Manly girls, girly men, made-up stories

Having watched the lie get halfway around the world, shall we see what happens when the truth puts on its pantsdress cover?

Things got worse for America, of course, before they got better. Here's the follow-up from the Friday predawn hours:

A retired female gunnery sergeant has blasted the Obama Administration’s plan to create a "unisex" look for the Marine Corps by swapping out the Marines' iconic hats with a new hat that some have derided as "girly" ...

Ready for the punch line?
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Today in Kenyan Muslim perfidy

Is nothing safe from his marauding Alinskyite touch?

A change to the Marine Corps' uniform hats could leave hard-nosed Leathernecks looking a lot less macho.

According to the New York Post, President Obama's plan to create a "unisex" look for the Corps has officials on the verge of swapping out the Marines' iconic caps with a new hat that some have derided as so "girly" that they would make the French blush.

Well, iconic is as iconic does. As the Post reports (but Fox doesn't), the style you see at right in the illustration* is "based on a style the Marines used from 1904 to 1918"; it's apparently called a Dan Daly, after a Marine of that era whose insight on its alleged girliness might be welcome.**

Fashions change, of course, and this isn't the fashion section anyway. We do, though, maintain an active interest in the sort of question-begging that makes this "Obama's plan." Here's the Post:

A change to the Marine Corps’ uniform hats could take the hard-nosed Leathernecks from the Halls of Montezuma to the shops of Christopher Street.
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When spark plugs attack

See if you can guess where the Editor In Chief Emeritus of the Washington Times is going with this one:

The Donald finally caught a break in Paris, basking in rare Franco-American bonhomie as he joined the new president of France on Bastille Day, this year to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the American arrival on the battlefields of World War I.

A contingent of American troops even led the parade down the Champs-Elysees. Not even a president can resist a parade, especially a military parade with marching bands and serried ranks of fighting men. On Thursday, President Emmanuel Macron of France did not even try.

I think you've got the wrong "not even" -- is there some reason heads of state should be especially immune to the old blare of bugles and ruffle of drums? But we're about to get to the point:

Neither did Donald Trump, once a schoolboy at a military academy. Regimental flags floating on a peaceful breeze, despised as nationalist symbols to some, are but reminders to all that “greater love hath no man than this,” in the words of Christ as recorded by the Apostle John, “that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

So whatever his offspring have been up to with the Russians, the Bright Sun of the 21st Century is still reminding Europe who's the real defender of Western Civ. Which makes the Times's venture into period history all the more interesting:

... The 100th anniversary celebrations are particularly poignant reminders of Franco-American friendship when it was backs-to-the-wall time.  ... When the Germans, advancing through a grain field, got within a hundred yards, the Marines opened ferocious rifle fire, mowing down the ranks of the Bosch until the survivors fled into the woods.

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The black guy played golf in 2013 again!

You guys! Guess what party the McClatchy Washington Bureau is arriving late at:

WASHINGTON--On a windy winter day in 2013 at one of Florida’s top golf courses, President Obama and Tiger Woods played a friendly round together for the first time.

Some 44 months later, the president’s trip to Port St. Lucie, Florida, has been revealed: $3.6 million.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article111163862.html#storylink=cpy

Strictly speaking, no. As the fourth graf suggests, the trip was "revealed" in (ahem) 2013. (Fox, usually better at chronicling the usurper's hijinx, caught up the following day, though it had borrowed a precede from the Daily Caller earlier.) Perhaps we meant the cost had been revealed?

... The GAO report was requested by Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article111163862.html#storylink=cpy

That's a relief. I thought for a moment there it might be someone who didn't already have a Washington bureau to call their own. Anyway, now that McClatchy has awakened to the scope of the Kenyan menace, could we suggest some stories to catch up on?

Obama uses first-person pronouns!
Hillary wrote a paper about ALINSKY!!!!!
Obama wants the Marines to wear girly hats!
BENGHAZI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Obama sat next to an Arab guy at dinner this one time!
Hillary is running for office, with politics!


Let me know if I can help.

