Sort of….

Tom Maguire has a few justified chuckles at the expense of some tested and ready practitioners of the august profession of journalism innumerate hacks at the Grey Lady. Clearly, the fourth estate would be better off if its members were required to undergo some basic quantitative training — not even necessarily anything involving actual computation or problem-solving, just enough to get a grasp of basic concepts — and the whole nation might be better off as a result as well. (At the very least, it would not be possible — to paraphrase a former Dean of Admissions at Yale — to shoot every reporter in the country, recruit pajamas-wearers to fill every, um, cancelled position, shoot all of them, and then recruit a third string journalistic corps with scant if any diminishing of the substantive quality of reporting.) That said, it’s sort of cute that Maguire thinks business school credentials would stand our press in markedly better stead. Sure, there are exceptional B-school grads; there are also exceptional J-school grads. And really now — has he met many Harvard MBAs? They’re supposed to be the best of the lot, and…let’s leave it at that. (more…)

Oh, I’m not done with the Commentards yet. Here’s what Sam Munson highlighted as the Comment(ard) of the Day: (more…)

The worst blogger on earth, writing for the worst site on the world wide web (including all the porn), demonstrates the nonideological idiocy undergirding her entire output quite apart from her laughably slavish partisanship, dishonesty, and stupidity:

Rove’s analysis [of state-by-state contests] should put much of partisan punditry into proper perspectiveational polls are fun but largely irrelevant. Remember Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani’s double-digit leads months before the first votes were cast?

Jesus H. Christ. How many confusions is it possible to pack into two short sentences? (more…)

Since I devoted far, far more words than Dick Morris deserves last week to dousing the Dickster’s fatuous column about a supposedly tied race between the presidential candidates, it would behoove me to point out that a trend towards McCain over the last couple of weeks is discernible at this point, as reflected in both FiveThirtyEight’s analysis and the rolling average of polls, both of which are converging on a 2 point Obama lead. By the same token, the notion that the race is tied remains spurious.¹ For these reasons, as well as those adduced in my prior post, I would caution Obama supporters that today’s Ras poll showing Obama ahead in Florida, and yesterday’s Ras poll showing McCain ahead in Ohio, are considerably more likely to be statistical noise than accurate representations of the conditions of either state race. (Indeed, outlying surveys ought to dampen confidence in Ras’s accuracy as against other pollster — not that Ras is particularly bad (or good), but rather that the field of polling is so fraught with error that an individual survey is a nigh-on-worthless datum.) Not that that is going to deter partisans from trumpeting the results they like or ignoring the results they don’t.

(more…)

Daniel Larison, who knows better, throws caution to the wind and decides to defend the credibility of a Dick Morris column. Has anyone ever made money on that bet? In the Morris column in question, Tricky Dick puts forward the thesis that the presidential race is in fact tied, and times it perfectly to coincide with the late week dip last week in Obama’s numbers in one prominent daily tracking poll, but not to coincide with those numbers predictably reverting to the mean of a modest but unequivocal and stable Obama lead. Having completed that sleight of hand — have you spotted how he knew which card was yours? he’s resting every word of his column on a single poll from which, at the time of his writing, drawing any strong conclusions was literally unintelligible, and which was contradicted by nearly simultaneous polls; and did I mention that the solitary result upon which the whole charade hangs happens to conform perfectly to P. Dicky’s pre-existing biases?; really now, I’ve seen birthday magicians whose tricks showed fewer seams and took longer to crack — the Dickster then projects his own biases onto the electorate as a whole, under the pseudo-objective guise of listing Obama’s flip-flops on salient issues in the campaign, thereby (since he presents neither evidence nor argument for their salience) just gruesomely begging the question a second time (the first time being his mendacious assertion of an Obama ex-lead). In other words, bullshit from top to bottom, an effort tha not only fails to add any value, but destroys existing value. In yet other words, exactly what one expects from a Dick Morris column.

(more…)

Downblog, re: the flap over the New Yorker cover, I asked in passing: “Anyone care to wager how long it will take an idiot at Commentary or the Substandard to suggest that the joke is really on the New Yorker, since in their parallel epistemic universe Obama does have troubling connections to radical Islam…The over/under is 4:30 pm EST, today, Monday.” Sure enough, Abe Greenwald at Commentary, in two posts timestamped 10:02 and 11:55 am, respectively, first writes: “In assuming that the serious Right seeks to burlesque Obama as the embodiment of our anti-American nightmares, the New Yorker burlesques itself.” And then, still commenting on the New Yorker not quite two hours later, he adds: “You know, if Obama is going to keep ex-terrorists around, he should at least utilize them.” Attaway, old sport, the credibility of the Commentary brand isn’t going to maintain itself. Anyway, the unders have it.

(more…)

The Economist is on-target in their analysis of why the latest New Yorker cover is bad news for the Obama campaign. The caricature of Barack decked out like Muammar Gaddafi fist-jabbing a camo’d, AK-wielding Michelle, is so clearly and profoundly over the top that there isn’t any non-negligible possibility that it’s anything but satire; as satire, there is really nothing objectionable about it; in fact, it makes the Obama campaign’s point; and if there are any New Yorker readers who fail to pick up on the satire, Ripley’s would like to have a word with them. The problem is that the images are going to circulate, firstly, among non-New Yorker readers who see the magazine cover in person and don’t understand satire, and secondly and crucially among TV chattering heads whose job it is to be incapable of appreciating irony, and who will ever so earnestly recirculate the cartoons, devoid of context, to an audience orders of magnitude larger than the magazine’s readership [but Remnick & co. hit all the right demos -- ed.]. What will be the net effect of the wide-scale circulation of such images? It’s hard to imagine them achieving anything on balance besides pushing some people in the direction of believing there is something fishy involving Obama and Islam and/or terrorism. Though I suspect the impact will ultimately be too marginal to matter.

(more…)

For very obvious reasons, the apparent decision by smart conservatives like Amity Shlaes, as well as not smart conservatives like Fred Barnes, to double-down on Phil Gramm’s suggestion that America is becoming “a nation of whiners,” is about as execrable a political tactic as putting “tough Mike” Dukakis in a tank. (Indeed, if not for the conventionally-wise frame in which left-wing criticism of American culture is deemed anti-American or at least unpatriotic, whereas right-wing criticism of American culture can fill in the lyrics of a Souza march, we would likely have already heard a chorus of chatting heads making (spurious) comparisons between Gramm and Jeremiah Wright.) Of course, those conservatives rushing to defend Gramm are perfectly well aware that they are compounding John McCain and the GOP’s problems. The thought seems to be, “impolitic truths are still truths, and we as courageous truth-tellers won’t back down because we might offend some overly sensitive souls.”

(more…)