This last week I haven’t written as much as usual, because I’ve been helping my father who had surgery last week. As a result of that, I ended up in the emergency room on Wednesday. At that time, I met a very chatty man in the waiting room. He was interesting and intelligent. He seemed like the kind of guy who questioned the official line on things. Soon, however, I found out that he was that and more. He started talking about the 9/11 attack and how it was all a “false flag.”

As I’ve noted before, I have a certain fondness for people who believe conspiracy theories. They are at least open minded. But while talking to this guy, I saw that believing in conspiracy theories can also cause people to close their minds. It’s sad. Because these people clearly have good and agile minds. They should be spending their time on something more edifying than looking for holes in the “official” story.

This man who I met was not just interested in 9/11 and Building 7. We spoke for a half hour and I did my best to move the conversation away from conspiracy theories. Still, he managed to mention:

• He didn’t believe believe Obama was born in the US.
• Vaccines cause autism.
• Chem Trails are poisoning us with Al2O3.
• Elites are trying to create a one world government.
• Oklahoma City bombing was a false flag.
• Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy.
• US government knew about Pearl Harbor and let it happen.
• Inflation is much higher than the government is letting on.

In his defense, he didn’t mention Roswell, crop circles, or theories about Elvis being alive and well. But it was only a half hour after all.

Here’s the thing: he didn’t seem crazy. In fact, with all the classic conspiracy theories he spouted, it all seemed amazingly normal to me. He was just this guy with a diabetic wife who had traveled 400 miles to come to the VA. If he hadn’t mentioned the conspiracy theories, I never would have known. And if he had only mentioned one, I wouldn’t be writing about this now. But it really struck me that at some point in his life, he traded in belief of the “official line” for belief in the “conspiracy line.” And what’s the point of that?

At one point, I probed him about 9/11. I know a bit about it. I read the report oh so many years ago. And I’ve known enough conspiracy theorists to know about Building 7 and its importance. So I asked a question that had long bothered me, “What is the official reason for the collapse of Building 7?” He really didn’t know. He speculated that it was something to do with debris from the tower collapses. It turns out that it is exactly that, although it greatly understates just how big the destruction was throughout the complex. An article in Structure Magazine argues that a single critical column (pdf) in the building was badly damaged and it caused the whole building to collapse. But what do engineers at Structure Magazine know? They are clearly part of the conspiracy!

But I was struck by the fact that this guy was not all over my question. It came as a surprise, as though the only information he had ever heard about it came from other conspiracy theorists. And that goes right along with belief in all the other theories. At this point, I assume he listens to Alex Jones. Which means he doesn’t much think anymore. Except each night when he watches Jeopardy!

I learned that about him too.

Afterword

This is a whole lot of fun:

You know what they say: hell hath no fury like a gay man shamed. That man would be Josh Barro. And it is totally great.

Yesterday, Niall Ferguson wrote the third part of his series of articles on why Paul Krugman is a great big meanie and why everyone should ignore the fact that Ferguson is not only a very public asshole, but also wrong about nearly everything he ever talks about. One of my many articles about him was Shame, Shame, Shame. But in this newest article, Ferguson offers a list of economic writers for public shaming: Dean Baker, Josh Barro, Brad DeLong, Matthew O’Brien, Noah Smith, Matthew Yglesias, and Justin Wolfers. It’s funny that this is a list of some of the very best people in the field; the “Ferguson Shame List” could soon be like the Pulitzer Prize for economics reporting.

This morning, Josh Barro responded, Niall Ferguson Is Mad That Paul Krugman ‘Acolytes’ Like Me Are Mean to Him. It’s odd, because he couldn’t find any articles where he had attacked Ferguson. But there were those tweets. It all started after Ferguson made an idiotic and offensive comment claiming that Keynes didn’t care about the long term (not true) because he had no children because he was gay. This caused Barro to tweet out a blizzard of very snarky and wonderful comments. But since Barro felt that he had never properly attacked Ferguson, he listed a large number of the tweets. A good example:

That’s right, he went all Gertrude Stein on him: “Ferguson is a bigot is a bigot is a bigot.” I recommend clicking over, because they make quite a collection. But it made me feel relieved that when Barro got mad at me, he only tweeted:

I guess it helps to only be dumb and not also hateful.

