Pundit Boxscore for Monday 21 July 2003

DEGREES OF NEGATIVITY: Here's something I intended to mention in last Friday's Ann Coulter review. Some readers in the past have questioned the limitation of categorizing partisan references only three ways -- positive, negative or neutral. The concern is that civil criticism and blistering accusations would be scored the same way, possibly obscuring the difference between responsible critics and slanderous flame-throwers. In general, I think the scores of responsible critics will be lower anyway because their reasoned arguments will unavoidably result in contrary references. But the scoring system probably does underestimate Ann Coulter's partisanship, since so much of her criticism of Democrats is so extreme. Here's an example from a January column:

The Democrats' jejune claim that Saddam Hussein is not a threat to our security presupposes they would care if he were. Who are they kidding? Democrats adore threats to the United States. Bush got a raucous standing ovation at his State of the Union address when he announced that "this year, for the first time, we are beginning to field a defense to protect this nation against ballistic missiles." The excitement was noticeably muted on the Democrats' side of the aisle. The vast majority of Democrats remained firmly in their seats, sullen at the thought that America would be protected from incoming ballistic missiles. To paraphrase George Bush: If this is not treason, then treason has no meaning.

If there was an additional category in the scoring system for rabidly negative, paragraphs like the one above might make Ms. Coulter invincible in our partisanship rankings.