'I' has the honor to report ...

No, the first-person-pronoun theme hasn't gone away; it's just taken on a few new guises:

On Sunday’s “This Week” on ABC, Washington Post columnist George Will offered his theory on why Obama might be struggling this go-around.

“Look, self-absorption is part of the occupational hazard of politics, and it’s also part of the job description of being president,” Will said. “All that said, try to imagine Dwight Eisenhower talking about D-Day saying, ‘I did this. I decided this. I did this and then I did that.’ It’s inconceivable.”

That comparison between Obama and Eisenhower illustrated the problem for the president, Will said.

“If you struck from Barack Obama’s vocabulary the first-person singular pronoun, he would fall silent, which would be a mercy to us and a service to him, actually,” Will continued. “Because he was been so incontinent for the last three years that you wind up with, as you said, [an] Ohio State University with empty seats.”

"Incontinent" is the new "spectacularly promiscuous" -- a vaguely medical term thrown around by right-wing columnists to describe a linguistic phenomenon that supposedly sheds light on some sort of presidential psychiatric disorder (which one, we're not exactly sure) that the librul media are forever scurrying to hide.

As you've probably noticed by now (if not, start with a summary of the Logsters' rigorous observations*), there are two underlying problems with the "I" meme:

1) It's undertheorized. Pundits toss first-person-pronoun frequency around as if it had a fixed meaning, but it doesn't, and if it did, it's probably not what the pundit of the day thinks. (If you missed Jamie Pennebaker's appearance on NPR last week, have a listen.)

2) The scary Kenyan Muslim communist dude? He doesn't say "I" that often, compared with other presidents.

Will is, in short, lying, but here it's a sideswipe rather than the main event, which is comparing the feckless Kenyan to a real gentleman. Will has the vapors -- it's inconceivable! -- at the idea that Eisenhower would have done any such a thing. Alas for him, that's an evidence question. Ike's writing as a general is easy to find, and when it's examined, it too has a dismaying tendency to show the opposite of what's claimed for it.

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Pronoun fever: Catch it

Language Log sheds some further light on Charles Krauthammer's latest pseudo-psycholinguistic fabrications about presidential discourse, with the excellent addition of an entry from Safire's Political Dictionary:

my (use of possessive pronoun): Used as in "my ambassador," either a slip of the tongue leading to an attack for royalist tendencies, or a deliberate presidential effort to undercut the State Department.

Brief detour. Bill Safire was by most if not all accounts a genuinely decent and collegial guy (Language Hat's poignant tribute is worth revisiting). But for all the different personae he assumed in his writing (Foxy Grandpa with a steel-trap memory for campaigns past, Mr. Marple summoning his platoons of irregulars to crowdsource the truth), he was at bottom a political creature. When the push of observation came to the shove of ideology, the latter tended to win -- at least, often enough to make him a lodestone of the particular brand of fiction-posing-as-analysis that seems to be in fashion on the WashPost's op-ed pages of late.

Thus, when Safire introduces historical evidence to support a current assertion about language and its effects, it's often a good idea to take a splash in the archives first. Back to the Dictionary:

Dwight Eisenhower, a team player, consciously avoided the possessive pronoun. "I don't believe," wrote reporter* Robert Donovan, "that Eisenhower has ever used the expression 'my administration' or 'my Cabinet.' He speaks of the Cabinet or the administration."

It takes all of two or three minutes to find this letter from Ike to Konrad Adenauer, discussing the disposition of confiscated German assets, reported in the NYT of Aug. 11, 1954:

Several bills dealing with the subject are now pending there [in Congress], and members of my Cabinet and other Government officials have appeared and expressed their views. None of the measures thus far proposed have the approval of my Administration, but you may be assured that this problem is receiving earnest consideration and it is my hope that a fair, equitable and satisfactory solution can be arrived at.

I like Ike's writing here: no Oxford comma, no strained attempt to avoid the perfectly well-placed preposition at the end of the sentence, comfortable use of the passive voice where it's appropriate ("you may be assured"). And, of course, what I would interpret as an assertion of personal responsibility in "my Cabinet" and "my Administration."

An interpretation is exactly that -- an inference you draw about what evidence means in its context. No doubt we could construct a "my Cabinet" sentence that means or implies something entirely different: "My Cabinet will look like America," meaning "and yours doesn't, you Skull-n-Bones elitist." I like my reading of the Ike letter, but I'm open to other ones, partly because I think there's a high risk of overstretch in drawing broad psychological conclusions from isolated examples of language.

