Krugman slips from first to second place in the Lying in Ponds Top Ten, behind last year’s champion, Ann Coulter.

Scandals help to highlight partisanship in the punditocracy. It seems that it would be difficult to write about the horrifying revelations from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq without criticizing the Bush administration and therefore producing a column with a Democratic partisanship score. However, several Republican pundits have found creative ways to write about the situation in the past week. Cal Thomas argued that “War is nasty business, and the rules don’t always comport with a book of etiquette.“. He narrowly limited criticism to the soldiers directly involved, avoiding any mention of those higher up. Linda Chavez cited “the breakdown in discipline and unit cohesion that have gone hand in hand with gender integration in the military.“. Mona Charen similarly kept the focus narrow, as did Charles Krauthammer, discussing “one fundamental issue at stake that dares not speak its name.” Peggy Noonan mentioned Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush, but didn’t criticize them. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page commended the Army’s ability to investigate itself, and criticized one Republican, but that was an offhand comment about Senator Chuck Hagel. The next day the WSJ criticized the White House a bit, but mostly for “putting blood in the water” by leaking criticism of Donald Rumsfeld. Mr. Rumsfeld was strongly defended by William Safire.

Daniel Henninger offered some tactical criticism of the White House. But David Brooks stood out for his willingness to sharply criticize a fellow Republican by name:

It’s hard not to be impressed with the way the military crisply opened criminal investigations into the depravity at Abu Ghraib. It’s hard not to be appalled by the Pentagon’s blindness to the psychological catastrophe these photos were bound to create. Even yesterday, months after the atrocities were first known, Rumsfeld and company were incapable of answering the most elemental questions from John McCain, Lindsey Graham and others about who was in charge of the prison, and why the photos weren’t immediately seen as weapons of mass morale destruction. If Rumsfeld had held a conference and pre-emptively presented these photos to the world, with his response already set, things would not look nearly as bad as they do now.

Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute wrote a piece this week which attacked Paul Krugman as a “shock pundit” for his criticism of the Bush administration’s job forecasts. Donald Luskin and Steve Antler responded, and Brad DeLong offered a rebuttal, arguing that Mr. Hassett’s charts were deceptive. I don’t know who’s right on the issue of job forecasts, but I was impressed by Mr. Hassett’s views on civic discourse:

Gentlemen like Mankiw suffer, but he is not alone. Many Democrats appear to want to believe that Republicans have foul intent. Republicans do the same in reverse. Accordingly, a kind of tabloid culture has arisen wherein wonks outdo each other in the attempt to insult and humiliate their opponents. It does not matter who is accurate or fair. The more shocking the accusation, the better. “Greg Mankiw is corrupt.” How delicious! As Al Franken, Ann Coulter, and Paul Krugman have shown, being artful in this line can be quite profitable.

But it is also harmful. It destroys the climate necessary for honest debate and encourages cynicism in voters. Further, it is harmful because the Mankiws of the world more and more are deciding that public service is not worth the bother. Those choices may hand the public policy terrain to the lowest common denominator.

A wise rector once told my congregation: “One should never ascribe to malice that which equally-well could be ascribed to stupidity.” Shock pundits degrade the public discourse. The fact is, most Democrats I know want to make the world better. Most Republicans do too. They disagree about the methods, and one side might even be right. That does not make the other side dishonest.

Shock pundits, on the other hand, are not stupid.

At Lying in Ponds, I’ve tried to be careful to avoid impugning the motives of even titans of partisanship such as Paul Krugman and Ann Coulter. I don’t know what their motives are — my point is that extremely partisan commentary is harmful to the civic discourse and problem-solving necessary to permit my children to grow up in a great nation.

A couple of weeks ago, Ann Coulter dropped into second place after writing a crossover column filled with slashing criticism of Senator Arlen Specter, who ended up winning his primary election anyway. Reader David Kline questions whether that column really deserved to be a crossover:

I suspect others have pointed this out, but I don’t think Coulter’s recent anti-Specter article makes her any less partisan. As you know, Specter is involved in a heated Republican primary contest with a much more conservative Pat Toomey. So in this column, Coulter is not attacking Specter for being a Republican, she is attacking someone for not being sufficiently conservative; for being only a moderate Republican. You point this out in your comment. So the question is: why should someone’s partisanship score go down based on an article which says, in essence, Specter is not sufficiently partisan? Why would this be, as you term it, a genuine crossover column?

I think that attacking Arlen Specter does represent a genuine crossover, because Ms. Coulter could have easily avoided it. She could have just written a column filled with praise for Pat Toomey. Or she could have criticized Specter briefly, and then argued that either Specter or Toomey would be better than any Democratic opponent. Contrast her column of direct criticism of Specter with the way Paul Krugman handled a similar situation in January. He wrote a column clearly expressing a preference for Democratic presidential candidates “who are willing to question not just the policies but also the honesty and the motives of the people running our country, and those who aren’t.” He specifically praised Wesley Clark and Howard Dean as examples of the former, but chose not to criticize the latter by name (although John Kerry’s hair did make an appearance). See how easy it is?

Of course I don’t think that Ms. Coulter’s Specter-cide column makes her any less partisan, even though it does lower her score. In the same way, I don’t think that Albert Pujols is any less of a hitter because he is batting only .188 over the first few days of May. What’s important is the longer term — Albert Pujols is an extremely good hitter and Ann Coulter is an extremely partisan columnist. The data clearly shows that when taken over a long enough period.

Over the weekend I finished evaluating all of Sebastian Mallaby’s weekly columns for this year. Just as the last time he was a regular columnist in 2002, Mr. Mallaby writes about a wide range of issues with intelligence and without a trace of partisanship.