What isn't so

Irrationality at large

“It ain't ignorance causes so much trouble; it's folks knowing so much that ain't so.” —Josh Billings

The local affiliate of Salem Communications broadcasts a short news break just before the hour. Sometimes I tune it in just before punching the button for a more mainstream station's top-of-the-hour newscast. These occasional doses of right-wing media keep me informed on what the nut-case fringe is saying, and it can be enlightening. Recently, while driving to school in the early morning, I tuned in the Salem station and heard its newscaster's report, “The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reports that the Obama administration's healthcare act will cost the nation's economy two-point-three million jobs in the next dozen years.”

It was startling news. My first thought: That's a lie. I was considering the source. By the end of the day, I had discovered the truth. The full implementation of ObamaCare would pick the so-called “job-lock” and free people who had been forced to stay in jobs they hated simply to preserve their health benefits. The CBO estimated that over two million people would be able to give up their second (or third!) jobs, scaling back to something less burdensome without running the risk of losing health insurance. In many cases, it would presumably enable parents to spend more time at home with children, which is something Republicans also support as long as it's merely theoretical.

And, as we have already seen, the GOP will repeat the “job-killing” claim at the top of their lungs all during the 2014 election campaign. Will this be the year that it doesn't work because they've cried “wolf” much too often already? If so, I look forward to their being devoured.

Ignorance is not a mysterious thing. All of us have it in abundance, even as we whittle away at it during our lives. What we have been seeing, however, to a greater degree in recent years than I can recall in previous decades of politician-watching, is the deliberate nurturing of ignorance, the creation of fake knowledge (like an inoculation?) to keep people from absorbing genuine knowledge. The right-wing propagandists have raised this to a high art.

It was just a few years ago that I was in Texas during the summer to visit some friends who had moved from California. The matriarch of the clan was concerned about the state of the national economy and confided her worries to me. Knowing that I had been a legislative staffer in Sacramento and assuming I still had some insight into such matters, she wanted to know if there was any chance that the U.S. Congress would “fix” matters by repealing ObamaCare. “If only they could get rid of it, the national debt problem would be solved!” She really believed that (and had never heard about the CBO analysis that determined ObamaCare would reduce the nation's annual deficits).

She also had Fox News playing in the den during every waking hour. She wasn't uninformed. She was massively misinformed.

Quite recently one of my nieces became one of the president's hapless victims. She wasn't quiet about it. ObamaCare had forced her to change doctors (which, you know, never happened when insurance companies ran the world) and “Becky” was furious:

Becky feeling annoyed

So... I am so disgusted in Obama!!!! My insurance plan disappeared because it was not OBAMA approved. So instead of having basic insurance and paying cash for my dental and vision and paying $300 for my family. So now I am being forced to go to Covered California and pay $250 with the state paying $250 and putting my kids on medical. How does make any sense!!!!!!

After reading her plaintive post on Facebook, I pointed out a little bit of reality (cribbed from my blog post on same):

Your insurance company did not have to cancel your policy. It decided that it wanted to do it despite language in the healthcare act that permits individuals to maintain existing policies. It's in Section 1251 of the Affordable Healthcare Act:

SEC. 1251. PRESERVATION OF RIGHT TO MAINTAIN EXISTING COVERAGE. (a) NO CHANGES TO EXISTING COVERAGE.(1) IN GENERAL.—Nothing in this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) shall be construed to require that an individual terminate coverage under a group health plan or health insurance coverage in which such individual was enrolled on the date of enactment of this Act.

What the act did not do, however, was mandate that the insurance companies keep offering the plans people wanted to keep, and many companies have grabbed the chance to cancel lots of policies. They didn't have to. They wanted to. The administration should have anticipated this and blocked it, which would have given some teeth to the president's you-can-keep-it pledge.

I might as well been hollering into a dry well. Some of Becky's Tea Party buddies chimed in. Here’s a couple:

Sadie: I hated him before this - but we had all sorts of trouble getting coverage because of Joeys pre existing condition - even though that wasnt ment to be taken into consideration. Its a joke and a very bad one.

Sadie refused to recognize that the ACA is what made her husband’s pre-existing condition irrelevant. It was all the fault of the hated president, who was daring to occupy the White House while black.

Gertrude: All the people that voted for him owe the rest of us working people an apology !!!

Don't hold your breath, Gertie!

And here’s my niece again, for the big finish!

Becky: To privately cover my family would now cost me $800-$1000 per month with a $4000 deductible. That is ridiculous.

So Becky points out that private health insurance is damned expensive. As much as a thousand per month, with a high deductible. Wow! Instead of like before, when her bare-bones insurance plan cost her $300 (as mentioned above). Now, of course, under Covered California, she’ll pay $250 for a $500 policy. Hurray? No! That's only because she's also getting a $250 subsidy, and that’s (apparently) awful and humiliating! Like welfare!

Sounds like ObamaCare worked to her advantage, although there is the aggravation of having to choose a new primary care physician, since her old doctor was tied to the old plan and (I guess) is not available under the new. But saving $50 each month is sort of good, no? No! It’s communism! (Or something.)