The point, though, is that you get to conclusions by starting with evidence. And the message to America's Newspapers is the same: Charles Krauthammer doesn't use evidence. He makes things up, and he draws broad psychological conclusions from stuff he makes up. You have every right to ask for a refund from the Post syndicate. Why do you continue to pay for this stuff?

* And a tip of the hat to Hat for not following NYT style, which would have called for making him "the reporter Robert Donovan."

Anniversaries II

Another Great Moment in Media History: On Sept. 23, 1952, the Republican vice presidential candidate -- that's the guy wearing the Nixon mask, above -- went before the public to explain his side of a slush-fund scandal:

I have a theory, too, that the best and only answer to a smear or to an honest misunderstanding of the facts is to tell the truth. And that's why I'm here tonight. I want to tell you my side of the case.

Shown here is the part about the dog, which is why this has gone down in history as the "Checkers speech." You'll want to stay tuned for the foreign-policy stuff, though; in functional theory terms, the speech looks like a defense, but it's also a full-throated attack. With a few other gems thrown in:

Now let me say that, finally, this evening I want to read to you just briefly excerpts from a letter which I received, a letter which, after all this is over, no one can take away from us. It reads as follows:

Dear Senator Nixon:
Since I'm only 19 years of age I can't vote in this
Presidential election but believe me if I could you and General Eisenhower would
certainly get my vote. My husband is in the Fleet Marines in Korea. He's a
corpsman on the front lines and we have a two-month-old son he's never seen. And I feel confident that with great Americans like you and General Eisenhower in
the White House, lonely Americans like myself will be united with their loved
ones now in Korea.
I only pray to God that you won't be too late.

Could Nixon actually go 15 minutes without telling a lie of some sort? Well ...

And, now, finally, I know that you wonder whether or not I am going to stay on the Republican ticket or resign.

Let me say this: I don't believe that I ought to quit because I'm not a quitter. And, incidentally, Pat's not a quitter. After all, her name was Patricia Ryan and she was born on St. Patrick's Day, and you know the Irish never quit.

I think I first saw this one in a NatLamp trivia quiz back in the Watergate days, but: Her name was Thelma Catherine Ryan, and she was born March 16, 1912.

The black guy's about to not play golf again!

You really do wonder if the Times has a policy of letting the print edition look all mature -- if incomprehensibly boring, headline-wise -- while saving the cask-strength stuff for online readers:

That explains why Trump is in the 1A print headline but doesn't appear anywhere in the frontpage text -- this is a story about an "Obama snub." Of what, you ask?

Of all the perks of the presidency that Barack Obama will miss as he leaves the White House, it’s a good bet that Camp David won’t rank high on the list.

Compared with his predecessors, President Obama has spent little downtime over the past eight years at the secluded presidential retreat in the mountains overlooking Thurmont, Maryland. In total, Mr. Obama has visited Camp David 39 times, spanning all or parts of 93 days — barely 3 percent of his two-term tenure.

By contrast, President George W. Bush made 149 visits to Camp David in two terms, covering all or parts of 487 days, said Mark Knoller, the CBS News White House reporter who keeps meticulous records of presidential comings and goings.

In other words, this is more or less the same story that the same reporter wrote in May 2014:

President Obama differs from his predecessor on more than just policy.

Compared with President George W. Bush, Mr. Obama has rarely visited Camp David, the sprawling, secluded retreat in northern Maryland that has become a regular getaway spot for presidents over the past 70 years.
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This just in from Planet Fox

And what might be the cunning, moronic, narcissistic Chicago punk pantywaist thug in the White House be up to now? Glad you asked!

The phone. The electric light bulb. The Model T. Heck, Google.

The list of American innovations that have changed life on Earth is practically endless, but President Obama is trying to inspire America's next technological wave by referring back to a 50-year-old achievement by a defunct nation -- Sputnik.
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The black guy's not playing golf!

No, it's worse than that. Far worse. He doesn't like Camp David! Take it away, The Washington Times:

President Obama differs from his predecessor on more than just policy.

Compared with President George W. Bush, Mr. Obama has rarely visited Camp David, the sprawling, secluded retreat in northern Maryland that has become a regular getaway spot for presidents over the past 70 years.

Although Mr. Obama hasn’t shunned the location entirely — he spent his 52nd birthday there last year — veteran Washington reporters and pundits say it’s clear that the 44th president hasn’t warmed up to Camp David in the same way as did Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter and Mr. Bush.