I was thinking about Genesis today. It’s part of my normal thing to think about different parts of the Bible. I think about it because, it’s silly to take it seriously. But it is even more silly when atheists think they’ve found little “gotchas” in places where the Bible contradicts itself. I hate this kind of thing because the Bible is supposed to be a religious book. It isn’t really much of one as far as I’m concerned, but it is meant to answer the ultimate questions that we humans have. And above all, it is meant to answer the ultimate question, “Why does anything exist at all?”

This is an unanswerable question—at least it is for our little brains. It doesn’t matter how you look at it. Even if you follow someone like Lawrence M. Krauss who claims that something exists because “nothing is unstable” you have to ask, “Why does this nothing that is unstable exist?” Or more simply, “Why is nothing unstable?” I think about this stuff far more than is healthy. And my thinking always ends up thinking about a universe that was always and forever will be creating and destroying itself. That, of course, makes no sense at all to us.

What’s the big deal? There are all kinds of things in the universe that make no sense to us. It is almost laughably easy to create logical paradoxes. Consider the Barber Paradox, “The barber is a man in town who shaves all those, and only those, men in town who do not shave themselves.” The problem is that this means the barber does and does not shave himself. This is just two logical bits of data and we have a paradox. The fact that the universe seems always to have existed but can’t have doesn’t seem that big of a problem to me.

That brings us to Genesis. One of the favorite bits of atheist lore (which I have used many times myself) is that in Genesis 1, Eve is made at the same time as Adam and in Genesis 2, Eve is made later from Adam’s rib. I don’t think this is a great observation. Existence itself makes no sense. Logic itself makes no sense. Why should the Bible make any sense? And more important, why does anyone think that a logical inconsistency disprove the Bible? It turns out, it is even worse than this.

If you look at the two verses of Genesis, they don’t really disagree. It is just that Genesis 1 tells the story much more briefly. This is all that it says about the creation of Adam and Eve (Verse 27):

Okay, so God created them. But did he create them at the exact same instant? I don’t necessarily read it that way. In Genesis 2, it is much more involved. In Verse 18, God notes that it’s bad for Adam to be alone, so he decides to make a “helper” for him. But it isn’t too pressing. God spends the next two verses forcing Adam to name all the animals. Then he makes Adam go to sleep and creates Eve from his Rib and all that. But if you just wanted to tell the story of the creation of man without getting into the animal naming and the rib operation, wouldn’t you write it more or less as it is in Genesis 1:27? I certainly would.

My point is that all this stuff about the Bible being inconsistent just isn’t that useful. In this instance, it doesn’t even seem particularly contradictory. What’s more, most Christians aren’t fundamentalists and so don’t believe the Bible in a way that would be helped by this argument. And the fundamentalists are a lost cause anyway. Bringing up picky arguments like this just make atheists look bad. No one will ever be convinced by such details, even when they are accurate.

Everyone is reporting that later today Janet Yellen will be officially nominated to be the new Federal Reserve Chairman. That’s overall good news. Listening to NPR this morning, I was kind of annoyed to hear people talking about what a monetary dove she is and how she will focus on unemployment. I have no doubt that she is indeed a bit dovish compared to Ben Bernanke. Ditto about concern for full employment. But come on: Yellen has been thoroughly vetted by the banking system. She would never have reached such institutional heights had she not been a team player—the team, of course, being the oldest team in American: the Washington Plutocrats.

There is some chatter that because of Yellen’s academic work on the use of monetary policy to increase employment, she might be more aggressive in that regard. But roughly the same thing was said about Bernanke. He had done a whole lot of work on unorthodox monetary policy as a means of stimulating the economy when interest rates were already effectively at zero. But as Fed chair, he did very little of that. I expect the same thing from Yellen.