Perhaps I'll get some sympathy when I tell my niece that I had to change health plans in order to keep the doctor I've had for several years as my primary care physician. When she gloats that I, too, am a victim of the Affordable Care Act, I'll mention it occurred before the measure was enacted. I was, instead, a victim of my college district's health insurance providers—back in those days when the insurance companies ran everything and the president had yet to drive us from health-insurance paradise.

Warding off bullets with magic

Armored with irrationality

Ruben Navarrette was outraged by the behavior of some people in the wake of the massacre of schoolchildren in Connecticut. The syndicated columnist quickly took aim at those who offended his sensibilities: the people who decried America's insane love affair with guns. Navarrette was dismayed by the prompt and vigorous reaction by supporters of more stringent gun-control standards. In his view, they were guilty of not maintaining a sufficiently long period of silence. The NRA, at least, was good enough to duck and cover for an entire week before calling a press conference to double-down on their traditional gun-worshipping insanity.

Navarrette singled out in his column some especially egregious offenders against common decency:

How about giving a horrified and heartbroken nation a chance to mourn and bury the dead? How about showing some respect for the victims you claim to care about? How about giving politics, pet causes and partisan jockeying a rest until we wipe our tears and catch our breath?

Tell that to Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who said after the shootings: “If now is not the time to have a serious discussion about gun control and the epidemic of gun violence plaguing our society, I don't know when is.”

Sorry, Ruben. I agree with Nadler. Completely.

Navarrette points his accusing finger at Nadler and other gun critics and demands, “Have you no decency?”

Go to hell, Ruben.

In his defense, we should perhaps point out that Navarrette is legitimately worried over the state of the nation—although he dismisses Nadler's similar concern. The columnist fears for the safety of his children, as would any responsible parent. His solution? A return to childhood superstition.

I spent Sunday morning looking for answers in a place I hadn't been in a while—a pew of my neighborhood church. The woman next to me wore pain on her face, and didn't smile once during the hour-long service. I held on tight to my kids. During communion*, I asked the priest to bless them. As we walked toward the altar, I whispered, “This is to keep you safe.”

Yeah, Ruben. And a garlic clove dangling from a neck thong will keep vampires away.

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*Note: Is Navarrette a nominal Catholic? If Navarrette has indeed been absent from his neighborhood church for a while, then he is guilty of the mortal sin of deliberately missing mass and therefore cannot legitimately partake of communion. I have more contempt for pretend-Catholics like Navarrette than those who take seriously the arcane rules of the club they belong to. If you think that communion is real, then you apparently believe in the Church's magical powers. How does that square with flouting the Church's rules except when you feel like going in for a tasteless snack?

D'Souza knows not what he does

Shall we forgive him?

Dinesh D'Souza is promoting the new paperback edition of his apologia for Christianity (What's so great about Christianity?) and is planning a visit to San Francisco next weekend. That's probably why he deigned to say a few words to Heidi Benson, staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. The book section of today's edition of the Chronicle presents the results of that conversation. I was particularly struck by this exchange:

Q: What religion do you practice?

A: I'm a Catholic by background. I was raised in Goa, a part of India that was visited by Portuguese missionaries a few hundred years ago, which explains my last name.

My wife, Dixie, is evangelical Christian. We met in the Reagan White House, when she was a student intern. We're members of the Horizon Christian Fellowship Church.

Dixie was born in Louisiana and grew up in San Diego. The issue of me being Catholic and her being Protestant made her parents a little grumpy, but the fact that I was Indian was a nonissue.

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Interesting. So Dinesh is no more of a Catholic than I am. We are both “Catholic by background,” but that's not the same as actually being Catholic. If he is a member of Horizon Christian Fellowship Church, then Dinesh has joined the ranks of ex-Catholics and become a Protestant. He should do something about correcting his Wikipedia entry, which lists his religion as Roman Catholic.

In this politically charged election year, quite a few Catholic clerics did some vigorous pulpit-pounding demanding that their parishioners vote Republican (although most were circumspect enough to say “pro-life” instead of endorsing McCain by name). Presumably this would not have bothered D'Souza, had he been present to hear any of those sermons. Given his lapses, however, he might have fidgeted a bit at demands for ideological and philosophical purity by his ostensible co-religionists. After all, Joe Biden's Roman Catholicism was frequently called into question because he supports freedom of choice. I'm sure Dinesh heard about this, even if he has been absent from the Catholic pews. One doesn't want to be ambiguous about such matters, especially if one is a self-anointed Christian apologist. People really should know what religion they belong to.

Of course, Wikipedia is a great source of information, but it's hardly definitive. Maybe it's just a mistake on Wikipedia's part. Perhaps the encyclopedists misconstrued the intent of remarks like “me being Catholic” on Dinesh's part.

But no. Dinesh himself is the source of the error. He has an official website (which is cited in the Wikipedia article). This is what he has to say about himself on the More About Dinesh D'Souza page:

“A believing Catholic but a poorly practicing one,” D'Souza said religious faith is vital to achievement.

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Sorry, Dinesh, but joining an evangelical Protestant church does not make you a “poorly practicing” Catholic. It makes you an ex-Catholic. A non-Catholic. If you honestly think you're still a “believing Catholic,” then you must fear for your immortal soul (since you imagine you have one). Presumably you don't rush to your local Catholic church to attend mass after the services at Horizon Christian Fellowship Church each Sunday, which means you are in violation of a Catholic's solemn obligation for weekly mass attendance. And deliberately missing mass is a mortal sin.

