Month: November 2007

For the second consecutive day I will not only mention George Will but also tip my hat to him. Don't worry, it's in the context of tearing him a new one.

Kudos to Mr. Will for recommending Curveball by devoting his Nov. 12 column to it. If this book were mandatory reading for every American adult I can guarantee you that we'd avoid the impending aerial fireworks display over Iran. Alas, it is not required reading. But if you feel like being really angry (or have an academic interest in group decision-making along the lines of Scott Plous' Psychology of Judgment and Decision-Making) don't wait another minute to read it.

Good work, George. Unfortunately, even in your best moment you cannot hide what a pedantic, smug, and condescending tool you are. To wit (emphasis mine):

(Curveball) claimed to have been deeply involved in Hussein's sophisticated and deadly science, particularly those notorious mobile labs. Notorious and, we now know, nonexistent.

A few months ago I wrote about the Republican Unburdening of the Soul (RUotS) ritual, for which I have exactly zero patience. The nation is littered with middle-aged white guys who are just so gosh darn upset about this war for which they were mindless cheerleaders in 2002 and 2003. They wander around seeking absolution and loudly speaking of lessons learned. Will is doing the pundit's version – the I Made an Honest Mistake ritual. Put in the uncomfortable position of having to rationalize how they got Iraq so completely, mind-bendingly wrong, pundits' choices are limited. If they're not going to go Bill Kristol (i.e., "Wrong? I'm not wrong!") then the only tactic left is….Well golly, folks, how on Earth was I to know that the entire case for war was based on a mountain of happy horseshit? Will titles his column "Seeing what's not there is a dicey strategy" like a man who speaks from experience. And yet he still won't accept responsibility for it.

Yes, George, "we now know" that the WMD stockpiles and the cartoon drawings of mobile bioweapons labs were nonexistent. Of course there was just no way of knowing that at the time, nor was there even the slightest cause for skepticism. That's odd, given that I recall reading quite a bit about the Judith Miller – Chalabi – Curveball dog & pony show long before the White House sent Uncle Colin's credibility on a kamikaze run to the U.N. We hear a similar, if not identical, argument from Hillary Clinton (and John Kerry in 2004) – "I voted for the war because I believed the President. How on Earth was I to know, or even suspect, that the entire administration is full of shit to the bursting point?" Such rationalizations leave only two possible conclusions: either they (Hillary, Will, etc) are flat-out lying or they are criminally stupid. To expect us to accept that they swallowed the White House's story with less skepticism than the average American uses to shop for a new car is beyond insulting.

My advice to the gentle reader: let no one (columnists or random right-wing acquaintances) wash off the blood so easily. There are 4,000 servicepeople and untold six-figure numbers of Iraqi civilians dead on account of their thundering ignorance. Indulging their quest for forgiveness and accepting "It was an honest mistake based on what we knew at the time!" is simply the most efficient way of ensuring that no one learns anything from this experience – meaning, of course, that we will be repeating it presently.*

So please blow it directly out your ass, Mr. Will. Take your guilt to your grave. There will be ample time for your rationalizations then, and you will need them.

*No, I am not using that incorrectly. "Presently" means, in the classical sense, "imminently."

On Sunday's edition of This Week on ABC, the panelists engaged in a discussion about the overall mood of the electorate in which Cokie Roberts characterized it as "slightly Democratic." Many commentators, for example the folks at Crooks & Liars (where I continue to get good plugs every time Mike, who apparently hates me, goes on vacation and leaves the Round-Up to guest moderators), have mocked Roberts for her biased or flat-out incorrect assessment of the current political landscape. They cite both polls and commentary by well-respected political scientist John Judis as support for the idea of a strongly Democratic swing in the electorate. I will now put myself in the awkward position of defending the likes of George Will and Cokie Roberts.

The C&L author comments, "Um, hello? See that forest, Cokie? It's made of trees." Oh, Cokie sees the trees alright. And she knows quite well how they behave. A year prior to the election they will all voice appropriately loud discontent with the Republicans. They'll talk about how they're tired of the war in Iraq (they are either legitimately sick of it or afraid of looking like a moron for voicing their support for it). They will voice outright hatred for George W. Bush. And they will claim, in the most extreme cases, that they are done with the GOP altogether.

