The New York Times’ Resident Voodoo Statistician

Another rational liberal can’t think straight.

by Bruce S. Thornton
Front Page Magazine

The New York Times’ resident voodoo statistician, Charles Blow, is at it again, using “scientific” polling data as an excuse to indulge ideological prejudice. The poll in question profiled people regarding the current health-care debate, and Blow doesn’t like the results. Seems that 56% of Republicans are following the debate “very closely,” while only 42% of Democrats are. More galling to Blow, while 80% of Democrats support Obama’s healthcare reforms, only 47% said they had a “good understanding of the issues involved.” On the other hand, 58% of Republicans claimed a “good understanding” of the issues, and only 19% supported Obamacare.

Now, these data could be interpreted in some interesting ways. This disconnect between some Democrats’ support and their understanding of the issue might just suggest that their support is merely an uninformed, partisan reflex. And the Republican lack of support could be a consequence of their greater understanding that results from following the issue more closely.

But of course, such an obvious reading of the data doesn’t conform to liberal ideology and its bigoted view of Republicans as knuckle-dragging cavemen easily manipulated by the evil cabal of corporate hegemons, whereas Democrats are cool rationalists who base their positions on the careful study of the facts and coherent argument. So rather than deal with the challenge to his prejudices suggested by the data, Blow just takes off on a juvenile rant that adheres to the Democrats’ spin on the raucous protests greeting Democratic politicians at various town halls and other fora. You know the narrative: all these people daring to question their betters are really just Republican operatives or pliant dummies agitated by Republican internet screeds and FOX news propaganda.

Following that partisan script, Blow writes, “Not only are anti-reformists showing up, they’re terrorizing legislators with their tomfoolery when they do.” This muddled sentence reveals the irrational biases deforming Blow’s thinking. By any definition of “tomfoolery,” anyone over the age of 5 who would be “terrorized,” rather than merely, say, annoyed, by tomfoolery should never leave the house, let alone be elected to public office. Blow displays here the representative vice of most bad writers: starting a sentence in one register and then finishing it in another incompatible with the first. George Orwell identified this fault as a typical feature of bad writing, which “consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.” Orwell linked this sort of bad prose specifically to political writing, which is used “for concealing or preventing thought,” just as Blow does by spraying the scary and distorting verbal aerosol of “terrorized” over the events he is describing.

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