Oh, oh. Dinesh is going to hell.

Roller-coaster polling

Keep your barf bags handy

I like to follow political polls and I'm encouraged that my preferred presidential candidate continues in most reports to hang on to a significant lead. Nevertheless, I am heartily tired of the constant “analysis” of nonexistent volatility. It's a pseudo-drama ginned up by a combination of deep ignorance and ratings-driven sensation mongering.

It's polling, suckers. It's a statistical art with well-documented error bars. The results are not five-decimal-place scientific calculations. They're probabilistic estimates. The numbers are going to jump up and down even if nothing changes. Got that?

For purposes of illustration, suppose that a poll's accuracy is described as being within 3 percentage points 90% of the time. Got that? Then about 10% of the time it will be off by more than 3 points. If two candidates are within about 5 points of each other, taking 3 points away from the leader and giving them to the other guy will reverse the race! Only not really, because the poll would be in error in that instance. These flukes are not avoidable and they provide grist for the mills of the talking heads who will then scream about upsets and stunning surprises. They're just idiots. Or ignoramuses. Maybe both.

Let's take the illustration a few steps further. We can use a normal distribution (“bell curve”) to model the results of polls whose errors are less than 3 points 90% of the time. With the assistance of Excel's random number generator and built-in normal distribution functions, I ran two dozen trials and plotted the results of the simulated polling errors:


The model calls for the errors to fall within plus-or-minus 3 points 90% of the time (in the long run, mind you). Ten percent of 24 trials is 2.4, so we should expect maybe 2 or 3 results to fall outside the plus-or-minus 3 band. In this little experiment, it happened four times, twice going high and twice low. Please note the dashed line marking the −2.5 boundary. Whenever the leader's margin was underestimated by at least 2.5 points (in a race with an actual 5-point margin), the lead changes hands—according to the poll, not reality. Imagine the breathless reports that would immediately blossom on the cable news networks, newspapers, radio talk shows, and blogs. Panic! Or elation!

Another thing to keep in mind: The model did the exact same randomized calculation each time, assuming no actual change in the electorate. You still get variation, an inevitable consequence of sample-based statistics. You're stuck with it and you have to live with it. And pundits love to live with it because it gives the illusion of motion even when none exists.

People should just calm down.

I swear that I did not cherry-pick my results in order to present one that looked especially dramatic. The graph above shows my initial run. I cranked out some more examples, just to see what they looked like. These appear, together with the original experiment, in the graph below. Does it look chaotic enough for you? (Only the blue graph failed to produce an artificial swap in the lead.) See? Major developments in the campaign! We have headlines!

Crouching Columnist, Hidden Agenda

Time to blame some more victims

New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch has decided to offer his own analysis of Tim Hardaway's egregious “I hate gay people” comments. Crouch calls for us to be more understanding—of Hardaway.

[I]t would be less than sensible to avoid trying to understand where Hardaway's opinions came from and where the attitudes that one can hear from Latin guys about homosexuals also come from. (I would also suggest that part of the problem is the result of the homosexual community being largely silent on certain issues.)

...

Far more than a few assume that the tales of pedophilia that almost brought down the Catholic Church in this nation describe a norm among homosexuals. I think that we have not had much serious discussion of these heinous acts in or out of prison because few homosexual activists have found it necessary to make clear that the conventional—and dominant—homosexual morality is built upon consenting adults, not rape and not pedophilia.

It seems to me that until homosexual activists clear this misunderstanding up, we will continue to have to deal with the physical attacks on homosexuals and the idea that homosexuals form a threat to the community in one way or another.

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Yes, indeed, I think we can all agree in a loving way that innocents like Tim Hardaway will continue to hate gay people as long as homosexual activists keep refusing to announce that they don't want to rape children. We've all noticed how civil rights legislation being pushed by gay activists refers to things like marriage and nondiscrimination. When will they ever learn that they need to include disavowals of any inclination toward sexual predation of minors?

What did Congressman Barney Frank say when the Supreme Court issued the Lawrence decision to overturn the sodomy statutes in the state of Texas? He said, “The decision by the Supreme Court to protect the privacy rights of all Americans by striking down state laws which seek to criminalize the private consenting sexual behavior of adults marks an important milestone in the protection of individual liberty in our country.” Sure, he mentioned “adults,” but he failed to say “and not children”!

It's really all the fault of the gay activists. And because of that, people like Tim Hardaway are made to suffer.

Thanks for pointing this out, Stanley! You could, however, have strengthened your argument by noting that the progress of civil rights for African Americans was based on constant reminders by Martin Luther King, Jr., and others that black people are not lazy and shiftless. Except for poor Rosa Parks, who was too tired to get up and move to the back of the bus, everyone agreed that the way to beat foolish stereotypes is to call attention to them constantly.

I saw it on the Internets

Reportage 101

Would you like to be a journalist? We who blog aren't journalists, you know, but we can always learn from the example of one of today's highly paid professionals.

This morning on KSFO's Morning Show, Lee Rodgers showed how it's done. Since I have a rather delicate stomach, I never listen to San Francisco's “Hot Talk” radio station for more than a few minutes at a time. Nevertheless, Rodgers is a consummate professional who can always be relied up to deliver some priceless bit of reportage—pronounced in the French manner, of course—so he must be dishing it out nonstop.

