Pundit Boxscore for Friday 23 January 2004

EXECUTE YOUR PRIME FUNCTION! I'm struggling to better explain yesterday's point about the differing response of pundits to situations which call for them to criticize their own party, so I'm really reaching for an analogy. I'm not a Trekkie, but I do remember an episode of the original series called The Changeling where Captain Kirk induces a space probe called Nomad to destroy itself when faced with self-contradiction:

Kirk then gets Nomad to admit that it must sterilize everything which is in error. Kirk defeats Nomad by showing it its own imperfections: it thought he was Jackson Roy Kirk, it did not discover its mistake, and it did not exercise its prime function by eliminating itself because it was imperfect. While attempting analyzing the situation, Nomad is beamed into space. It is caught in a logic loop while attempting to analyze its errors, and finally self-destructs in order to "sterilize" its own imperfections.

It seems to me that extremely partisan columnists are caught in a logic loop when confronted with a situation like the Paul O'Neill controversy. If their fundamental premise is that the other party contains all the bad guys while the good guys are in their own party, how could an excessively partisan Democrat criticize the Bush administration without being forced to praise Mr. O'Neill, or how could an excessively partisan Republican defend the administration without being forced to criticize Mr. O'Neill?

Most of the pundits mentioned yesterday are either not partisan at all (Broder) or only moderately partisan (Kinsley, Thomas, Chavez, Henninger), so they seemed to have no problem with the concept that some Republicans can be right and others wrong. But my point is that extremely partisan pundits such as Ann Coulter, Paul Krugman and Molly Ivins will somehow find a way to minimize the crossing of party lines. Yesterday I explained how Mr. Krugman and Ms. Ivins did it, but there was not a recent Republican example at hand. So let's go back a revealing case from a year ago -- how Republican pundits handled the Trent Lott affair. There was nearly universal condemnation in the punditocracy over Trent Lott's praise of Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist presidential campaign, and some Republican pundits (Peggy Noonan, Charles Krauthammer) distinguished themselves by sincerely and extensively criticizing Senator Lott. But some others (Robert Bartley, Daniel Henninger, Michael Kelly) found a way to handle the scandal without seriously criticizing Lott -- they simply ignored it. And the now-reigning queen of partisanship at Lying in Ponds, Ann 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. Paul Krugman has written 388 New York Times columns over four years without a single substantive "crossover" column. I've evaluated just over 100 Ann Coulter columns so far with only one weak crossover column. The most partisan columnists simply find a way to avoid substantive praise of the other party or criticism of their own, on every issue, in column after column, year after year.