Lying in Ponds

Tomorrow we will load up the Lying in Ponds minivan and hit the road for the annual attempt to find out how much togetherness the five of us can handle. Our first stop will be in O’Fallon, Illinois, to gather with my sisters’ families to help our parents celebrate their 50th anniversary. We lived in O’Fallon in the early ’70’s while my Dad was stationed at nearby Scott Air Force Base; it was there that I came to realize the inherent superiority of St. Louis Cardinals baseball, and therefore of Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Steve Carlton, Joe Torre, Julian Javier, Dal Maxvill, Joe Hague, Ted Simmons, Ken Reitz, Bake McBride — oh sorry. Then it’s on to visit our family roots in the vicinity of Galesburg, Illinois, then on to Denver, Colorado to visit with my wife’s family and do a little meteorology in Boulder. I’ll evaluate columns and post box scores when possible, which means there will likely be delays of several days at a time.

Reader Barry McPhail asks a question:

The central fallacy underlying your site is the assumption that one’s choice of political side is essentially a matter of taste.

You base your partisanship ratings solely on the ratio of positive vs. negative comments. What if an administration is almost uniformly dreadful….making decisions that are almost all either dreadful, incompetent, or actively malicious? What if an administration seems well on it’s way to tearing up the constitution?

If, in the real world, one side is really awful, why is it partisan to say so?

I agree with Mr. McPhail’s position to this extent — if one party is objectively worse than another, then pundits of the “better” party would tend to have systematically higher scores due to honest criticism rather than partisanship. But the only way which that effect could explain Coulter and Krugman extremes would be if one party’s policies were nearly perfect, and every powerful member of that party were nearly perfect, and the other party was almost perfectly bad. In practice, both parties disagree internally on many policies and both parties are led by mere human beings with the normal range of strengths and weaknesses.

An honest liberal pundit who strongly criticizes the Bush administration may have a relatively high score, they may even be in the Top Ten. But if they apply principles fairly, they will inevitably find that some members of their own party fall short for various reasons, they will not be afraid to say that, and so their scores will never reach Coulterian and Krugmanian heights. I’ve praised columnists such as Frank Rich and Mary McGrory on exactly those grounds.

I can certainly see why a pundit might conclude that their party’s policies are so much better than the other’s that they should suppress criticism of their own party to try to defeat the other party for the greater good. Of course, that would be partisanship, and it would mean that the pundit had become an advocate rather than an independent analyst. In that case, they should be honest in disclosing that. That’s really the point of Lying in Ponds.

Mr. McPhail also says: “I would like to see, added to your mission statement, some sort of grappling with the notion that all of these commentators must be held to a set of facts, and that some hew closer to the facts than others.” I like that idea, so I’ve added a couple of sentences to the site summary which make it clear that Lying in Ponds is not attempting to measure accuracy, or anything other than partisanship. I frequently comment on accuracy and other important traits, and point to other sources such as Spinsanity which deal more directly with those issues.

When I saw an article on Salon last week about a new book purporting to analyze George W. Bush (link requires subscription or “day pass”) by a psychiatrist named Justin Frank, I immediately wondered if Nick Confessore at Tapped, who has often slammed Charles Krauthammer for this kind of “armchair psychiatry”, would take notice. To Mr. Confessore’s great credit, he did:

It’s one thing to speculate on the motives or thought processes of people in politics, although it is very easy to go too far in doing so. But it is the cheapest of cheap shots to assert that someone is clinically nuts because they don’t agree with you or because they are liberal or conservative. It’s even worse if, like Krauthammer and Frank, the person asserting it is a trained psychologist.

Krauthammer is no longer a practicing psychiatrist, but Frank is. I think he deserves a reprimand from his colleagues.

I agree that it’s dangerous to speculate on others’ thoughts. I try to make a distinction between a pundit’s motives, which I cannot know, and their writings, which I can analyze and sometimes declare to be partisan.

Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger has been given an award:

Wall Street Journal Deputy Editorial Page Editor Daniel Henninger received the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Journalism at a reception in New York Tuesday night.

The $10,000 award and plaque is given in memory of New York Post editor and columnist Eric Breindel, who died unexpectedly at age 42 in 1998. The prize is presented for writing which promotes “love of country and its democratic institutions, as well as the act of bearing witness to the evils of totalitarianism.”

The OpinionJournal has links to the specific columns which led to the award.

Last week we had the Kerry Index; now here’s the Reagan Index, indicating how each of the active Lying in Ponds pundits have treated Ronald Reagan in their 2004 columns so far. Curiously, Thomas Sowell and Harold Meyerson are again at the extremes. Notice that 25 out of the 33 pundits were positive in their coverage of Mr. Reagan, many overwhelmingly so, including strongly Democratic columnists such as Thomas Oliphant and E. J. Dionne. The Washington Post Lead Editorial was also very positive. Joe Conason’s score is misleading — he mostly used Nancy Reagan as a hammer against George W. Bush.