Many people have wondered why Bernanke did so little, and will likely wonder why Yellen goes on to act similarly. I think it is all about tribal identification. Why should a Fed chair stick his or her neck out in the job? Doing something unusual could have disastrous consequences. No one will blame them for doing what is tried and true. The possible up side for such neck sticking would be huge for people like me and almost everyone I know. I don’t think that either Bernanke or Yellen have close friends who are in any pain because of high unemployment. But they have lots of friends who are hurt by inflation.

None of this is to say that the Yellen pick is bad—not at all. If we want consistency and dependability anywhere, we want it at the Fed. But if I had had my druthers, I would have selected Christina Romer. Now that might have stirred things up at the Fed. But Obama didn’t even listen to her when she was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. He’s far too conventional to nominate her for Fed chair. And the Republicans would have been apoplectic. So Yellen is a good pick and I’m sure she will do at least as good a job as Bernanke, and far far better than Greenspan.

But now that the whole thing is done, I can’t help but think back on the whole Larry Summers controversy. I am divided about him, but I never thought he should be Fed chair. But I am totally with Brad DeLong in thinking that Obama treated him very badly. If Obama really wanted Summers in the job, he should have supported him. He shouldn’t have allowed Summers to hang out in the wind. What’s more, he should have seen the problems ahead of time. Yellen was always the obvious pick, and allowing Summers to be seen as the top choice was not only bad for Summers, it made the administration look sexist.

As a result of all this, the Yellen nomination casts a shadow. But it isn’t on her. It’s on Obama. Now we just need to get her confirmed and see what she does. And I fully believe that will end up being the usual thing with some minor variations. And that’s just fine. Minor variations can make a huge difference.

I was amazed on Friday to see that Rachel Maddow was again pushing the discharge petition as though that is going to solve all of our government shutdown problems. She even showed a rather long clip from Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde, which she claims explains the process really well. Except that it doesn’t. A discharge petition has all kinds of limitations that make it almost useless in this case.

Sarah Binder is a political scientist over at The Monkey Cage, which is unfortunately now part of the Washington Post. On Wednesday, she wrote a really informative article about how discharge petitions work. Two things are critical. First, the bill to be discharged (in this case the clean continuing resolution) must have been stuck in committee for at least 30 days. Second, after the discharge petition is filed, it is put on the discharge calendar, but the House will only vote on them on the second and fourth Mondays of the month. That would put a vote sometime in mid-November.

But some smart people came up with a way to get around the 30 day limit. Greg Sargent reported Friday, “But now House Democrats say they have found a previously filed bill to use as a discharge petition—one that would fund the government at sequester levels.” This bill has been stuck in committee since March of this year, so it’s ready to go. It could get a vote as soon as the 14th of his month. There, are, of course, big problems.

This bill, Government Shutdown Prevention Act, would cause there to be an automatic continuing resolution (CR) for 4 months any time Congress failed to enact a new budget or pass a CR itself. I like this idea very much. And that is very much the problem. It would be hard enough (most likely impossible) to get Republicans to go against their party on a single CR. Given that the Republican Party now govern entirely on shutdown and Debt Ceiling threats, a vote for this bill would be a vote to eliminate half of all the Republican “tools” going forward. In addition, the Senate Republicans would almost certainly filibuster such a bill.

But let’s assume for a moment that all of this worked: the discharge petition worked and the bill got through the Senate and the president signed it. We would be 2 days from hitting the Debt Ceiling. And given that the House Republicans would feel that a particularly dirty trick was played on this, we can be pretty sure that the deadline for that would be missed as well. So a discharge petition would be a terrible thing. Luckily, we don’t have to worry about it.

Afterword

The way I see this all playing out is that the government shutdown will drag on through next week. At the end of the week we will see things loosen up. By Monday, the House will offer something like a repeal of the medical device tax in exchange for the continuing resolution and a Debt Ceiling increase. That isn’t so bad on one level. But it will be another example to the Republicans that they really can use extortion to get what they want. I am seriously thinking about giving up on politics and going back to my essays on communities. This is messed up.