Let's let some veteran reporters and pundits explain why:

“I suspect part of the reason is because his daughters would prefer to be in the city, prefer to be at the White House,” said Ken Walsh, chief White House correspondent for U.S. News & World Report and author of the book “From Mount Vernon to Crawford: A History of the Presidents and Their Retreats.”

“I’ve been told that as an urban man, a guy from Chicago, he doesn’t take to Camp David and its rural setting as much as other presidents have. That’s another part of it,” he said.
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'I' likes Ike: More pronoun fables

OK, who out there had "Krauthammer" and "June 1" in the great Post/Ike/Obama pronoun pool?

That ad also highlighted the many self-references Obama made in announcing the bin Laden raid: “I can report . . . I directed . . . I met repeatedly . . . I determined . . . at my direction . . . I, as commander in chief,” etc. ad nauseam.* (Eisenhower’s announcement of the D-Day invasion made not a single mention of his role, whereas the alternate statement he’d prepared had the landing been repulsed was entirely about it being his failure.)

By now, this has the makings of a drinking game: Columnist makes specious psychological inference based on direct misreading of the data introduced to support the claim, and the last one to find a direct refutation of the claim has to buy a round. I'll just assume that if you're a regular visitor, you know how easy it is to document Ike's pronoun use and how completely the fables about Obama's "spectacularly promiscuous" and "incontinent" use of the first-person singular have been debunked. The question, given this wealth of data, is why no one from the world of punditry seems interested in calling bullshit on such a spectacularly promiscuous lie.

That's really up to the Washington Post, whose ombudsman has come out foursquare in favor of a world in which columnists don't make things up -- to the point where he publicly dressed down a humor columnist who booted an ill-sourced fact claim about Rush Limbaugh. Perhaps the Post owes its audience -- and not coincidentally, the newspapers that pay to run Krauthammer, George Will and the like -- a more thorough explanation of its standards here. Is it OK to lie about presidential candidates, but not about popular propagandists? Is it OK for political opinion leaders to lie, but not humor writers? Or has Walter Lippmann been right all along?

If I lie in a lawsuit involving the fate of my neighbor's cow, I can go to jail. But if I lie to a million readers in a matter involving war and peace, I can lie my head off, and, if I choose the right series of lies, be entirely irresponsible.**

* It's a free country, and Dr. Krauthammer has a First Amendment right to be disgusted by anything he wants to. Given, again, that the evidence runs contrary to his argument, he risks creating a public perception that "ad nauseam" is Latin for "uppity."
** "Liberty and the news," 1929

Pronoun purge: Curiouser and curiouser

As you may recall from Friday's episode, serial fictioneer Charles Krauthammer has brought the Ike/Obama/"I" fable around for another turn in the spotlight. Imagine my surprise on opening the syndicated version to find that the I's had been plucked out -- purged like an unperson from the Big Soviet Encyclopedia.

Here's the fifth graf of the Krauthammer column, as posted at Charlotte, Sarasota, Indianapolis, Sumter (SC), Charleston* (WV) and the National Post (Canada):

A campaign ad had Bill Clinton praising Obama for the courage of ordering the raid because, had it failed and Americans been killed, "the downside would have been horrible for him." Outraged veterans released a response ad pointing out that it would have been considerably more horrible for the dead SEALs. Obama only compounded the self-aggrandizement problem when he spoke a week later about the military "fighting on my behalf."

That's the fifth and seventh grafs of the Post version, with the sixth -- the one including the ad's pronoun claim and the Eisenhower comparison -- excised. It seems reasonable to conclude that the edit occurred upstream from the papers that carry the column; all six versions** also have a slightly tweaked lede. (The Post version begins "A very strange story, that 6,000-word front-page New York Times piece ..."; the others have "A very strange story, a 6,000-word front-page New York Times piece.")***

Several explanations present themselves. The syndicate could have been aiming for a stricter word count than the home team. Someone could have thought the pronouns represented an irrelevant detour from the core of the column's argument. Someone might have been concerned that the ad has been critiqued for selective editing. Or someone could have decided to hold opinion columns to a rudimentary standard of truth-telling.

That last would be a nice outcome, but it'd be even nicer to learn that the Post was extending such a standard to the stuff it publishes in print and online too. Observations and comments from the Post would be welcome.

* The paragraphs are cut differently here, but the order is the same
** The Hartford Courant omits the first two sentences of the fifth graf but shares the lede tweak.
*** If I were Krauthammer, I'd complain about this, though he owes the editor who deleted the pronoun fib..