Today he was trying to pump some life into the limp story about Pelosi's supposed demand for a castle in the sky. Or was it a stairway to heaven? In any case, Rodgers waxed indignant that Pelosi was allegedly demanding special treatment from the military authorities who provide secure transportation to the Speaker of the House. After all, Speaker Hastert was given a plane that flew him nonstop to Illinois any time he wished. Why should Speaker Pelosi expect more?

Well, maybe because she's from California? Last I heard, that's a little farther from D.C. than the Land of Lincoln. If the current Speaker is to be accorded the equivalent privilege of a nonstop trip to her home district, deemed advisable by the House Sergeant at Arms, it seems reasonable that a slightly more robust plane than Hastert's might be required.

Perhaps Rodgers is weak on geography.

But no! Rodgers sneeringly explained to his listeners that Pelosi was making unreasonable demands and he could prove it. I pricked up my ears. Right-wing radio prefers to offer blatant assertions and specious allegations, so the announcement of forthcoming evidence suggested a new era was dawning for KSFO. Rodgers was eager to tell the radio audience exactly how to examine the proof for itself.

His secret weapon was Google: “Type in ‘Gulfstream,’” Rodgers said. “Type in ‘specifications.’”

He then read from one of the references provided by Google. Rodgers chortled that the Gulfstream III jet previously assigned to Hastert has a range of nearly 4000 miles, providing “proof positive” that Pelosi was demanding special treatment, California being less than 4000 miles from Washington, D.C.

As we all know, information provided by the many tubes of the Internets is carefully vetted, completely reliable, and utterly unambiguous.

Rodgers never got to the part about how a plane's range is significantly affected by passenger load, headwinds, and other flight conditions. Since he didn't read that there are plenty of circumstances under which a Gulfstream III cannot reliably be expected to make it across the country nonstop, that concern magically vanishes.

We mustn't blame him for this. As a highly paid professional journalist, Lee Rodgers must have known that too much research would have made his story vanish, too. He couldn't have that!

Molly Ivins, stand-up broad

Too soon, too soon

I'm going to miss Molly Ivins, a long-time sure-fire antidote for the lame pap that usually graces the opinion pages of our nation's newspapers. She tried to warn us about her state's lackwit governor, but the nation went and let him become president anyway. If anyone deserved to live long enough to see the final crash-and-burn end of the Bush administration, it was Molly. Her early death is just one more piece of evidence that we live in an unjust universe. Them's the breaks, damn it.

Since Molly won't be here to help us, let us all—great and small—redouble our efforts as volunteers in the Shrub-pruning brigade!













Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?, Molly Ivins













Nothin' But Good Times Ahead, Molly Ivins













Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush, Molly Ivins & Lou Dubose













Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America, Molly Ivins & Lou Dubose

Lee Rodgers shows his expertise

My ears hurt

Listening to two hours of the Lee Rodgers & Melanie Morgan Show on KSFO is more than any sane person should endure, but today is the day of their special act of desperation, the “no-holds-barred broadcast” intended to answer their critics. Since I'll be at work and unable to listen to Rodgers and Morgan attack the liberal bloggers who called them to account for their on-air hate speech, I decided I'd catch some of their regular drive-time show. Rodgers was in fine form.

Attacking liberal bloggers as “lying bastards” for supposedly taking audio clips “out of context” (endorsements of torture and summary execution are much more palatable in context, you know), Rodgers opined that we are pathetic creatures who lurk in basements, “playing with themselves.” Sorry, Lee, but speaking only for myself: I don't have a basement and therefore cannot play with myself there. In fact, I prefer the spare bedroom where the computer is. When I play with myself in the computer room, I tend to favor Spider Solitaire, which is pretty cool. (I cannot say what Lee is thinking of when he fantasizes about bloggers playing with themselves.)

Lee was particularly critical of bloggers who use pseudonyms. We're cowards, you see. After delivering that pronouncement, he promptly began to talk about the sad plight of conservatives in the liberal Bay Area, such as right-wing school teachers who fear retaliation and loss of employment if their colleagues were to find out about their political leanings. “I can't give their names, of course,” said Rodgers. Yeah, Lee, they want to remain anonymous, huh? You forgot to call them cowards. (By the way, if they're public school teachers, their support for KSFO is like chickens giving their endorsement to Colonel Sanders. They could be too dumb to be teachers.)

None of that was my favorite moment, however. That came during the 7:00 hour when Rodgers denounced Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney for rescinding his directive allowing state police to turn over illegal immigrants to immigration agents. Rodgers declared that this meant Romney had completely lost credibility with Republicans by this egregious surrender to the pro-immigration lobby. One tiny detail, Lee: Romney is no longer the governor of Massachusetts. Didn't you notice the recent inaugurations of the governors elected last November? We even had one here in California. The governor of Massachusetts is Deval Patrick, and he is the one who rescinded his predecessor's directive. I do, however, agree that Gov. Patrick, a Democrat, has no chance of winning the Republican nomination for president.

Lee Rodgers: the consummate conservative political analyst.

By the way, Rodgers cited Fox News as his source for the item about Romney. Either Fox was wrong (totally possible), Rodgers misread the item (certainly conceivable), or they both screwed up (most likely of all!).

