More interesting stuff from Andrew Sullivan's weblog
(unfortunately he doesn't have hyperlinks to individual posts)
1.
This story makes me ashamed to identify as a Republican. (Technically I'm
not one, but that's only because I registered to vote through a drive set up by the Berkeley College Democrats. I went Libertarian because I thought it would be rude to use the College Dems to join the GOP.)
2. Sullivan quotes a personal attack from
this article (note: I copied the link without actually following it). The quote itself (speculating about the effect of AIDS on Sullivan's mental state) seems to set a new
he SAID that?! low.
3. This
Paul Krugman article from two years ago. The money quote:
While hired guns do not flourish at Harvard or the University of Chicago, however, in Washington they roam in packs.
Portrait of a hired gun: He or she is usually a mediocre economist -- someone whose work, if it didn't have an ideological edge, might have been published but wouldn't have had many readers. He has, however, found a receptive audience for work that does have an ideological edge. In particular, he has learned that pretty good jobs in think tanks, or on the staffs of magazines with a distinct political agenda, are available for people who know enough economics to produce plausible-sounding arguments on behalf of the party line. Ask him whether he is a political hack and he will deny it; he probably does not admit it to himself. But somehow everything he says or writes serves the interests of his backers.
Most of these hired guns work on behalf of right-wing causes: it's a funny thing, but organizations that promote the interests of rich people seem to be better financed than those that don't. Still, the left has enough resources to front a quorum of its own hacks. And anyway, love of money is only the root of some evil. Love of the limelight, love of the feeling of being part of a Movement, even love of the idea of oneself as a bold rebel against the Evil Empire can be equally corrupting of one's intellectual integrity.
How can you tell the hacks from the serious analysts? One answer is to do a little homework. Hack jobs often involve surprisingly raw, transparent misrepresentations of fact: in these days of search engines and online databases you don't need a staff of research assistants to catch 'em with their hands in the cookie jar. But there is another telltale clue: if a person, or especially an organization, always sings the same tune, watch out.
