Category: New York Times

Just in Case New York Times Readers Don’t Feel Enough White Guilt Yet …

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. . . Ta-Nehisi Coates is there on the op-ed pages with a stern sermonette for them. It involves the fact that an employee of a New York deli didn’t recognize the actor Forest Whitaker and accused him of shoplifting. Coates offers a few more examples — including from before he was born — of a racism that “haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence.”

And also haunts them, we might add, with dramatic prose.

Far be it from me to say that New York deli employees aren’t in the thrall of atavistic ethnic prejudice, their minds crowded with ignorant racial stereotypes and hateful bigotry. But, on closer inspection, that doesn’t seem to be Coates’s point:

In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist.

Who is this “we”? But never mind that. In fact, Coates is right, insofar as he is suspicious that the “good people” — even nice, well-meaning, liberal white people — are more guilty of racism than they would like to admit. How often, for example, have I given my opinion on the utter hopelessness of the public education system, only to have some parent explain to me that they live in a good district with good public schools. The suspicion that “good” is actually a synonym for “mostly white” is hard to avoid, but these parents don’t want to think of their personal choices in that context, and so I don’t bother to point this out.

Frankly, there are a lot of things about contemporary race relations I don’t bother to point out, because I am a white man who isn’t a liberal and one who has, indeed, often been called a racist.

There are no New York publishing houses offering me contracts to write The Complete NeoConfederate Guide to Better Race Relations, although it has occasionally occurred to me that problems which seem insoluble inside the margins of Political Correctness could most likely be improved by more truly radical thinking.

Here’s a radical thought: What if racism isn’t really the problem?

Ethnocentric attitudes are commonplace, a logical consequence of mankind’s innately tribal nature.

Everyone is self-interested and, insofar as he has any actual thought about race, is chiefly concerned about whether anything might affect the mental category of People Like Me.

Obviously, race is not the only such category. We might mentally categorize ourselves in any number of ways: Male, female, old, young, urban, rural, Crimson Tide fans, et cetera.

Man’s innate tribalism persists, but in a media-saturated consumer society one notices that there are many people who classify themselves by what they buy and what they watch on TV.

You see this especially among young people, where high school cliques are sometimes defined by certain fashionable clothing brands. But high schoolers denominate themselves by all kinds of crazy classifications that make no sense to sane adults, and which honestly never made sense to me even when I was a teenage dopehead. (“Teenage dopehead” being a rather large fraternity in the ’70s.)

 One category which young people are avidly encouraged to join nowadays is Not a Racist.

Membership in the Not a Racist Club is exclusive to white kids, because the same mentality that castigates whites as racist is also constantly telling non-white kids that the most important thing about them is their race. The result is that while the minority kids get their heads crammed full of ethnic chauvinism, white kids are taught — often quite explicitly — that being white is a source of shame.

Such indoctrination produces effects consistent with Newton’s Third Law of Motion: Every teaching has an equal and opposite reaction. One occasionally encounters white people who have so entirely internalized ther anti-racism lessons that they run around all the time pointing fingers at other white people, yelling, “RAAAAACIST!”

That’s annoying, but it is not as troubling to me as the opposite reaction: White kids who, resisting the indoctrination, develop a profound resentment of the non-whites whom they are constantly told are their moral superiors (in the liberal calculus where victimhood is superiority).

Trust me, Ta-Nehisi: It ain’t the old-fashioned white racism you need to worry about, it’s this disturbing new racism of kids quietly embittered at being branded with a collective mark of racial shame for the sins of dead white guys hundreds of years ago. You can call it “backlash,” or you can call it “unintended consequences,” and you might even wonder if the accidental results of the White Guilt curriculum weren’t occasionally manifested as something that doesn’t look like racism, but rather an inchoate rage: Columbine, Tucson, Aurora and so forth.

Lot of really angry young white guys out there, eh?

“Racism” is a word that has been degraded by promiscuous overuse, and if we can still recognize racism at work in the unfair suspicion directed at Forest Whitaker by a deli employee, it’s almost a miracle, considering how often nowadays we are told that “racist” is effectively a synonym for “Republican.” (Was the deli employee Republican?)