Twelve months from now the election will require action, not just complaining. Complaining is easy and cost-free. People can say whatever the hell they want right now because it doesn't matter. Making a decision will have consequences. It is easy to offer sweeping criticism of the Republicans in 2007, but Cokie understands that when shove comes back to push the Republican Issue of Last Resort – taxes – will sway oh-so-many of these newly discontented suburban Republicans. They have 12 long months to rationalize why voting for Giuliani or whoever is "different" than supporting the incumbent administration. The right-wing media will give them dozens of excuses for why Rudy ain't so bad (or, more likely, why Hillary is Too Horrible to Imagine Let Alone Support).

In those 12 months they'll slowly – and so terribly predictably – decide that they're really against the war in Iraq, but……golly, ducking the Alternative Minimum Tax sure would be sweet. They'll reassure their friends that they really think the GOP is corrupt and incompetent, but…..boy could they use that Capital Gains Tax cut. They value human life, but the sad truth is that they value paying 31% in federal income taxes instead of 33% just a little more.

No, Cokie Roberts is not intelligent. On this point, however, she is either correct by accident or showing a deeper understanding of the selfish, solipsistic trees than her critics realize.

(PS: Apologies to a favorite regular commenter for the political flavor of Friday's NPF)

So this is the last time I'm going to dignify David Horowitz's existence. I promise.

You might need to watch this video. D-Ho doesn't like being filmed, so thank the miracle of hidden cameras for this masterpiece. Go ahead, take a few minutes to watch it.
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I'll wait.

Am I misperceiving or is he essentially a circus freak at this point?

Is going to a Horowitz "lecture" driven by the same impulse that makes us click on the headlines about the girl with 8 limbs? Look at that guy. The uncoordinated lumbering back and forth, the ranting, the obsession with conspiracies against him, the talking into the ground or his chest, the complete lack of any coherent structure to his thoughts….this man belongs on a street corner behind a bus station with a colander on his head and a Bo Gritz for President sandwich board. This is starting to raise Wesley Willis-esque questions about whether it is OK to laugh at him when he is so obviously mentally ill.
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This is the sad, sad downside of our collective overreaction to the right-wing industry of manufacturing insidious webs of bias and prejudice against their viewpoints. If we don't let him speak – and in fact if we don't invite him to campus so he can do so on our dime – we're silencing the right.

But if conservatives want to be represented by a man who belongs in the darkened corridor of a state mental institution, picking corn out of his own shit and accusing the nurses of poisoning him, that's just fine by me. The first rule of electoral politics is that when your opponent is tying his own noose, don't interrupt.

I lack the time for an in-depth entry today, but please, please take the time to read this (Part I and Part II) discussion of "the greatest story never told."

You know what I find really ironic about the post-2001 Neocon Economy? It's encouraging people to work for the government. They stand there cheering and rationalizing as one industry after another pulls up its chutes and heads to the third world.
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Since all of our "economic growth" these days is nothing more than consumer spending dumped on credit cards, the entire matchstick house depends on individuals' ability to service their debt. Losing a decent job and replacing it with a Taco Bell shift won't cut it. So where do we look for stability?

Un-outsource-able jobs? Working for the government. Teachers. Cops. Professors. District attorneys. Civil servants. Face it, in another 20 years that's essentially all that will be safe from outsourcing.
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If today's "knowledge economy" superstars really think that there won't be Indian and Indonesian accountants, lawyers, IT people, etc., ready to take their jobs they're in for a charming surprise.

So thanks, Cato Institute! You've gotten your way, and now "the market" is telling us that the best (and perhaps only) bet is the government teat.

One common complaint among political scientists, or those who like complaining about academia, is that so much research has so little to do with real politics. This is not a difficult argument to support; one could easily read a dozen contemporary academic journals and count on one hand the articles that are actually relevant outside of a university setting. As you can imagine, there are two camps on this subject. Some people feel that research is not intended to be popular reading and that it necessarily targets a very small audience. This argument is not without merit. Academic journals are written in a way that presupposes a lot of knowledge on the part of its readers.

Conversely it is often argued that research, or at least its conclusions, should be somehow applicable to the real world. In other words, you may not care about academic argument nor will you understand all of the statistical jargon/literature reviews in an article but you will be interested to know that the research shows X and Y to be true. I fall firmly in this camp. I believe that the first question to ask of any research agenda is "Will I be able to explain this to an intelligent layperson, and if so will he care?" Of course research cannot be written to the average Jerry Springer audience. But a normal person with an interest in politics and the ability to process arguments above the Sean Hannity level should be able to grasp the implications of your findings.

From time to time I would like to take the opportunity to share some relevant research with you the gentle readers. I don't care to turn this into an academic blog (believe it or not, there are plenty in every conceivable field of interest) but I think it's important for more people to realize that there is solid empirical support – quantitative and experimental – for many of the things we presume to know about the political landscape. In other words, "Right-wing talk radio badly misinforms people" is not an assumption but rather a well-supported argument.