* McClatchy could also take a note from the follow-up -- just like in the textbook, kids! -- pointing out that Obama didn't seem to have learned much.

Of female nurses and male drivers

It does cause one to wonder what circumstances would have to obtain for our friends at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network to write a hed saying "male zookeeper," doesn't it?

We have cliches like "man bites dog," after all, because news is about the unusual, and to have an unusual, you have to have a usual -- a natural state of things in which women don't tend large animals or operate heavy machinery and men don't do girly stuff like teach primary school. Hence the persistence of double-marked ledes like this one, in which the pronoun makes the modifying "male" unnecessary:
A male nurse who exposed himself and a fondled a female colleague at an old folks home faces being struck off.

Or this:
Prosecutors are reviewing a case against a 17-year-old suspected female drunken driver who crashed in September, killing her passenger.

Those are more extreme than the case at hand, but they're still reminders that how we portray the world says a lot about how we view the world. Readers can't tell what you meant from your choice of modifiers, but they're likely to have a pretty clear idea of what you said.

Really stupid stuff you shouldn't do with polls

Q: What's worse than writing a bogus poll story because it fits a sports narrative?
A: Writing a bogus poll story because it fits the party line!

I think we've discussed this point before, but one way you can distinguish the professional press from the party press is that the professionals screw up survey reporting evenhandedly. If the New York Times decides to round all its confidence intervals to the nearest whole percentage point, that's a dumb decision, but it applies with equal dumbness to all results -- not just ones the Times allegedly likes or dislikes. Similarly, horse-race writers will write about who purportedly clawed whose way back into contention after the candidates traded jabs when the gloves came off, regardless of how the paper's endorsement is going to go. The horse race is a silly narrative, but it usually operates independently of party alignment.

The party press is a different creature. (I'm fond of this example from 2008, in which a 3-point lead* is "Within Margin Of Error" when the Kenyan Muslim usurper is ahead but "McCain Out Front" when the home team is winning.) Its goal is to tell the audience what ought to be happening. And the risk with letting your wishes influence your results -- trying to be objective here, kids -- is not just deluding the general-purpose viewer but deluding the paymaster. If anybody deserves a clear-eyed account of the Massachusetts Senate race, it's the American side -- right, Fair 'n' Balanced Network?

The Senate race is Massachusetts is deadlocked heading into the final weeks** – again challenging the assumption that a little-known Republican cannot win national office in such a heavily Democrat state.

There are no values of "deadlocked" for which this is true -- at least, not on any evidence the story presents, or any evidence from the lone specific source the story cites. Above is Real Clear Politics' summary of the four most recent polls in the Gomez-Markey race. In the two latest, the Democrat has a 7-point lead; with a sample of 500 in each case, that means a "margin of error" of 4.4 points at your standard 95 percent confidence. If Fox News tells you that's an even bet, Fox News had better hope it gets to the county line before you and your friends with the tar and feathers do.***

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The echo chamber: Pronouns again!

Always nice when Jon Stewart's working in a holiday week, isn't it? Some of those otherwise hidden gems of Fair 'n' Balanced journalism might not otherwise get the audience they deserve -- this one, for example. (Its Web incarnation -- top story Monday evening -- is above.)

The random fear-stoking is really secondary to all the other buttons this one pushes in the audience. This evening's No. 2 story is an example: once again, those damn liberal media are ignoring a major story broken by the fierce watchdogs of Fox:

Last year, it was Van Jones and ACORN that slipped under much of the media's radar. But despite pledges to pay closer attention to the "polemic world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs," two new stories have taken their place in the annals of things not much reported.

But more broadly, it's a chance to light up the echo chamber for everybody's favorite themes (so, yes, it's going to hit the mainstream media, whether the news desk has the good sense to ignore it or not). Cal Thomas has the Apology Tour/kowtowing beat (now with added Racism®!):

It is a continuation of the president's subjugation of himself (bowing to foreign leaders) and the country he is charged with leading by obsequiously kowtowing to a people for whom advancement to the Middle Ages would be a step up.

