Skew You

Today's column for the Daily Banter, the last before election day tomorrow, takes a look at how NBC is trying to ward off criticism from the right by preemptively "unskewing" its polls that show Barack Obama ahead.

Here's the opening shot:

"For some time now, I’ve been making the argument that claims of a liberal media bias — at least insofar as what’s actually produced by most American news outlets — amount to a bunch of nonsense. The reason for this is simple: The right has created such a magnificently run cottage industry out of hectoring news operations for supposedly being a bunch of pointy-headed, overeducated elitists — making them, by their very nature, anti-conservative — and it’s done it for so long that most newsrooms now preemptively police themselves in an effort to ward off any potential criticism from the right. It’s of course a losing game, because the reality is that no amount of self-censoring or general bending over backwards will make media critics on the right happy since the stories of the liberal media boogeyman are now an article of faith for conservatives; they need that boogeyman to justify their willingness to deny any reality that threatens to pop the epistemic bubble that keeps them safe. It’s imperative for the right to retain the ability to dismiss out of hand any news that makes it mad as being the work of political enemies who can’t under any circumstances be trusted."

Read the Rest Here

Assistant Quote of the Day

"Hardcore conservatism’s loathing of science has lurked around GOP politics for so long that it's easy to forget how nasty it is. Over 40 years, that disdain has slid from 'pointy-headed intellectuals' to something very like a jock slapping a math book out of a kid’s hands and saying, 'NICE NUMBERS, FAG.' But this is what you do when you can’t crunch the numbers yourself or when they will not save you. You shoot the messenger."

Gawker's Mobutu Sese Seko on the sudden, virulent rage directed at Nate Silver from the right and how it's manifested itself in a dismissal of his numbers as being the work of an obviously gay guy

Seriously, read Seko's post from start to finish. If nothing else it's worth it just to hear him refer to "Unskewed Polls" idiot Dean Chambers as "the Meat Loaf of numbers" who "corrects for bias in polls by making them say things that don’t make him angry" and whose polling results "are generated in the same way that a kid turns an F into an A by drawing an extra bar down the right side of it."

Quote of the Day, Jr.

"Nate Silver seems to have some weird allegedly statistics-based process where he analyzes the data from polls and predicts which candidate will win a state or an election and he assigns a percent chance they will win it. I don't see any validity to it at all and certainly I don't view it as any kind of 'scientific' process. It entirely seems like voodoo statistics to me and it might as well be entirely made up what he comes up with. Imperfect as it is, and it can only be imperfect, the only real way to predict the results of any political election contest is to conduct surveys and polls."

-- Dean Chambers, founder of the conservative panic-assuaging website "Unskewed Polls," which predicts that Mitt Romney will win by a virtual landslide next week because, well, he will

So there you have it. Translation: Math = voodoo. Brought to you in the form of a barely comprehensible word salad by a guy who's entire "scientific process" involves indiscriminately pulling numbers out of his ass.

We're so far beyond parody at this point. The very notion of "Unskewed Polls" is like a Mobius strip of meta-stupidity. I'm really beginning to think that the entire modern conservative movement is coming from the mind of Charlie Kaufman, who's discovered that somehow what he writes truly does become reality.