The Slippery Rationalizations of the Far Right

When I was in college, one of the best books I was ever asked to read was a small slender book called How to Lie with Statistics. Right wing Republicans seem adept at dragging out all kinds of sort of true statistics that don't tell the real picture. For example, the American economy is doing very well but only if you're rich (pick up a copy of the Sunday New York Times and look at one of their magazines that show estates running from $3 million to $20 million, somewhat outside the price range of even upper middle-class Americans).

Zeno of Halfway There is a mathematician and he has a post that cuts through all the nonsense of those who play with numbers and then words:

In a previous post, I reported how Melanie Morgan of KSFO radio in San Francisco used an article in WorldNetDaily to lie about Iraq. She said we were definitely “winning” because American troop deaths were dropping every month. That's a questionable criterion for success in the ill-advised Iraq war—surely a necessary condition but hardly a sufficient one. Furthermore, her claim is demonstrably untrue. She could give it a certain truthiness only by truncating the month of August. The day after she published her WorldNetDaily column, her claim had already been invalidated.

One of the truly damnable things about Morgan and her ilk is how they make easily refutable statements about Iraq, terrorism, patriotism, or what have you, and, when you refute them, they claim you are glad they are wrong. Yes, aren't we all delighted that the rising body count quickly gave the lie to Morgan's specious claims? It's nasty, but it's how they do business....

The neoconservatives intellectual with their doctorates and books and endowed chairs at think tanks seem to spend much of their time thinking up clever rationalizations rather than real policies or practical solutions. It's time for our country to return to good common sense.