One thing that is nice about having a fairly small readership: I don’t have to worry too much about what I say. So I can just say what I think. And what I think is that Paul Krugman has a crush on Lydia DePillis. Krugman, as you should all know, is the brilliant economist who is today better known for being a great big meanie to conservatives. And Lydia DePillis is (and I regret that my life is so devoid of anything of real interest that I don’t even have to look this up) the most recent person to join Ezra Klein’s Wonk Blog. So how do I know that the grand ol’ man of economics has a crush on the young Ms. DePillis? I’m getting to it…

But first you need to understand how Wonk Blog is organized. The simple answer is: I don’t know. But it does seem to me that Ezra Klein gets the best articles to write. As a result, Lydia DePillis seems to very often get stuck with really boring topics, even though she very often transcends them.

Given this, why would Paul Krugman post two articles in three days dealing with pieces by DePillis? I’ll grant you, yesterday’s article was a fun one, Remember When Republicans Were worried About “Economic Uncertainty”? But before that, she wrote what I called “one of those horrible interviews with people no one cares about,” “Shame on us”: How Businesses Brought the Debt Limit Mess Onto Themselves. Krugman trudged through that out of general interest?! I just don’t think so.

Add to that that fact that Krugman has been dieting recently. Sure, he might be doing that because his life is so great that he wants to live as long as possible. And certainly, those of us who read Krugman get alerted to every great thing that happens in his life, even if I’m not too keen on standing room only gigs. But as we now know, being slightly heavier is actually healthier and Krugman must know that. (I think I first read about it in Wonk Blog before DePillis joined.) So the question is, “Who you trying to impress Krugman?!”

Finally, just look at this young lady: she’s cute as a button! To me, that’s the final strike. Krugman is in love. But I would advise caution. Krugman is 60. DePillis looks early 20s. That is way creepy. What’s more, an affair could well kill the great man—regardless his weight. As for the other side of the affair, Krugman’s wife, Robin Wells could definitely take DePillis in a fight. It’s not worth the risk.

But Krugman definitely has a crush.

Update (2 October 2013 2:30 pm)

The crush continues, “Lydia DePillis continues her informative series of blog posts…” Oh, how he tries to cover!

Slate has introduced a new feature, “If It Happened There…” It is reporting on things happening in the United States the way we would report on them if they were happening in some other country. It’s a great idea, but I’m not sure that Slate is quite the right outlet for it, because as good as they are, they are dedicated to a pretty typical mainstream outlook on thing—as dedicated as they are to the #SlatePitch. But more to the point, it depends greatly what country that we are talking about. I find the mainstream media’s coverage of foreign affairs to be extremely biased based upon whether the country is a “friend” or “enemy.” For example, coverage of the same event in Venezuela and Israel would be radically different.

Bearing this in mind, consider the first installment by Joshua Keating, The Government Shutdown. If it were Israel, we would get a very objective treatment with a discussion of the different sides and little notion that one side or the other was right. “These kinds of disagreements happen in the best of governments and it will all work itself out.” Had it been Venezuela, however, the article would get a much more harsh treatment about the corruption of Maduro government. The whole thing would be told from the perspective of the opposition and some mention would be made of the fact that the opposition has never accepted the last election results (despite the fact that all the international observers have). “What do you expect from a socialist country that nationalized the oil industry?!”

What Slate provided was more or less the “friend” country version. And here’s the shocking thing: it is actually a lot more informative than what the American press has offered. In a fundamental sense, it is a whole lot more objective and less “even handed” than we normally get. Here is the meat of it:

Most of the article is downright poetic. Keating’s writing transcends the parody—many try, most fail at such style. He only really goes for humor in the last two paragraphs. First, he writes, “While the country’s most recent elections were generally considered to be free and fair (despite threats against international observers)…” And he links to a Courthouse News Service article, Texas AG Threatens to Arrest European Election Observers. In American, the humor writes itself!

The last paragraph is a wonderful jab at Thomas Friedman:

That’s how the enormous mustache would put it!