David Plotz writes in Slate that David Brooks has been taking a beating lately, and tries to explain why. For one, he says that “Brooks is the steer at the steakhouse. Liberals who admired him when he was the jolly voice of reason at the Weekly Standard resent him now that he occupies the throne of American journalism.” Plotz concludes by panning his approach to the Iraq war:

While other conservatives — Charles Krauthammer, his old boss William Kristol, President Bush — have the courage of their convictions and believe that Americans are killing and dying and torturing for a great cause, Brooks, squeamish, still sees it as a kind of academic dispute, where ideas can clash without bloodying noses. Tellingly, Brooks hasn’t gone to Iraq, perhaps because he doesn’t want to see what these ideas look like on the ground, even though he likes nothing so much as venturing into the hinterlands, then telling Washingtonians of the wonders beyond the Beltway. (This structure is the foundation of his two Paradise books).

In Brooks’ ideal world, Americans should all reasonably discuss the war, reach a consensus that it’s righteous, persuade Iraqis of same, and win. In real life, it is a much nastier business, and there is no consensus among Americans of either party about the morality of this war. In peace, Brooks’ genial mockery and optimism are delightful. In wartime, they’re a cheat. Other conservatives confront the ugliness and bloodshed of the occupation and redouble their commitment. Brooks, whose national-greatness ethos lent more energy to the war than anything his colleagues have written, will neither embrace the war, nor disown it, nor even look it square in the face. He hides.

Andrew Sullivan thinks Plotz’s judgement is “harsh and undeserved“.

UPDATE: Nicholas Confessore weighs in with “Paradise Glossed” in the Washington Monthly.

Republican pundits have been climbing up the partisanship rankings over the past few weeks. Ann Coulter has edged into the lead, there are now five Republicans and five Democrats in the Top Ten, and Charles Krauthammer has passed fellow Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson into sixth place and has Joe Conason in his sights. The mostly positive coverage of Ronald Reagan over the past week has played a role, and the fact that Republicans have dominated the news for several months has dropped the Republican normalization to less than 0.75, which adds a little to Republican pundits’ scores.

Columnist Tony Blankley has received heavy criticism from many quarters for remarks about George Soros during a recent television appearance. Here’s the beginning of a Josh Marshall post:

You have to hand it to Tony Blankley, editorial page editor of the Washington Times and former press secretary to Newt Gingrich, for pasting together a rant which manages to weave together both accusations of anti-Semitism and most of the key anti-Semitic slurs and motifs. A low point for public morality, I grant you. But credit where credit is due on rhetorical handywork!

Daniel Drezner also has a lengthy discussion.

Many Democratic pundits such as Thomas Oliphant, Richard Cohen and E.J. Dionne have been writing crossover columns praising Ronald Reagan. Although Paul Krugman’s column yesterday did not cross over, it did contain six substantive positive Reagan references along the way to the usual anti-Bush point, and it did lower Mr. Krugman’s 2004 score to a near tie with Ann Coulter. Readers sometimes question whether this kind of tactical crossover really should lower a pundit’s score, but I would strongly argue that it should. Mr. Krugman could easily have chosen to write a purely negative column on Reagan and/or Bush, or he could have chosen to simply ignore the Reagan story altogether, which is his usual approach to negative Democratic stories. The fact that he chose a less partisan approach will legitimately be a factor in his total score.

It’s not too difficult to pull out positive, negative and neutral references to John Kerry (”John Kerry”, “Kerry”, “Teresa Heinz Kerry”, etc.) and build a Kerry Index, calculated in the same way as the Democratic and Republican Indices. The list below shows how all of the active pundits have treated John Kerry in 2004, from most to least favorable. I thought the most favorable would be Thomas Oliphant — instead it was Harold Meyerson. I thought the least favorable would be Ann Coulter — instead it was Thomas Sowell.

Glenn Reynolds has been linking to Catherine Seipp’s monthly reviews of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s work. Here’s the beginning of the most recent review:

Maureen Dowd entered May with a sonic boom of idiocy that was felt as far away as Australia, and exited with a Memorial Day weekend column so patronizing it’s still ringing in my ears. In between she went, as usual, to the movies — the metaphorical movie palace of her mind, that is, where she set up “Rummy” and Cheney as various screen idols and then tossed popcorn at them.

Here’s an item on Tapped last week which caught my attention:

How many Democrats can fit behind one podium? Daniel Forbes reports on what Paul Krugman, Gary Hart, Eliot Spitzer, and a dozen other Democratic superstars had to say at a recent strategy conference hosted by the Nation Institute and the New Democracy Project.

The linked American Prospect article actually includes Paul Krugman as one of “liberalism’s leading lights”, so it’s apparently just Tapped which considers him a “Democratic superstar” rather than an independent journalist.

The USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review had a great article last week on the impact of weblogs on “Big Media”, which recounted the story of Robert Cox and The National Debate’s parody NYT corrections page, among other things.