And Charles Krauthammer -- maybe George Will was busy elsewhere and Chuck was the only one available who could spell "exceptionalism":

There was no finer expression of belief in American exceptionalism than Kennedy's. Obama has a different take. As he said last year in France, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." Which of course means: If we're all exceptional, no one is.

But -- wait for it, grammar fans -- there's more afoot here. Dr. Krauthammer is going to show you his psychoanalytic chops again, and he's going to do it with pronouns!

... It's fine to recognize the achievements of others and be non-chauvinistic about one's country. But Obama's modesty is curiously selective. When it comes to himself, modesty is in short supply.

It began with the almost comical self-inflation of his presidential campaign. ... And it carried into his presidency, from his posture of philosopher-king adjudicating between America's sins and the world's to his speeches marked by a spectacularly promiscuous use of the word "I."

How many times to we have to dig up the links and go through this again? "Spectacularly promiscuous" is Krauthammer-speak for "less than his predecessor, and probably significantly less, but who has time to test it when the original lie won't go away." It's not new. It's old enough that someone at the WashPost (people used to call them "editors") should be asking the little doctor when he'd like to document it and how exactly he got through medical school anyway with that sort of attitude toward the world of falsifiable propositions. But there's a new twist on the pronoun phenomenon just ahead:

Notice, too, how Obama habitually refers to Cabinet members and other high government officials as "my" -- "my secretary of homeland security," "my national security team," "my ambassador." The more normal -- and respectful -- usage is to say "the," as in "the secretary of state." These are, after all, public officials sworn to serve the nation and the Constitution -- not just the man who appointed them.

It's a stylistic detail, but quite revealing of Obama's exalted view of himself.

OK, we've got your conceptual definition. What's your operational definition? If "habitually" means something, it means something with decimal points -- if you want anyone to believe it, you're going to have to measure it and then show that it happens in Obama's speech at some predetermined degree higher than it generally does in presidential speech. That's basically a reliability question, meaning it doesn't address the validity question: Is this a detail "quite revealing" of an "exalted view of himself," or did you just make that up too?

Because it seems to cause such trouble at Fox, we should probably note that not all words and phrases carry the same meaning in every context they're spoken in. I'm going to bet that even Dr. Krauthammer doesn't see this post-election comment by Bush Senior as evidence of rampant narcissism:

"I would like to see my Secretary of State continue that which George Shultz has done in terms of the numbers of meetings with the Soviet Foreign Minister."

Clearly that's contextually differerent from Bush Junior's comment in November 2004:

"I'm proud of my secretary of state -- he's done a heck of a good job.''

Or Reagan from June 1987:

"And I shouldn't perhaps go out of the way to say that the thing that he himself has proposed, the zero-zero of intercontinental -- or intermediate-range missiles, that I proposed that four years ago and got in trouble with my then Secretary of State -- not the present one -- for saying such a foolish thing."

Or Bush Senior again, writing to (ahem) Saddam Hussein shortly before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990:

"Let me reassure you, as my Ambassador, Senator Dole and others have done, that my Administration continues to desire better relations with Iraq."

Or even Jimmy Carter amid the Andy Young flap in 1979: "He's still my ambassador to the UN, with restraints"

It's worth noting here that a search of the NYT database at Lexis-Nexis for stories containing "obama" and "my ambassador" on Thursday night turned up no hits. None. Which certainly doesn't mean the combination hasn't occurred, or that the Times is the same sort of archive of political speech it was three decades ago, but might start to suggest that the little doctor is simply making stuff up. But another those key phrases -- "my national security team" -- does yield some material for direct comparison. Here are two examples of Obama's speech, from January 2010 and September 2009 respectively:

"My national security team has led an interagency effort overnight."

"It was my judgment, informed by my national security team, that releasing these photos would inflame anti-American opinion and allow our enemies to paint U.S. troops with a broad, damning and inaccurate brush, thereby endangering them in theaters of war.''

You might conclude -- unless you'd been reading Kathleen Parker's unmitigated bullshit about girly-manhood or something -- that presidents use that sort of phrase when they're taking responsibility for a potentially controversial action. Based on these examples from Bush Junior (September 2007 and January 2007), I'd call that a fair guess:

"I have consulted with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, other members of my national security team, Iraqi officials, and leaders of both parties in Congress."