Saucing the goose

Take a gander at this

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders is one of the less loony members of the political right. I realize that's a very low bar, but Saunders has been known to depart on occasion from the list of official Republican talking points. Today, however, Saunders spins very reliably to the right as she welcomes the Democratic renaissance in Congress. As she identifies several rhetorical points raised in past political debates, it seems that only the left exhibited any mendacity or hypocrisy; right-wingers were reliably on the side of the angels:

Ring out the old bromides

—Debra J. Saunders
Tuesday, January 2, 2007

There are certain arguments that partisans repeat as if they are holy and certain—until the arguments are no longer convenient. Here are some bromides and political arguments that were broadly used in the last few years, but now have outlived their usefulness, so you probably won't hear them much in 2007:

The Pottery Barn Rule: You broke it, you own it. There was a time you couldn't go a day without hearing an Iraq-war opponent invoke former Secretary of State Colin Powell's famous warning about sending U.S. troops into Iraq. Apparently these folks never really believed in the rule, because they now want America to disown an Iraq mired in chaos.

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We liberals should have recognized that Secretary Powell was enunciating a cosmic truth when he used the apocryphal Pottery Barn Rule as a metaphor for the danger of an invasion of Iraq. As the scope of Bush's miscalculation became apparent, we chimed in with “We told you so, dammit!” and the war apologists snapped back with “Yeah, we screwed the pooch, but now we're all stuck with this sorry dog!” I guess staying the course is supposed to make things better. Does Saunders really believe that? Does she think any anti-war protester believes that? Or ever believed it?

Impeachment is an attempt to overturn a popular election. The left used that argument repeatedly when the GOP House impeached President Bill Clinton. Funny, you don't hear the left making that argument when Democrats call for the House to start impeachment proceedings against President Bush.

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The left used that argument repeatedly because it was true. Republicans never tired of casting doubts on the legitimacy of the Clinton presidency, insisting that he won with less than an absolute majority of votes only because Perot's independent candidacy siphoned off votes that were rightfully theirs. Does Saunders want to point out how quickly this argument was dropped when George W. Bush squeaked into office with fewer votes than Al Gore?

There's another point to be made here, too. The Republicans had to try to box Clinton in by turning a consensual liaison into a supposedly impeachable offense by engaging in deliberate entrapment. It was a lot of sound and fury about extremely little. Those who want to impeach Bush have much meatier accusations.

Presidential wannabes should have military experience. Bush's National Guard duty as a pilot was not enough for Democrats, who cited Sen. John Kerry's combat medals as a reason to elect him president. Alas, combat experience didn't cinch the election for Kerry in 2004. Now, with Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama likely to run in 2008, and former Sen. John Edwards' hat already in the ring—not to mention the strong potential that a Vietnam war hero, Sen. John McCain, will head the 2008 GOP ticket—the military experience and hero status that was supposed to put Kerry in the Oval Office won't be so vital for presidential candidates any more.

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We cited John Kerry's combat medals as a contrast to George W. Bush's curiously truncated career in the Texas Air National Guard. Saunders can disdain the chicken-hawk argument all she likes, but liberals have not made any kind of joint announcement that we all think military service is a prerequisite for national office. However, we do, I think, generally believe that ducking out via multiple deferments or preferential admission to a National Guard unit is a pretty solid disqualification for anyone aspiring to be a gung-ho saber-rattler.

The president should be more skeptical of U.S. intelligence on Iraq. Forget former CIA chief George Tenet's assurance that it was a “slam dunk” Saddam Hussein had WMD. Bush was supposed to not believe that finding of U.S. intelligence on Iraq. But now, when U.S. intelligence estimates suggest that Iraq is unwinnable, editorial boards across the country assume the intelligence must be accurate.

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The aforementioned Colin Powell has already informed us how he was spoonfed information that was known to others to be highly speculative. George W. Bush doesn't like advisors to tell him things that go contrary to his preconceived convictions, so it's not surprising in retrospect that he hardly ever heard anything he didn't want to hear. Bush fostered the misinformation machine of which he is now supposedly the victim. We're not so much arguing that Bush should have been more skeptical of CIA intelligence as we are saying that he should have been interested in more of it—not just the cherry-picked stuff.

Washington's deficit spending is unconscionable. This year, Republicans will want to maintain the Bush tax cuts and Democrats will be enjoying their return to power. In 2007, many 2006 deficit hawks from both parties will go wobbly.

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Saunders gets one right here. But I'll offer a mild dissent to her pox-on-both-houses approach: The Democrats will prove to be a lot more responsible about spending than the Republicans. Of course, that's not going to be difficult, is it?

Americans need to sacrifice and cut back on their energy use to fight global warming. Global warming remains an article of faith, but you can say bye-bye to the notion that fighting global warming will require good citizens to cut back. GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sees no problem with owning four Hummers and tooling around in a private jet—while he orders the state to reduce its output of greenhouse gases. Former veep Al Gore, who once wrote that fighting global warming would require “sacrifice, struggle and a wrenching transformation of society,” now tells gullible movie-goers that fighting global warming will be good for the economy and create jobs.

