On Being, or on Message Down?

Just as a reminder that our British friends aren't the only ones who churn out the occasional post-comprehensible hed, there's this from the National Review. See how long it takes you to get the intended meaning:

Donald Trump made pro forma endorsements of Paul Ryan, John McCain, and Kelly Ayotte on Friday, which has led his supporters to argue his campaign is back on track. It does show that Trump can sometimes be forced to do things he doesn’t want to–the Pence pick was another example–but this wasn’t exactly a watershed event. His original non-endorsements were an exercise in pointlessly destructive pique, and quickly backtracking was literally the least he could do. But every time he reads from a script his boosters hopefully pronounce it a major turning point (presumably there will be more of this after tomorrow’s economic speech).

National Review is still a bastion of obsessive hyphenation, if not of full-on Buckleyesque high grammar. ("Quickly backtracking" isn't even figuratively the least he could have done.) The problem with the hed, of course, isn't that it's ungrammatical, but that -- as is so often the case -- it's grammatical about so many different things. Defining being is one of them; Message Down is another.

Easy cure: Quotes! Especially since the phrase doesn't appear in the text of the post, mark it in the hed: Defining "being on message" down.

On a completely unrelated note, enjoy the comments.  There are reasons a circular ambush with units this size is a bad idea.

Don't it strike fear into your heart?

You can see why the alarm bells are going off over at the National Review:

Google plans to bias its search engines in favor of the supposedly factual accuracy of the sites to which it links. From the New Scientist story:

THE internet is stuffed with garbage. Anti-vaccination websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free “news” stories spread like wildfire. Google has devised a fix – rank websites according to their truthfulness.

Google’s search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them.

Don't tell me -- that'd be like the ones that throw scare quotes around "facts"? Just wondering. Anyway, this is a matter of profound concern for Buckley's heirs:

As the old saying goes, there are facts–and then, there are facts. These days a lot of things are called “facts” that aren’t–often surrounding heated political and cultural controversies.

That is why I think Google’s plan will open the door for profound political, cultural, or ideological bias in what should be a neutral function. Perhaps that is the point.

Imagine a world in which links to Fox and Drudge -- and for that matter, the National Review itself -- weren't cyber-mistaken for votes in favor of their credibility.

Lying with statistics: Ur doin it wrong

Now that we're inside four weeks to the election, it's probably worth reviewing some of the Magic Phrases of political punditry. Here are three that should raise immediate red flags:

• "Real Clear Politics average"
• "Within the margin of error"
• "Statistical dead heat"

If you see any of those in a campaign thumbsucker, you should assume that the writer is either (a) amusingly ill-informed or (b) attempting to blow smoke up your butt on the assumption that you'll fall for anything that sounds entertaining. Which will it be there, National Review Online?

Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D., N.H.) and Republican challenger Scott Brown continue to find themselves neck-and-neck in the New Hampshire Senate race less than four weeks away from the election.

The latest NH1/New England College poll shows Shaheen leading Brown 48.5 percent to 46 percent, falling within the roughly three-point margin of error. Just 3 percent of voters remain undecided at this point.

Well, not quite. The lead is 48.5 to 45.9, according to the polling agency, and the margin of sampling error -- which you really should leave to one decimal place* -- is 2.7 points, meaning (at 95% confidence) that the result is right at the so-called "margin." Whether you're a tenth of a point above or a tenth of a point below the arbitrary number that's misapplied here, the best bet is that Shaheen is leading. All you have to do is turn the confidence level down to about two-thirds. If that's your idea of a dead heat, you shouldn't go to the track by yourself.

There's no such bogus statisculating in the second example:

Senator Pat Roberts (R., Kan.) has closed the gap with independent candidate Greg Orman, according to a new poll in what has become one of the increasingly competitive races this cycle.

After polls showing Roberts trailing by as many as ten percentage points last week, a new CNN/ORC poll of likely voters in the Sunflower State finds Roberts leading Orman 49 percent to 48 percent. The survey finds both candidates above water with their favorable-unfavorable ratings.

In case you don't feel like calculating it,** the standard error for that survey is about .019, for a margin of sampling error (95% confidence) of 3.7 percentage points. The "slight lead" isn't as good a bet as the "statistical tie."

Well, that's not unusual. The party press has often been the sort of place where you hear what you want, regardless of those pesky confidence intervals. And this isn't the National Review's first county fair. If it's only trying to lighten the rubes' wallets a little, that's between National Review and the rubes; it might get to the county line ahead of them, and it might not. But if it's in the habit of deceiving its masters, it might want to watch out. Those bills can come due in a hurry,  

* This poll has a sample of 1,286; you could get a margin of 3 points -- OK, 3.04 -- at 95% confidence with 250 fewer respondents.
** Real Clear Politics is a useful archive of current survey results and sample sizes, but averaging a bunch of estimates -- particularly estimates with different CIs -- is never a good idea. The commentary files can be pretty hilarious, though.

Today in the realism-free zone

Behold the National Review in its infinite wisdom:

We can’t delegate our warfighting to jihadists.

Kinda slept through the entire Afghan-Soviet thing, did we? Here's the AP in December 1984, bringing Ronald Reagan into a story about the administration's apparent inability to ensure that enough high-end equipment ended up in remote parts of Afghanistan:

He added, "The Afghan freedom fighters -- the Mujahedeen -- remind us daily that the human spirit is resilient and tenacious, and that liberty is not easily stolen from a people determined to defend it."

Hey, kids: See if you can guess what triliteral root is used to form the noun "mujahed"! In sad news for the National Review, not only can we delegate our warfighting to jihadists, we're pretty good at it.

That's why we have realism, and why (in one of those rare bits of punditry that still merit reading six years later) Stephen Walt referred to the American press as a "realism-free zone." You don't have to still be sticking up for the Melians to be a realist, but you do have to begin by looking at the world as it is, not as your angry friend on the AM dial wants it to be. You don't even have to take sides for or against Reagan's Elmer Fudd approach to the parts of the world with funny alphabets and lots of brown people. (If realism had a T-shirt, it would probably say "It seemed like a good idea at the time" in Latin.) But you should have either the common sense or the common decency to agree that things happened the way they happened, because that's sort of essential if you want to shape how things might happen in the future.

To paraphrase a popular rallying cry from early in our national life: billions for defense, but not one cent for jihad.

Should we just take up a collection and buy the poor clown a copy of "Charlie Wilson's War"?