"It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq. So my national security team, military commanders and diplomats conducted a comprehensive review."

If you turn the dial back another notch, you might even conclude that this is a way presidents talk when they're trying to underscore the importance of a security issue. Here's Bill Clinton:

"I have just been meeting with my national security team on today's tragic events in the Middle East, and I would like to make a brief statement." (October 2000; the Cole bombing)

"I want to explain why I have decided, with the unanimous recommendation of my national security team, to use force in Iraq, why we have acted now, and what we aim to accomplish." (December 1998)

"And so this morning, based on the unanimous recommendation of my national security team, I ordered our armed forces to take action to counter an immediate threat from the bin Laden network." (August 1998)

That's not the way to do content analysis; it's a way of starting to explain how the things you're going to measure might have some plausible relation to the real world of news content that people see and hear. Unless you're Charles Krauthammer, who interpreted "My national security team" this way in his column of December 18, 1998:

He then proceeded, pathetically, to enumerate every single one of them -- "the vice president, secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff," etc., etc. The commander in chief and leader of the free world has fallen so low that he needs to draw authority from those under him.

So much for that "more normal -- and respectful -- usage," eh?

All right, America's Newspapers. Charles Krauthammer is a hack and a fabulist. You already know that if you run his column. Consider this advance notice that this particular column is a pack of lies from top to bottom. You should consider calling the Washington Post Writers Group and asking for your money back. And if you're the Washington Post, you should consider asking your columnists to meet minimum professional standards or confine themselves to the studios of the Fair 'n' Balanced Network. I really don't think you'd have a problem filling the space with competently written, accurate, provocative material.

If it was up to me, I'd start by soliciting the official Language Log take on Kathleen Parker. That might provide the Wills and Krauthammers of the world with a gentle hint that open fraud is no longer an appropriate mode of op-ed discourse. Sound like fun?

Blame game: From man to pig ...

We spend a lot of time around here picking on the Fair 'n' Balanced Network, so let's take a brief glance at how the world looks from a fresh, distinct, radically different angle:

(CNN) -- When signs of a severe economic downfall emerged more than two years ago, then-candidate Barack Obama was quick to point a finger at the man he hoped to replace.

Seventeen months into his administration, the message is often the same, and Republicans say it's time for him to drop the Bush bashing and take ownership of the problem.

"Nothing makes a president look weaker than pointing the finger at past administrations," said Republican strategist Ron Bonjean. "By blaming somebody, it looks like you are playing politics and people just want jobs. They don't care about whose fault it is. Playing the blame game only boomerangs on yourself."

Sound familiar? It should. It's been a running theme for many months over at ... wait, what's that other network? The one that everybody's always holding up as the anti-CNN? Here's Sean Hannity from a year ago:

President Obama claims that he wants the American people to hold him accountable for his decisions, but as Peter Baker of The New York Times points out, since taking office the president has dodged responsibility for any of our nation's problems.

Instead he's been engaging in one of the liberal left's favorite pastimes: blame Bush, blame Bush, blame Bush.

Let's take a look:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, 2/9/2009: We also inherited the most profound economic emergency since the Great Depression.
OBAMA, 2/24/2009: With the deficit we inherited.
OBAMA, 3/6/2009: We inherited a big mess.
OBAMA, 3/12/2009: Because of the deficits we inherited.
OBAMA, 3/18/2009: Because of the massive deficit we inherited.
OBAMA, 3/19/2009: Because of the massive debts that we've inherited.
OBAMA, 3/20/2009: Because of the massive deficits we inherited.
OBAMA, 3/25/2009: And because we've inherited a historic fiscal mess.
OBAMA, 6/1/2009: We inherited a financial crisis unlike any that we've seen in our time.
OBAMA, 6/9/2009: The financial crisis this administration inherited is still creating painful challenges for businesses and families alike.
(END VIDEO CLIPS)

This is a broken record. Isn't it time for the president to retire that line and maybe start to take some responsibility for his own?