In truth, however, actual racism — a generalized hostility toward other races — is a psychological defense mechanism, a rationalization of personal failure by resort to blaming the scapegoated Other.

We recognize this in the life of Adolf Hitler, the failed artist who became an eager acolyte of anti-Semitism after being rejected at the Vienna institute. And we see how the German people, humiliated by defeat in World War I, responded to Hitler’s blame-the-Jews message as an explanation for the collective insult to their pride.

Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, Bebel said (as if socialism itself weren’t foolish enough, we might add). And the interesting thing about the Third Reich is that it was the National Socialists who created it. The Nazis’ particular hybrid of socialism was disowned by other socialists, whose habit is always to dismiss any failed socialist experiment — from the Stalinist nightmare to Pol Pot’s murderous lunacy to Hugo Chavez’s sordid mess in Venezuela — as Not Really Socialism.

But Hitler’s socialism was Really Socialism in the sense that it was about the victimhood of the allegedly virtuous masses at the expense of the vicious Other. Just substitute “Jews” for “bourgeoisie,” and it’s the same thing as more orthodox socialism. It’s about scapegoating — externalizing the causes of failure — and it doesn’t really mattere who the chosen scapegoat is, or what elaborate ideological superstructure one erects to justify it, the Politics of Blame is always the same.

How about that One Percent, huh?

NYPD arrest Occupy Wall Street protesters, Oct. 1, 2011

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

Well, “Occupy” mobs raging against bankers may seem harmless enough, but I wasn’t the only one who noticed that those mobs were mostly a bunch of idiot white kids, and who knows where their victim mentality may lead? Not in my lifetime, of course.

As bad as schools are and as vicious as our politics have become, America isn’t likely to go through any violent revolution or totalitarian dystopia soon. We seem to be traveling The Road to Serfdom by baby steps. Yet the escalating ignorance of history, and the dying off of those who have any direct memory of fighting against dangerous “un-American” ideas, creates a genuine risk of future generations surrendering to Bad Ideas we thought we had long ago vanquished.

Pardon the long digression, Ta-Nehisi, and sorry to bust your hustle, but why does the New York Times only want a black man to write op-eds for them when the subject is racism? Why don’t the editors ever solicit your thoughts about the budget or foreign policy? Are the editors of the New York Times the sort of liberals who think black writers can’t write about anything except being black? Isn’t that attitude . . . racist?

That box you’re thinking inside? Throw it away.

You might be surprised what the world actually looks like, once you escape the indoctrination and begin thinking for yourself. 

 

Lying by Euphemism: ‘New Revenues’

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Journalism is supposed to be about truth. Jackie Calmes and Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times are engaged in deception:

With Republican leaders in Congress forswearing budget negotiations over new revenues, President Obama has begun reaching around them to Republican lawmakers with a history of willingness to cut bipartisan deals.

“New revenues” = INCREASING TAXE RATES.

President Obama wants to RAISE TAXES, which Republicans oppose, but these lying bastards at the New York Times — dishonest partisan propagandists, endeavoring to assist their fellow Democrat — realize that the president’s proposal might be less popular if they described it truthfully, and so they begin with this 11-word dependent clause that hides the truth and shifts the blame:

With Republican leaders in Congress forswearing budget negotiations over new revenues . . .

In other words, if you buy what Calmes and Weisman are selling, you believe that the problem in Washington is that Republicans won’t negotiate, and that the ideal way to solve the budget problem is with “new revenues,” which could be had easily if weren’t for those Republicans “foreswearing negotiations.” As far as concerns the economic error in the underlying fallacy of their hidden premise, Ronald Reagan once explained that in a single sentence:

“We don’t have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven’t taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.”

Oh, to be back to the good old days, when the debt was only a trillion dollars! But of course, we can’t cut spending — President Scaremonger won’t let that happen — and therefore the question is how to raise taxes. Never mind that the government could actually collect “news revenues” if it would just stop strangling economic growth with its vicious policies.

No, in the fanatical brains of Democrats, it is necessary as a matter of “social justice” that the rich (however you define that term) be forced to “pay their fair share” (however you define that term). Words have actual meanings, except when Democrats are talking, and then you always have to ask yourself, “What do they really mean when they use words like ‘rich’ and ‘fair’?”