Afterword

Something occurred to me while writing this. Friedman’s whole thing about “I talked to a cab driver in X” is really an elitist ploy that says, “All cab drivers are represented by this one.” In other words: the little people are all in agreement, or as I like to say, “All Indians walk in single file, at leas the only one I ever saw did.” But my experience is that the “little people” actually do have strongly held opinions and they are all over the place. There is no such thing as “Joe Six-Pack.”

Paul Krugman is unhappy. Lydia DePillis at Wonk Blog wrote another one of those horrible interviews with people no one cares about, “Shame on us”: How Businesses Brought the Debt Limit Mess Onto Themselves. It is with Paul Stebbins, who we are supposed to care about because he is the CEO of 74th company on the Fortune 100. But he’s really being interviewed because he’s a representative of Fix the Debt, the Pete Peterson funded group determined to cut the deficit by taking money away from the old and poor.

Krugman is upset because Stebbins shows a typical lack of understanding about economics and politics. He notes that Stebbins thinks that the economic problems we have come from our government debt. “You get the sense that he’s completely unaware of the actual debates that have taken place about economic policy, probably unaware of how much the actual deficit and forecasts of future debt have changed. So he’s angry at Washington for not facing up to a fake problem.” That’s absolutely true. What’s more, the deficit scolds that Peterson funds have not celebrated the fact that the federal deficit has cratered. Part of the problem is as Krugman claims: they don’t even know that it has happened. But the other part is that they don’t care about the deficit; they just want to use it as an excuse to cut entitlement programs.

Stebbins is also wrong on the politics. As Krugman characterizes him, “The AARP, fighting against cuts to benefits, is just like Republicans threatening to plunge us into debt crisis if Obama doesn’t kill health reform.” But the actual quote from Stebbins is helpful:

Put aside the “throw grandma into the snow” comment, which says about all you need to know about how Stebbins thinks of the needs of the poor and old. And also ignore the fact that the AARP is really not in the primarying business—Congressional Democrats don’t get liberal primary challenges very often. What is most important is that Stebbins frames the debate as though he alone is in the reasonable center. He has created a continuity: on one side there are tax increases and on the other is cutting entitlements for the poor. Since Fix the Debt wants to do both, that makes them the heroes because everyone knows the truth is right down the middle. Of course, when it comes right down to it, the deficit scolds are for cutting social security and raising taxes on the middle class. The last thing these people want to do is cause even the slightest amount of pain for the rich.

But there is a more fundamental issue in all of this. Why does the Washington Post think that the CEO of a large business knows any more about the economy on a macro scale than anyone else? And even if he did know something about it, wouldn’t we have to worry that his business interests would cloud an objective judgement? And wouldn’t that be more so the bigger the company was? This is a big part of the problem with media coverage of the economy: it is presented through the lens of big business. Every day on the news, we hear how the stock market did. We almost never hear how workers’ wages are doing. (Now that would be a depressing segment each night!)

I wouldn’t mind if Stebbins were being interviewed about trends in transportation fuels. As the CEO of a company that does that, he might have something useful to say. But he apparently can’t say anything about the economy generally without simply repeated long refuted talking points. But it’s worse than that. He is also someone who testifies before Congress with the same ignorant certainty as when he talks to Washington Post reporters. Is it any wonder that our nation is so screwed up?

Afterword

I’ve been ending a lot of articles that way. The truth is that the government shutdown and Debt Ceiling crisis are really having an impact on me. And it seems that it doesn’t much matter how badly the Republican Party (With lots of help from the Democrats!) drives the economy into the ground, the people will continue to ignore it. But maybe they are the smart ones, because it doesn’t seem to much matter what we do. But we could at least vote the worst ones out of office.

As I point out a lot, conservatives are against Obamacare because it raises taxes on the rich. There is no more to it. One of the main ones is a new excise tax on certain medical devices. Companies that make and import medical devices hate this 2.5% tax. So they have been lobbying Congress hard. And guess what? It’s working! Yesterday, the House voted for a continuing resolution that delays Obamacare for one year and permanently repeals a tax on medical devices.