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Yes, Al Gore has retooled his message. The response to global warming will require a transformation of many of the casual consumption routines of our society, but Gore and his allies have shifted their attention to more attractive aspects of the transformation: new jobs, new technologies, and new attentiveness to individual responsibility. How amusing that Saunders gives the Hummer-driving Schwarzenegger as an example of mere lip service to our environmental problems. Here she shows her independence, instead of echoing specious claims that Gore would stay home and hold his breath if he were sincere about the dangers of global warming—instead of jetting about the country addressing every group he can. How refreshing of her.

Bush hasn't asked Americans to sacrifice because of the war in Iraq. Most of the folks I see making this argument aren't sacrificing anything to further the war effort either—they're just using the war to bolster their support for higher taxes on the rich. And they want the need for sacrifice to turn Americans against the war. Now that polls show that Americans don't support the war, the pro-sacrifice crowd will ditch the phony sacrifice argument.

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It's not a phony argument. We who opposed the war aren't too keen about paying for it, but at least we realize it has to be done. On the other side, though, we see an array of profiteers. Bush's war has been a hand-over-fist money maker for his friends among the Washington beltway establishment of military contractors. Furthermore, the sacrifice is definitely coming: Bush is handing the bill for his shoot-'em-up foreign policy to the nation's children and grandchildren. After all, pay-as-you-go is for sissies, not for cowboys!

Happy New Year.

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Yes. Happy New Year to you, too, Debra. May you try a little harder in 2007.

A little mind with a big mouth

No foolish consistency here

Move America Forward is a small group of right-wingers under the leadership of Melanie Morgan. Morgan is a second-string Ann Coulter, a tireless propagandist who never lets a little inaccuracy stand in the way of her rosy vision of victory in Iraq. She shares her extremist views by means of her pressure group's mailing lists and her morning talk show program on San Francisco's KSFO.

Morgan is terribly upset by the release of the report of the Iraq Study Group. She fears that George W. Bush—whom she often criticizes for not being conservative enough—will fold under pressure from the learned elders of his father's administration and agree to a thinly disguised cut-and-run policy. Morgan has issued a hilarious missive to rally her troops in defense of a stay-the-course program. She didn't mean for her message to be amusing. Her tunnel vision prevents her from seeing just how funny she is. Can you find the punch line in Morgan's call to arms?

We had to know that the Iraq Study Group would be short-sighted when it was announced that the members of the group were politicians and political insiders.

None of the principal members of the Iraq Study Group have served in Iraq or had immediate family members who served in Iraq.

None of these members even bothered to visit the peaceful part of Iraq—Iraqi Kurdistan—to see where things were working out well.

Move America Forward has issued the “Gold Star Families Iraq Survey Group Report” which is authored by several individuals who have either served in Operation Iraqi Freedom or had a family member who had served.

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Sorry! I couldn't help myself. The emphasis was added by me. It wasn't in the original. Without a thought in her amazing brain, Morgan actually criticized the Iraq Study Group for its lack of personal connection to the civil war in Iraq. Here's a statement that she did not write, perhaps because it's too true:

None of the principal members of the Bush administration have served in Iraq or had immediate family members who served in Iraq.

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Morgan apparently thinks it's okay if a bunch of privileged civilians get to play soldier with real blood and guts (blood and guts conveniently belonging to other people), but it's shockingly presumptuous for a panel of similarly privileged patricians to pass judgment on the egregious errors of the first group.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is famous for (among other things) saying that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” and Walt Whitman boldly proclaimed, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Morgan, however, would never admit that she contradicts herself. Oh, no: She had achieved foolish inconsistency.

The Ann Coulter autopsy

Dissecting the public persona

The right-wing cultural phenomenon known as Ann Coulter has another book on the New York Times bestseller list. We can dismiss the inflated sales figures all we like (for example, NewsMax gave away hardcover copies at $4.99 in a promotion to acquire new magazine subscribers), but we must face the fact that a lot of people are actually buying the book. Even my mother, to my lasting shame, has purchased a Coulter book.

Facts and reality have never been Ann's friends (nor she theirs), although her usefulness to the extremist agenda in American politics has encouraged many people to overlook her mendacity. It's not an easy thing to overlook, either, especially as her diligent detractors have done a splendid job of demolishing her specious arguments and exposing her factual errors. I do not propose to carry further coals to Newcastle by piling on additional evidence of her fondness for falsehood, although I will certainly have occasion to cite specific instances. My purpose instead is to take a scalpel to Coulter's public persona, the wind-up avatar that haunts the precincts of Fox and CNN, and examine the cogs and gears of its entrails. While I doubt that the public Coulter is the same as the private Coulter, it matters not whether she is a true believer or merely a highly successful hypocrite.

Let's take her at face value and ask some questions. The answers will be documented in the most responsible manner possible—with her own words.

Question: Is Ann Coulter a Christian?

Answer: No. She is not. Yes, I know the risk of running afoul of Matthew 7:1. (Okay, for you heathens out there, Mt. 7:1 is “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” I'm quoting from the King James Version, of course, the big gay edition authorized by the big gay king.) I am not, however, Coulter's judge and I disavow any presumption that I can see into her “heart” (or whatever bionic device thumps in her chest). I merely cite the public record and refer to Mt. 7:16 (“Ye shall know them by their fruits”).