Once you know that someone is attempting to deceive you — and Calmes and Weisman have advertised their deceptive purpose in the first sentence of their article — then all you need to wonder is why they’re lying. Perhaps sinister motives inspire them:

“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”

 That Orwell fellow was onto something.

 

‘Patriotic Progressivism’, The Moron’s Oxymoron

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by Smitty

Begins beta-male Brooks:

The best Inaugural Addresses make an argument for something. President Obama’s second one, which surely has to rank among the best of the past half-century, makes an argument for a pragmatic and patriotic progressivism.

This country remains founded upon individual liberty. That a pack of liars over the last century have sold an unsustainable falsehood is neither deniable nor right. ‘Progress’ remains the most expensive and destructive scam in history, and Brooks is truly a false prophet for peddling it.

Modern problems like globalization, technological change, widening inequality and wage stagnation compel us to take new collective measures if we’re to pursue the old goals of equality and opportunity.
Obama wasn’t explicit about why we have failed to meet these challenges. But his critique was implicit. There has been too much “me” — too much individualism and narcissism, too much retreating into the private sphere. There hasn’t been enough “us,” not enough communal action for the common good.

Oh, you Devil. And I mean that in the theological sense of a deceiver selling the very causes of the problem as solutions. Human nature remains constant, technology, the variable. It’s a fine sales pitch that the variable can be used to tweak the constant. If your audience is totally fools. Peaking out at the current 51% is not likely to cut it. The implicit critique of ‘too much “me”‘. Has any President ever been so immodest as to deploy the personal pronoun like #OccupyResoluteDesk?
Emphasis mine here:

I am not a liberal like Obama, so I was struck by what he left out in his tour through American history. I, too, would celebrate Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall, but I’d also mention Wall Street, State Street, Menlo Park and Silicon Valley. I’d emphasize that America has prospered because we have a decentralizing genius.
When Europeans nationalized their religions, we decentralized and produced a great flowering of entrepreneurial denominations. When Europe organized state universities, our diverse communities organized private universities. When Europeans invested in national welfare states, American localities invested in human capital.
America’s greatest innovations and commercial blessings were unforeseen by those at the national headquarters. They emerged, bottom up, from tinkerers and business outsiders who could never have attracted the attention of a president or some public-private investment commission.
I would have been more respectful of this decentralizing genius than Obama was, more nervous about dismissing it for the sake of collective action, more concerned that centralization will lead to stultification, as it has in every other historic instance.

What in the world are ‘entrepreneurial denominations’, you clown? Do you really think sincere sacred business is secular? Sure, people sell books, and yes, one might argue at length and in detail about the contents, but that’s peripheral to the question of faith. Come visit my Sunday School class, Brooks, for some desperately needed insight.

And what is the point of being ‘respectful of this decentralizing genius’ in a speech? Obama is more honest in his contempt for the fundamentals of American greatness than you, Mr. Brooks. He tosses our seed corn under the bus with a personal pronoun on top. You’re making some wistful nod to what, were you actually a conservative, you’d be snarling a ????? ???? and defending.

Reinvigorating a mature nation means using government to give people the tools to compete, but then opening up a wide field so they do so raucously and creatively. It means spending more here but deregulating more there. It means facing the fact that we do have to choose between the current benefits to seniors and investments in our future, and that to pretend we don’t face that choice, as Obama did, is effectively to sacrifice the future to the past.

Our first task for recovery is to ignore false prophets like yourself. Our political Winter, while cold and bitter, can be followed by a Spring of reform. But that involves understanding that the centralization of policy is the garrote about the neck. Your ‘patriotic progressivism’ piffle is absolutely not the answer, Brooks.

via Byron York

How to Get Jennifer Schuessler to Give You a Puff Piece in the New York Times

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Obviously, it helps if you’re a Bolshevik:

When Bhaskar Sunkara was growing up in Westchester County, he likes to say, he dreamed of being a professional basketball player.
But the height gods, among others, didn’t smile in his favor. So in 2009, during a medical leave from his sophomore year at George Washington University, Mr. Sunkara turned to Plan B: creating a magazine dedicated to bringing jargon-free neo-Marxist thinking to the masses.
If that hardly seems less of a long shot at fame, let alone fortune, he’s the first to agree.
“I had no right to start a print publication when I was 21,” he said in an interview in a cafe near his apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “Looking back, I see it as a moment of creative ignorance. You have to have enough intelligence to execute something like this but be stupid enough to think it could be successful.”
The resulting magazine, Jacobin, whose ninth issue just landed, has certainly been an improbable hit, buoyed by the radical stirrings of the Occupy movement and a bitingly satirical but serious-minded style. Since its debut in September 2010 it has attracted nearly 2,000 print and digital subscribers, some 250,000 Web hits a month, regular name-checks from prominent bloggers, and book deals from two New York publishers.

When I saw the headline (“A Young Publisher Takes Marx Into the Mainstream“) at MediaGazer, it got my attention because, of course, Marxism is the deadliest idea in human history. Marxist-Leninist regimes killed 100 million of their own citizens in the 20th century but, hey, let’s assign a cheerful human-interest story about this young idiot who thinks it’s hip and cool to revive a discredited ideology.

It’s “an improbable hit” with “250,000 Web hits a month”? Guess that makes me “an improbable hit,” too, but I haven’t had any interview requests from Jenny Schuessler yet. Ace of Spades HQ has had more than 190 million visitors to date and, last time I checked, they were averaging something like 300,000 Web hits daily. However, for some reason Ace doesn’t get glowing coverage in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and if New York publishers have been eagerly thrusting book contracts at him, Ace has been suspiciously quiet about it.

Almost like there’s a bias or something, y’know?

 

UPDATE: Ask yourself, “How does a magazine with less Web traffic than this blog merit a gushy 1,100-word puff piece in the New York Times?”

Well, left-wing journalists like Jenny Schuessler read left-wing magazines, and they watch MSNBC and it turns out MSNBC host/Nation writer Chris Hayes is a big fan of Jacobin. So it’s a “friend-of-a-friend” kind of phenomenon. Donald Douglas at American Power quotes Jacobin’s interview with Chris Hayes:

I do think there is a potential for a radicalized upper-middle class. We already see that, it’s just a question of how that gets channeled. Everything about the Netroots, the anti-war, anti-Bush sentiment … One of the interesting things about the way our certain kind of fractal inequality has manifested, the people who see it the most, have the closest proximity to it, say, the top 2 to the top 20 percent: ‘I went to law school with Joe and I have some job at a firm and I’m doing alright, but he went into a hedge fund and is making $10 million.’

Only the elite can afford to be Bolsheviks nowadays.

UPDATE II: Da Tech Guy does the math and figures to kill 100 million people in 100 years, you’d have to kill 2,739 people a day.

Eggs, omelets.

 

#LennayKekuaFacts: What You Don’t Know About Manti Te’o’s Fake Girlfriend

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From the “Too Good to Check” file:

The Times was not among the most prominent offenders in taking at face value what turned out to be a hoax, as revealed by the Web site Deadspin.com on Wednesday.
But Times reporters still wrote about the Fighting Irish linebacker Manti Te’o’s girlfriend at least five times in recent months.
A Nov. 25 article said that  Te’o was “dealt a full deck of adversity when his grandmother and his girlfriend died within hours of each other.”
Another, on Oct. 14, noted, “His girlfriend, who lost a long fight with leukemia, was a Stanford alumnus.”

Five mentions! The non-existent girlfriend of Manti Te’o has actually gotten more New York Times coverage than the “Fast and Furious” scandal. Think what it means that Deadspin.com did more thorough fact-checking than the nation’s most prestigious newspaper:

Deadspin Editor-in-Chief Tommy Craggs says Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey were faced with a tough question when reporting their now famous Manti Te’o story: “What lengths do we go to to try and prove a negative?”
When asked about his reaction to The Boston Globe calling Deadspin “a website that has broken some high-profile stories but not an outlet regarded for journalistic standards,” Craggs says: “Whatever. Why should I care what a craven, slipshod outfit like the Boston Globe thinks of my ‘journalistic standards’?”
In an email Q&A, Craggs elaborates on Burke’s explanation of how Deadspin got the story that all other journalists missed . . .
From the start, Tim Burke and Jack Dickey kept a running notes file in Google Docs that acted as a skeleton for both their reporting and for the story itself. They asked themselves the obvious questions, Socratically: Who is the person in the photos? Where was Lennay Kekua born? When was Lennay Kekua born? Where did Lennay Kekua live? Did Lennay Kekua attend Stanford? When was Lennay Kekua’s car accident? When did Lennay Kekua die? . . .
We began reporting on Friday. By Monday, Burke had found and contacted the woman in the Lennay photos. Once we had her on the record, we knew we had enough for a story. . . .

She was a cyber-fiction, and yet she was mentioned five times in the New York Times and got quoted on the CBS Morning News.


 

(Hat-tip: MediaGazer.com.)

Are You a ‘Nate Silver Truther’?

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I am, according to some worthless putz named Joshua Holland writing at the left-wing site AlterNet. Holland also:

  • Calls me “a notably dense right-wing blogger”; and
  • Misspells my name (there is no “e” in Stacy).

As to the substance of the dispute, Holland’s article is entitled:

Republicans Desperate to Spin Romney as the
Front-Runner Are Becoming ‘Nate Silver Truthers’

No, Republicans are actually (a) looking at Romney’s lead in numerous polls, (b) looking at Nate Silver’s bizarre transmutation of this data into a 73.1% likelihood of Obama’s re-election, and (c) saying, “What the f–k is Nate talking about?”

As been repeatedly pointed out, when you start digging down into the samples of the polls, there is good reason to believe that Romney’s vote is actually being underestimated. For example, it was big news that ABC/WaPo had Romney leading Obama 50-47. But Ace of Spades points out that the sample is D+4 and Romney leads by 19 points — NINETEEN FREAKING POINTS — among independents.

Let’s consider the possibility — just throwing this out there — that many of the “independents” leaning so decisively toward Romney are a bunch of bitter gun-clingers in Appalachia who don’t really matter in terms of the Crucial Battleground States.

Fine. OK. But excuse me for believing that if Romney has even half that big of a lead (9 or 10 points) among independents in Ohio, Florida, Colorado, Ohio, Iowa and New Hampshire, we’re gonna be looking at an all-out Republican romp Nov. 6.

Not even Jim Moran’s kid can steal enough votes to win it for Obama if Romney’s leading by 10 points among independents.

Back to the question, then: What the f–k is Nate Silver talking about? A commenter on yesterday’s post suggested it’s non-random “weighting”:

I found out everything I needed to know about Silver’s “analysis” when I learned that he was overweighting a week-old PPP poll that showed Obama well ahead and underweighting a fresh poll *by the same pollster* that had Obama’s lead almost gone in his “model.” The adjustments were not small. So he was purposefully and consciously giving a large amount of additional weight to old data compared to new data despite the source of both being the same.
This statistical legerdemain is justified by an ipse dixit assertion that PPP’s Dem lean has diminished over the cycle (a change he would have us believe has significant, observable effects over a 7-day period). Then there’s the grotesquely Obama-positive Marist poll to which he gave a huge statistical bump compared to a slew of more recent data for almost two weeks. That poll had a D+11 sample–over twice Obama’s 2008 ID edge and therefore something no rational poll observer could possibly argue with a straight face was likely to be valid. Nate loved it, though, giving it massively outsized influence over his overall results long after it was stale data.

Live by the weighting, die by the weighting, and if it weren’t for the fact that Nate is running this shady scam on the New York Times platform, we could laugh it off as irrelevant cheerleading. Instead, it’s highly relevant cheerleading, which has the effect of shaping elite opinion, which in turn affects media coverage, and thus tends — as a certain other statistical wizard once said — to “hide the decline.”

FLOUNDER: “Will that work?”
OTTER: “It’s gotta work better than the truth.”

Let me point out something: Nate Silver considers Rasmussen disreputable and unreliable, and yet on Thursday we could see three other national polls — ABC/WaPo, Gallup and Monmouth — all showing the same +3 margin for Romney that Rasmussen shows. How is it that these other polling firms report the exact same margin as the No Good Very Bad Stinky Rasmussen Poll Nate Silver Hates?