Lee Fang at The Nation wrote a great article yesterday, Tea Party Lawmaker Letter on Med Device Tax Repeal Authored by Lobby Group. As he reports, after the Republicans took over the house at the start of 2011, 75 Tea Party House members wrote a letter to Boehner in which they demanded that the medical device tax be repealed. Clearly, this was not about the people and their freedom to get the Best Healthcare in the World.™

But Fang has more to report than this. He looked at the metadata on the document and under “author” it said, “Ryan Strandlund.” Who is he? A congressman? A congressional staffer? Of course not! He is “a member of AdvaMed’s government affairs team.” And AdvaMed (Advanced Medical Technology Association) is a lobbying group for the medical device industry. But there’s more! Until recently, Boehner’s deputy chief of staff was Brett Loper—a former AdvaMed lobbyist. (In June, he went back to lobbying in an official capacity.)

Fang points out that the medical device industry is not hurting. They already pay a very low tax rate. But it is worse than he says. By increasing the number of people who have insurance, there will be more demand for medical devices. So the medical device manufacturers should be happy: more business and more profits. What I don’t like about Obamacare is that it forces citizens to buy into a ridiculously expensive private insurance market. This is a huge giveaway too all of the people in the healthcare industry. But despite this, the businesses who are getting major help from the government are upset when the government asks them to give the smallest amount back.

Again, however, the issue is not the business community. It is supposed to be evil. The problem is that the government is not supposed to do the bidding of the business community. It is supposed to be looking out for the best interests of the nation. Sometimes, those interests are the same. But in this case they aren’t. In the feeble minds of the Tea Party caucus, the business community is America. It is the same old myth that what is good for GM is good for America. These 75 Tea Party legislators should be tried for treason—well, at least corruption.

Robert Reich has a film out, Inequality For All. It looks really good. But I’m afraid it will be a while before I get to see it. Unlike John Dies at the End, Inequality For All is not available to stream. It is, however, getting better distribution. If I could get to Berkeley or San Francisco, I could see it. Nothing like this ever comes to Santa Rosa. That’s interesting, because Santa Rosa is a reasonably liberal town. But the only documentaries like this that make it here are conservative claptrap like Dinesh D’Souza’s 2016: Obama’s America. Of course, that film disappeared almost immediately, indicating that no one here cared to see it. But the rich people who own our multiplex sure wanted to push it. But a liberal documentary about income inequality? Not so much.

In the trailer below, it is clear that the film combines the two things that I most love about Reich: humor and insight. It even includes a very short bit of video where Bill O’Reilly says that Reich is a communist. That’s a perfect example of the revolutionary use of language: make words meaningless. If Reich is a communist, what is Stalin? A double plus bad communist? But O’Reilly is right to fear Reich because he does stand for everything that O’Reilly has spent his career fighting against: equality, opportunity, justice. But it is more than just ideology; it is also style. O’Reilly is a bully who shouts and intimidates in order to get his way. Reich uses his considerable charm and enormous knowledge to make his points.

Unfortunately, raging on live television will draw 3 million viewers per night. Robert Reich has no such outlet. So it is great that this documentary is making its way around the country. Thus far, the reviews for it have been very good. Currently Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 93% fresh rating. So hopefully it will get some big awards and get a larger audience. I can’t speak for the film, but certainly Robert Reich deserves that. And so does the country.

Afterword

I saw on the O’Reilly Sucks blog that last night he was pushing the most pernicious bit of false equivalence. He claims that both sides have their complaints, “So President Obama and the Republican leadership must sit down and hammer out a deal. Those who will not compromise will be hurting the country and the American people will know just who they are.” But that is the whole thing. If you say that it is acceptable to shutdown the government over an irrelevant policy, then you are siding with the Republicans. But of course, O’Reilly puts it in a way that sounds reasonable and even handed. Also note: Obama can’t negotiate with John Boehner. Boehner doesn’t have control of the Republicans. So even if it were the right thing to do, it would be useless.