Amazing coincidence! That's the takeaway message CNN has too!

The White House needs to go on a confidence campaign and perhaps take a page from President Reagan's playbook, Epstein said.

Let's do just that. Here's Reagan from 1982:*

Sept. 16, 1982: ",,, if we had not brought inflation down as far as we have from the double-digit rates we inherited."
July 1, 1982: "A year and a half ago, we inherited 21.5 percent interest rates, double-digit inflation and a trillion-dollar debt, the worst economic mess in post-war history."
June 16, 1982: ''Some diehards are now declaring the present recession was caused by our program,'' Mr. Reagan said in a speech at the Albert Thomas Convention Center here tonight. ''May I just point out - we had the recession before we got the program.''
April 30, 1982: "And they have every reason to because that 12.4 percent inflation rate we inherited has been running at only 3.2 percent for the last six months."
March 19, 1982: "Our Administration has been reminding the American people that the economic mess we inherited last year - and the recession we're in now - is the legacy of years of misguided policy. ... Well, we inherited many mistakes by others - but we're not going to just bemoan the past."
Feb. 19, 1982: "A year ago, I went before the American people to say that we'd inherited the worst economic mess in half a century."

Nothing makes a president look weaker, huh? Good thing Reagan had gotten out of the habit by the time he ran for re-election:

Oct. 2, 1984: Mr. Reagan told the business group that his Administration ''inherited the legacy of 42 unbalanced budgets in the last 50 years.''
Aug. 24, 1984: "The Census Bureau confirms that, because of the tax laws we inherited, the number of households at or below the poverty level paying Federal income tax more than doubled between 1980 and 1982."
Feb. 23, 1984: "May I give two examples? We've not only cut down the rate of increase in spending that we inherited and that we found when we came here, but no one has added up the proposed spending increases that we have denied. "
Feb. 1, 1984:In an address to executives of the concrete and gravel industries, Mr. Reagan cited a dozen different aspects of the economic recovery, saying, "We inherited despair and turned it into hope."

The right time to drop the bashing and take ownership, in other words, seems to be sometime toward the end of Year 4. Unless you're a major cable network trying to build a bogus politics story around a fictional talking point about one party passed along by a strategist for the opposition, that is.

The point is not that CNN and Fox are the same thing. They aren't, though when it comes to buying this handful of magic beans from this huckster, it's hard to tell. But it's equally important to note that they aren't polar opposites or left-right anchors on a Likert-type scale of ideology in journalism or anything like that.

CNN is building a story in a very old-fashioned way: some people in the pundit class are saying X, here's an expert saying Y about that, here's another expert saying sort-of-Y, and here's an opposition expert saying not-Y. The gatekeeping fail comes at the outset. As when it buys into, say, Paul Payack's loopy assertions about presidential speech, CNN isn't bothering to ask what properties would have to be in place for X to be worth talking about. And as with other such pseudo-quantitative assertions, the first thing to do is -- ready for this? look around a little and see what the terrain looks like. If the pundit class is chattering about some phenomenon that amounts to Water Flows Downhill or Sun Rises in East, that's a sign that you don't have a story and should tell the strategist to bugger quietly off into that good night. CNN evidently doesn't make a habit of that sort of reflection, but if we ask nicely, there's always a chance that it might.

Fox is a different creature. It can turn out stories built exactly along this pattern (claim, support, contradiction, coinclusion), but it only does them for some political actors. Fox would never run an assertion that George W. Bush was a girly speaker because of his use of the passive voice, or that his use of the first-person singular pronoun marked him as a blithe narcissist unfit for leadership in times of crisis. Fox is a propaganda organization, and propaganda organizations don't buy magic beans from the enemy. That's why CNN is easy to game and Fox isn't.

Takeaway point for editors? If the reporter can't tell you what a "blame game" would look like and how this alleged instance compares to your good old null hypothesis, you don't have a story. You don't have to show it's false. The reporter has to show it's true.


* Not what you'd call a thorough content analysis, but a ranging shot; it's what you get by searching the NYT archive for "reagan" and "inherited."