When online I sometimes check out the Powerline blog--for the same reason, I think, that in college I signed up for a course in abnormal psychology. What has gone wrong with these fellows? I don't know, but it sure is fun, in a creepy sort of way, to root around on their site, typing into their great search engine the names of eminent members of the reality-based community. Today I tried "Hendrick Hertzberg," the New Yorker magazine's brilliant political writer, and learned, from John Hinderaker, that he (Hertzberg) is "wholly unmoored from reality," "an ill-informed idiot."
The occasion was a dust-up from last fall when the Minneapolis newspaper printed an editorial that appeared to have been lifted, in part, from a New Yorker piece of Hertzberg's in which he had declared, around the time of the election, that the Bush administration had: sought to suppress scientific truth, overseen a festival of bribery, subcontracted environmental policy to corporate interests, replenished the ranks of the poor--you get the idea. Hinderaker huffs that if the newspaper is going to plagiarize it should at least try to find someone half-way intelligent, and he proceeds to rebut Hertzberg, point by point. I say "rebut" but Hinderaker's performance is so lame that, unless he is unmoored from reality, he cannot possibly have persuaded even himself. Take his punchy riposte to Hertzberg's claim that, under Bush, the ranks of the poor have been replenished.
"Replenished the ranks of the poor"? Poverty rate in fifth year of Clinton administration (1997):13.3%. Poverty rate in fifth year of Bush administration (2005): 12.6%
Surely Hinderaker must understand that this "fifth year" comparison is completely bogus. In fact he could only have selected it because it is bogus. That has to be what attracted him to it. The fact of the matter is that the poverty rate declined during each year of the Clinton administration, then reversed course upon Bush's ascendancy, and has risen every long year of the current occupant's incumbency. The sinking Clinton line crosses the rising Bush line in the fifth years of their respective terms, and, in the world according to John Hinderaker, this absolves Bush of the charge that he has "replenished the ranks of the poor."
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