Eric Alterman is no wonk. He is an English professor, after all. And although he is perhaps better described as a historian, he is no mathematician. So you can imagine just how humbling it is when he starts making calculations. Like back in 2003, shortly after the invasion of Iraq, he predicted, “George W. Bush deliberately misled the country to launch an unnecessary war that will embroil this country in what could be decades of chaos, mayhem and murder, and cost us hundreds of billions and quite possibly trillions, while destroying the nation’s fiscal health in the process.” Ouch! He must regret saying that now!

At that time, Jane Galt—later revealed to be right wing hack and pseudo-libertarian Megan McArdle—was on hand to call Alterman on his bullshit. She wrote that while most things tend to end up costing more than first estimated, he was way off target. “But trillions? US GDP is roughly $10 trillion. Alterman is saying that over the long run, this war is going to cost us at least 20% of GDP. That’s nuts, and it’s not the first time I’ve seen those sorts of numbers around.” That had to sting! I can’t imagine how Eric Alterman could even show his face in public after that.

After she was done “proving” that Alterman’s numbers were wrong, she went after another well know innumerate: economist James Galbraith. He made the outlandish prediction that the Iraq War could take 5 years and 200,000 troops. What an idiot! No wonder the only people who ever quote him are similarly mushy headed thinkers like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. But McArdle was not afraid, she even went so far as to try to school Galbraith on what an opportunity cost is. Of course, as Jon Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution noted, she can’t even do basic arithmetic like division. But her point is not Galbraith; she is above all focus on the evil English professor and his suggestion that the Iraq War might cost more than Bush and company said.

Of course, it turned out that McArdle was completely wrong. The war really was that expensive, it really did take that many toops, it really did take that much time. Actually, it took more of all of them: money, troops, time. It also cost far more lives than she estimated. Gin and Tacos dredged up this old Jane Galt article last month and gave it the whole FJM treatment, A Very Special Time Warp FJM. It goes step by step, tearing McArdle apart. It wasn’t hard. As they said, “Megan McArdle labors mightily, and almost always unsuccessfully, to write columns that do not immediately collapse under the weight of mild scrutiny.” And this one was written ten years earlier!

But what I find most interesting is that it doesn’t matter that McArdle was totally wrong about this and so much else besides. She is still a shining light in conservative media. Last year, right after the election, David Brooks wrote, The Conservative Future. He was looking at all the new ideas and open minded thinking on the right. He highlighted Megan McArdle and wrote that she was one of the “soft libertarians” who “start from broadly libertarian premises but do not apply them in a doctrinaire way.” Apparently, nothing that McArdle can say or do will ever make her anything but a smart and insightful thinker.

Meanwhile, Eric Alterman continues to be the star on the left that he has long been. But being right doesn’t matter any more than McArdle being wrong matters. To some extent, that’s simply because he’s a liberal. Liberals are expected to be right when it comes to facts. Conservatives are only supposed to be right in a postmodern sense of the word—you know, where being right is the same as holding an opinion. What’s more, it is another example of conservative affirmative action. We can’t hold conservatives accountable because the pool of conservatives who can pass for intelligent political observers is so small.

Still, I think we need to point out the gross incompetence of commentators wherever we see it. I do it to liberal commentators all the time. There isn’t nearly as much fun to be had going after conservatives. Shooting fish in a barrel is easy compared to it.

Update (26 September 2013 8:05 pm)

In a private tweet, Megan McArdle responded, “Yes, you’re right, I was wrong about the Iraq War.” I always hate getting these kinds of responses, because it makes it all so very personal. It isn’t my intention to make her feel bad. My point is that no one is held accountable once they get a certain level of fame. So I don’t particularly care that she was wrong in this particular case. I don’t even particularly care that she has been wrong so often about so many things. (Just two months ago, I wrote, Megan McArdle’s Ridiculous Anti-Filibuster-Reform Argument.) The point is that it doesn’t matter. She will continue to be well paid to blather on. And this is part of why our politics is so screwed up.