Along those lines I would like to recommend one of my favorite pieces of public opinion research, one that goes a long way toward understanding why our national political discourse is one step above a throng of retards slap-fighting in a mud puddle. Jim Kuklinski and Paul Quirk's
"Reconsidering the Rational Public: Cognition, Heuristics, and Mass Opinion" from Elements of Reason (if I link the book they might not punch me for posting a chapter here) is one of the best, most cynical analyses of individual-level public opinion that you will find. While I doubt you're interested in reading 50 pages of it without the benefit of course credit, even a glance at their experimental results (pages 28 and beyond) will be interesting.

The authors perform a series of lab experiments to measure opinions, information, and how individuals react when their beliefs conflict with facts. They ask the participants to guess what portion of the budget is spent on welfare, offer an appropriate amount to spend on welfare (if it differs), and state how confident they are in their estimations. The findings tell a lot of us what we already know.

First, the Reagan years of "welfare queen" rhetoric have resulted in nearly every participant significantly overestimating the amount we spend on welfare payments (other forms of public aid were explicitly not included in the discussion). Some guessed amounts as much as 25% of the annual budget. Secondly, and more importantly, people are wildly overconfident in their levels of information. Two of three respondents were either "confident" or "very confident" that their guesses were accurate. The relationship between accuracy and confidence was inverse; that is, the less accurate the guess, the more confident the respondent was in its accuracy.

If you have a strong stomach you can proceed to the section entitled "Resistance to Correction" (p. 29). Presenting the participants with facts showing that their responses were incorrect had almost no effect on their opinions. Very few of them were willing to revise their positions or retract their previous statements even when the hard facts were put in front of them. In short the beliefs/preferences of participants with no information were indistinguishable from those who were given the facts. There is no relationship between what these people believed and reality. Whether the two coincided or not was irrelevant to the firmness with which they clung to their versions of the facts.

If you've ever wondered why debating "average people" about…well, about anything is so goddamn fulfilling, I think this type of research does an excellent job explaining it. People aren't "stupid" in the sense that they lack information or access to it (well, that may also be the case but it's beside the point). The truth is much more depressing. It makes absolutely no difference whether or not they have information. Presenting the average American with cold, hard facts disproving his or her beliefs is likely to be of no consequence, especially on issues connected to a set of ideological beliefs or values.

Our society encourages people to create their own reality, and it is succeeding. Bertrand Russell said "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." In the current political landscape we find that the less people know, the more confident they are that they know everything.

Among the most common criticisms of our political system is the appallingly small amount of time spent debating issues of actual importance.
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Of course the media bears the lion's share of the responsibility, with 36 hours of OJ Simpson coverage for every 10 minutes of political news (pundits screaming at one another does not count). You already know this and you've heard it all before.

What amazes me lately is the extent to which talking about absolute nonsense has become the official strategy of the right these days. I am well accustomed to the concept of latching onto anything to divert attention from the trainwreck that is Iraq, but the last couple of weeks have just floored me. As someone else put it, they have refined the Art of the Hissy Fit to an unprecedented degree.

We have moved in an almost unbroken chain from the Petraeus/MoveOn story to Obama Won't Wear a Flag Pin to Columbia University Hosts Ahmadinejad to Pete Stark's comments to Al Gore Winning the Nobel Prize to Dumbledore is Gay to Islamo-Fascism. Just two solid months of pure, unadulterated, pulled-out-of-asses bullshit non-events. Every one was fabricated out of whole cloth by Drudge or Malkin or O'Reilly or whoever. None of this even remotely qualifies as relevant news.

I seriously do not know from where the right wing media get the stamina to constantly maintain such a high state of phony moral outrage. How many times can this act be played out before even the dumbest listeners approach fatigue? After so many hissy fits in such rapid succession, Mary Ann from South Dakota must be wondering "Gee Rush, is this really important? I can only write so many angry emails in a day." The fruit fly sized attention span of the talk radio audience should be taxed to the limit soon.

If I wasn't already convinced that most conservatives are about 4 years old emotionally, this orgy of non-news would be overwhelmingly persuasive. They have literally reduced themselves to stomping their feet, crying, and throwing hysterical temper tantrums every 30 seconds until they get their way.
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The next time they threaten to hold their breath until we stop at Dairy Queen, I vote for letting them suffocate. I'm more than happy to grab a piano cord and help, in fact.
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