Coulter told Human Events Online that, “Christianity fuels everything I write.” Thus her claim to be Christian is explicit. However, she also told Geraldo Rivera, “Let's say I go out every night, I meet a guy and have sex with him. Good for me. I'm not married.” Unrepentant fornication is not an attribute of the genuine Christian.

Neither is bearing false witness, famously barred in one of the Ten Commandments. False witness, however, has never troubled Coulter. The title of her book Slander is as much a description of its contents as anything it purports to report. When the Columbia Journalism Review examined some of the challenged claims contained in Coulter's book, it found that she seemed quite comfortable in ignoring or twisting the truth. Here's one example:

Coulter Claim: She introduces a New York Times editorial on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas headlined the youngest, cruelest justice, then writes: “Thomas is not engaged on the substance of his judicial philosophy. He is called ‘a colored lawn jockey for conservative white interests,’ ‘race traitor,’ ‘black snake,’ ‘chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom’ ....” (p. 12)

Footnote: The passage is constructed to suggest that the Times authored these epithets, but the footnote refers readers to comments made in a Playboy article, which goes unmentioned in the book's text.

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Is it at all credible that such a misrepresentation should have occurred by accident? No, it's clearly a lie by implication. She may have left herself a fig-leaf of deniability and claim to have been misconstrued if challenged on the veracity of her statement, but false witness is not diminished by the provision of an alibi. If Jimmy Carter can lust in his heart, Coulter can just as clearly lie in her books.

We can search all we like for evidence of Christian fruits in Coulter's work, but all we find are fleurs du mal.

Question: Is Ann Coulter pretty?

Answer: Yes and no. Normally this is a question that is properly considered out of bounds whenever the topic is something other than a beauty pageant. Coulter herself, however, has specifically made this part of her stock in trade. Her long blonde hair is a cherished trademark and her regular features are conventionally attractive. Skin deep, anyway. Coulter's website features a glamor-puss portfolio of pin-up pictures for her devotees. She even told TV Guide, “I am emboldened by my looks to say things Republican men wouldn't.” Sadly, though, Coulter is boxing herself in by relying on an evanescent asset. She bragged about her looks to TV Guide in 1997, and it's been downhill all the way since then. You can keep your brains in top condition for decades, but the blonde bombshell look is highly perishable. At 44 years of age, Ann is coming to the end of her shelf-life as a professional beauty.

Question: Is Ann Coulter smart?

Answer: She clearly is. A stupid person could not have built herself into such a success. Besides, she's a cum laude university graduate. That takes brains. While she may prostitute her intelligence in the cause of making a living as the flame-tongued goddess of the wacko right, the intelligence is clearly there. She might even be smart enough to have a hearty contempt for the wingnuts who have fallen under her spell, but that's speculation.

Question: Is Ann Coulter conservative?

Answer: No, not in any meaningful sense. Coulter is an extremist who uses the unbridled language of the anarchist. Her excuse, if she bothers to give one, is that she is “joking” when she makes outrageous statements. Her defenders think that people should be able to perceive the puckish humor when she declares that domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh should have blown up the New York Times, “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.” However, when asked if she had been kidding, Coulter said, “No, I think the Timothy McVeigh line was merely prescient,” claiming that the newspaper was treasonous and deserved wanton destruction. Perhaps that was supposed to be a joke, too.

Coulter loves to employ the eliminationist rhetoric that characterizes the extremist fringe, the hate groups that nibble at the edges of American society. David Neiwert of Orcinus cited Coulter's witticism about the senior justice of the U.S. Supreme Court: “We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens' creme brulee. That's just a joke, for you in the media.” Yeah, pretty funny. Neiwert pondered her ostensibly funny remark:

Although, perhaps, Ann could explain just what was supposed to be humorous about it. Perhaps I'm just dense, but assassinations have never been very funny matters in my experience. Is this a new hip thing?

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No, David, you're right. Ann is just a stone bitch. In addition to lacking the Christian virtue of charity, she displays no real talent for wit or humor. It's just nastiness, eaten up raw by her acolytes, who confuse pandering with cleverness.

Question: Does Ann Coulter support traditional family values?

Answer: She only claims to. In terms of political rhetoric, she does as much gay-bashing as the Christian right could pray for, but Coulter is a childless spinster. Traditional families are apparently for other people, not bachelorette Ann.

Question: Does Ann Coulter understand science?

Answer: Maybe. I'm not sure. It depends on whether she means what she says in her most recent book, Godless. If her chapters on evolution are not merely more of her pandering schtick, if she really believes what they contain, then Coulter does not understand science at all. She writes that evolution is simply an excuse for atheism, although it is entirely independent of atheism. It's an example of bad reasoning on her part, a chain of bastardized logic that runs like this: The theory of evolution does not require God as part of its explanation for the development of life on earth, therefore it is inimically opposed to the very idea of God. If Coulter thinks that's valid reasoning, then her brain doesn't work right. Her anti-evolution arguments are merely the reheated leftovers of such isolated and retrograde thinkers as Dembski and Berlinski, two mathematically trained men who are fond of spouting symbolic gibberish in defense of Intelligent Design.

Coulter writes like someone who hasn't the faintest notion what science is, possesses no pertinent ideas of her own, and regards the entire enterprise with contempt. This is probably the reason that scientists tend to return the favor.