There is the possibility that Nate’s right and all of us “Nate Silver Truthers” are wrong. And there is the possibility that, even if Silver is wrong, his statistical cheerleading will have the self-fufilling prophecy effect of creating the phenomenon Silver pretends to observe.

On the other hand, there is also the possibility — and I think Nate Silver is severely underestimating this scenario — that he is so completely wrong his credibility will be destroyed on Nov. 6.

If Obama loses, we will not forget that he gave Obama’s likelihood of re-election at a precise 73.1% just ten days before Election Day.

At this point, Nate might as well raise the number to 100% — a guaranteed Obama win — and be done with it, because even if he tries to walk it back now, 73.1% is nearly 3-to-1, and if you lose a bet you called 3-to-1 with 10 days to go, your credibility is permanently screwed.




 

 

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Signs and Omens: Obama’s Fading Hope and the Graveyard Whistling Choir

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Nate Silver continues to lead the Democrat Graveyard Whistling Choir, raising Obama to a 70.3% likelihood of victory based on . . . what?

I dunno. I’m not an expert with a New York Times column or anything, much less a Magical Forecasting Model™ that can divine future events with the precise scientific exactitude of 1/10 of one percent.

This morning, Silver told us that Ohio might be a crucial battleground, which may be news to a victim who just escaped from an underground rape-dungeon after nine months of being held hostage and tortured by a sociopathic sex offender. But to everyone else, it’s not news at all.

My apologies for the bizarre word-imagery. Debate-night aftermath, a shortage of sleep and other psychological stress sometimes have this effect on my prose. But don’t worry. After 24 debates in 16 months, I’m used to it by now. And speaking of bizarre word-imagery, Ace of Spades:

“It’s going to be a grim affair, grim and horrible and just sad, but there’ll be lots of alcohol.”

That’s in reaction to unmistakable evidence of doom and gloom in Obama’s increasingly desperate fundraising e-mails. The plural of “anecdote” is data, as they say, and you don’t need a Magical Forecasting Model™ to see the dots in this emerging gestalt pattern, including the Gloria Allred “October surprise” gambit. Never heard a peep about this until after Obama got his ass kicked in the first debate, did ya?

–

Four new national polls — Gallup, Rasmussen, ABC and Monmouth — show Romney leading, compared to one (IBD) that shows Obama leading. If you average those five most recent polls, Romney’s lead is 2.2 points, while the RCP national average (which includes earlier results) has Romney ahead by a more slender 0.9 points.

In other words, while I haven’t yet seen any polling that reflects reaction to Monday’s debate, the trend going into that debate was steadily in Romney’s favor, which in turn would rather tend to contradict any thought that the pro-Obama shift in Nate’s Magical Forecasting Model™ is a function of actual data inputs. There is a growing suspicion that Nate’s just pulling his “data” out of his ass and wishcasting, and if that suspicion should prove true — if it becomes clear Romney is heading toward victory and Silver is forced to scramble his numbers — it might produce the biggest scandal since we learned that Jayson Blair was filing West Virginia datelines from his Brooklyn apartment.

However, I have no definite reason to accuse Nate Silver of deliberate fraud, and it’s entirely plausible that he’s just the victim of his own erroneous faith in statistical modeling. And when Team Obama starts talking about scenarios where they can win without Ohio, maybe you want to add a few extra grains of salt to Nate’s numbers.

The first rule of Losing Ohio Club is you don’t talk about Losing Ohio Club.

Damn, I love that Ewok. Continue reading Signs and Omens: Obama’s Fading Hope and the Graveyard Whistling Choir →

The Democrat Graveyard Whistling Choir Ignores ‘Preference Cascade’ Scenario

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–

Ed Driscoll points out that the “War on Women” hero/martyr Sandra Fluke drew a much smaller crowd than did the actual victims of the “War on Coal” in Grundy, Virginia.

As they say, the plural of “anecdote” is data, and these are just a couple of points on the scatter-chart which are beginning to form into a clear pattern that looks a lot like an Obama meltdown. Democrats don’t want to admit this, of course, and Nate Silver is a Democrat, which is the only plausible explanation for why the Magical Forecasting Model™ still gives 2-to-1 odds for Obama.