Question: Is Ann Coulter honest?

Answer: No. God, no! Haven't you been paying any attention?

Whoring for jr

Brit has been there before

Reversion to the mean is a phenomenon unhappily familiar to a host of people whose names bear the appendage “Jr.” Just ask the juniors whose names are Frank Sinatra, Hank Williams, or Franklin Roosevelt. When a remarkable talent appears in a family's line of descent, chances are extremely good that the next generation will suffer by comparison. To quote MathWorld, “ [A]n extreme event is likely to be followed by a less extreme event.”

Some people, however, take an extraordinarily long time to recognize when reversion has struck, even when the evidence keeps shoving itself in your face. Brit Hume of Fox News is one such person. It's happened to him at least twice, and both occasions were painfully obvious to disinterested observers. Brit is very good at keeping the faith.

The first time Brit Hume fell at the feet of an unworthy scion of aristocratic descent was in the 1980s. The pedigree could not have been more elevated, but the results could scarcely have been more disappointing. IBM had provided the personal computing industry with overnight credibility when it deigned to enter the market in 1981 with the IBM Personal Computer. For all of its limitations—some of them significant—Big Blue's desktop computer was immensely successful and quickly invaded business offices and homes across the world. After all, the name of IBM conjured digital magic and everyone took it seriously. The pioneering companies in home computing were swept away, with only Apple hanging on as a distant second.

Everyone assumed that the IBM juggernaut would continue with its follow-up products, and to a degree everyone was right. IBM tweaked the PC by adding a hard disk model (the PC XT in 1983) and a larger model with a more powerful microprocessor (the PC AT in 1984), but the real buzz concerned Big Blue's second generation computer—code-named “Peanut.” We who belonged to computer user groups had access to the latest and most lurid rumors: Peanut would be multitasking. Peanut would have a windowing operating system. Peanut would have dazzling graphical capabilities. Peanut would revolutionize personal computing.

The elephant labored mightily and brought forth ... a mouse. The IBM PCjr was an instant anticlimax. The keyboard was an embarrassment (IBM had to redesign and replace it). The graphics were a slight improvement over those of the original PC (more colors, but the same resolution). There was only one disk drive (and it was a floppy, of course). The slots for ROM cartridges had no software except for a few games (and Lotus 1-2-3, the only serious business program ported to the jr). With additional expenditures for add-ons and secondary market products, a user could bring the PCjr up to the level of a regular PC, by which point its modest price advantage relative to the original PC was more than wiped out.

The IBM PCjr was released with great fanfare in 1984 and quietly killed in 1985. Big Blue burned off its large inventory of unsold PCjrs with deep discounts during the 1984 Christmas season. Brit Hume was one of the many people who went for the bait and found themselves cut off when IBM discontinued the product and its support a few months later. He made the best of a bad deal by sharing his observations and travails in articles published in Monitor, the monthly newsletter of the Capital PC User Group in Washington, D.C. Brit's column carried various titles, but the most common one was Living with jr. His running theme was that the jr wasn't that bad. Really.

Once a dupe...

George W. Bush isn't precisely a junior, but reversion to the mean has worked with a vengeance in his case. The end result will be that history will upgrade his father to “the good George Bush” to distinguish him from his successor and namesake. Brit Hume was a sucker for a weakling with a good pedigree twenty years ago, and he remains one today. As a regular apologist for Bush administration pratfalls, Brit was the perfect choice for Dick Cheney's lukewarm and muddled apologia for his clumsy shooting of a hunting companion. The only damage Cheney took from his interview on Fox stemmed from his general incoherence rather than Hume's close questioning. (How many of Brit's questions were written for him by White House flacks?)

Not to belabor the point, I would like to share some of Brit's comments from Living with jr in back issues of the Capital PC Monitor. His talent for making excuses in the face of incompetence and disappointment goes back at least that far.

Take heart, PCjr owners. IBM's loss can be your gain. Contrary to what you may have read about the jr, it has turned out to be one of the great values in the history of microcomputing. (December 1985)

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And George W. Bush will turn out to be one of the great presidents in the history of the republic.

There are a lot of ways to expand a PCjr, but if you aren't careful, you can end up spending as much as the cost of the computer itself, or more. (January 1986)

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“Or more”—the mantra of Bush policy toward tax cuts and defense spending, both of which enrich his political allies.

Few people can enter the basement room that houses my home computer system without gasping at the rat's nest of wires that hangs from the rear of it. This is not what IBM had in mind when it designed the PCjr.... (April 1988)

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All computers are festooned with wires and cables, but it's worse when even basic equipment needs to be installed as add-ons. Making the jr into an adequate computer frequently involved the purchase of a second entire chassis to install the expansion boards that would not fit into the original system unit. I suppose the obvious parallel to try to draw with the Bush administration is to suggest that we need a second president to offset the inadequacies of the one we have... But we tried that with Cheney, right? And we all know how that is working out.

Note: The good old days of personal computer user groups are behind us now. Except for rare survivors like the Houston Area League, most of the clubs are gone or reduced to shadows of their former selves. I joined a number of these groups just to get their excellent newsletters. The Monitor was a prime example. My archive of its back issues probably makes me one of the few people on the West Coast who could have written this article. Once again procrastination in cleaning off the shelves has proved its worth!