This creates a serious problem for Nate, who now has only 15 days to walk that back. If he were to shift one net point per day from now until Nov. 6, the Magical Forecasting Model™ would have it at Obama 52.6%-Romney47.4% on Election Day. Yet insofar as Silver’s predictions are a proxy for the popular vote, there is an increasing likelihood that the Magical Forecasting Model™ would have it bass-ackward: Romney now leads the RCP average, and is ahead by 2 points in the latest Battleground Poll, to say nothing of Romney’s 7-point lead in Gallup.

Something else: Look again at Real Clear Politics, and you notice that the last time a national poll showed Obama at 50% or better was a CNN poll taken Sept. 28-30.

When an incumbent president has been below 50 percent throughout October, on what factual basis does Nate Silver justify the persistent advantage for Obama in his Magical Forecasting Model™?

Even if you think Obama could still pull out a narrow win — and the cable news networks now seem to feel obligated to feature hourly showings of Electoral College map scenarios to that effect — the precise 67.6% chance offered by Nate Silver is absurd. So unless there is some game-changing event in Obama’s favor over the next two weeks, Silver’s probably going to be hard-pressed to shift the odds toward Romney quickly enough to be “right.”

Whistling past graveyards is not science, Nate, and the aroma of bovine excrement is not perfume.

Quinnipiac has Obama up 5 points in Ohio, but Quinnipiac is the same outfit that had Obama up 10 points in Ohio — an absolute absurdity — a month ago. Even stipulating the bogusness of Quinnipiac’s D+9 sample, however, Mitt has gained 5 points in Ohio according to them, while the Democrat polling firm, PPP, shows Romney gaining four points since their previous Ohio survey.

If Romney has gained either 5 points in a month (Quinnipiac) or 4 points in a week (PPP) in what everyone acknowledges to be the most crucial swing state, exactly how the hell does Nate Silver justify his Charlie Sheen pose? #Winning!

Here’s something else for you, Nate: Why does the Battleground poll (which you consider reputable) now show the exact same margin, 49-47 as the Rasmussen poll, which you consider so unreliable? Is it possible that Rasmussen’s methodology is actually providing a more accurate measurement of public opinion than your Magical Forecasting Model™ had hitherto acknowledged?

Tonight’s debate is about foreign policy. When CBS News (not exactly a right-wing outfit) is all over the bungle in Benghazi, and the president’s spokeswoman is compelled to deny that the death of a U.S. ambassador is a policy failure, excuse me for suspecting that tonight won’t be an easy win for Obama. Yeah, maybe the talking heads on MSNBC will score it a “win” for President Gutsy Call, but what about those patriotic red-blooded American swing voters in Ohio? Probably not so much.

The dots are beginning to form a pattern, as I say, and the Graveyard Whistling Choir can ignore the pattern only at peril of their credibility. Is there a phrase for this? I think we know:

Public-opinion polls are lagging indicators in politics. By the time a shift in the trend becomes clear from poll data, the causes of the shift are days or weeks in the past. It is therefore unwise to extrapolate the current trend forward or to begin thinking of polls as supernatural prophecies that predict future events.
With all those caveats in mind, however, Mitt Romney enters the final two weeks of the presidential campaign looking very much like the next president of the United States, and it is not merely poll data that creates this impression. President Obama’s own campaign has begun to emit clear signals that the incumbent’s re-election prospects are dwindling, and anecdotal evidence of strong Republican momentum is not hard to find these days. We cannot predict what will happen in tonight’s third and final presidential debate (9 p.m. ET at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida), but it is a fairly safe guess it won’t have the game-changing impact of the first debate on Oct. 3, one of two apparent pivot points that triggered Obama’s downward slide. While the impact of Romney’s one-sided victory over a listless Obama in Denver has been universally acknowledged, it would be wrong to overlook the political effect of the other pivot point, the Sept. 11 terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans.
The Benghazi attack appears to have started slowly sapping Obama’s support in late September. . . .

Please read the whole thing at The American Spectator. And please pay close attention to the last three words.

 




 

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