Paul Krugman writes about Paul Ryan's latest flim-flam, replacing magic asterisks with mis-citations:
Give Ryan some points for originality. In his various budgets, he relied mainly on magic asterisks — unspecified savings and revenue sources to be determined later; he was able to convince many pundits that he had a grand fiscal plan when the reality was that he was just assuming his conclusions, and that the assumptions were fundamentally ridiculous. But this time he uses a quite different technique.
What he offers is a report making some strong assertions, and citing an impressive array of research papers. What you aren’t supposed to notice is that the research papers don’t actually support the assertions.
In some cases we’re talking about artful misrepresentation of what the papers say, drawing angry protests from the authors. In other cases the misdirection is more subtle.
Take the treatment of Medicaid and work incentives. I’m going to teach the best available survey on these issues tonight, which looks at the research and finds little evidence of significant disincentive effects from Medicaid (or food stamps). That’s not at all the impression you get from the Ryan report. So I looked at the Medicaid section, and found that it contains a more or less unstructured listing of lots of papers; if you read that list carefully, you find that there really isn’t anything in there making a strong case for large incentive effects.
In other words, the research citations are just there to make the report sound well-informed; they aren’t actually used to derive the conclusions, which more or less come out of thin air.
via Paul Krugman's NY Times Blog
Well, this sounded familiar to me. It brought to mind Ann Coulter's defense of her own work, in which she also makes things up. According to Ann, the numerous footnotes proved beyond doubt that her arguments were sound. But, not so much:
On July 7, Media Matters for America asked Random House Inc. whether it would investigate charges of plagiarism lodged against right-wing pundit Ann Coulter's latest book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism (Crown Forum, June 2006). Steve Ross, senior vice president and publisher of Crown Publishing Group and publisher of the Crown Forum imprint – divisions of Random House Inc. – responded to Media Matters by stating that charges of plagiarism against Coulter were “trivial,” “meritless,” and “irresponsible,” and defended Coulter's scholarship by stating that she “knows when attribution is appropriate, as underscored by the nineteen pages of hundreds of endnotes contained in Godless.”
This was hardly the first time Coulter and her defenders have offered the large number of footnotes contained in her book as “evidence” of the quality of her scholarship. Also on July 7, Terence Jeffrey, editor of conservative weekly Human Events, defended Coulter's book on CNN's The Situation Room by citing her “19 pages of footnotes.” And when similar questions were raised about her 2002 book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (Crown, June 2002), Coulter repeatedly cited her “35 pages of footnotes” as evidence that her claims were accurate.
In response, Media Matters decided to investigate each of the endnotes in Godless. We found a plethora of problems.
Among other things, Coulter:
misrepresented and distorted the statements of her sources;
omitted information in those sources that refuted the claims in her book;
misrepresented news coverage to allege bias;
relied upon outdated and unreliable sources;
and invented “facts.”
What follows is documentation of some of the most problematic endnotes in Godless.
via Media Matters
That's from way back in 2006. You can read on at the link if you really care to read Media Matter's refutation. Maybe they need to do the same exhaustive job on Ryan. The problem is that it takes more time and effort to refute bullshit assertions than to make them; it's a problem I come up against in legal work all the time. This reminds me of another manipulative technique that I've run up against, and,in part, it's something Ryan is relying on here, at least insofar as the treatment he expects from the regular media. If you've ever been on a Town Council, Board of Education or other governmental body, you know it is not unusual for town officials to send board members giant packages of written materials shortly before a meeting. One can hardly complain about getting all relevant information, but the fact is that the members, most of whom have jobs and lives, don't have the time to read through what they're given to find the hidden gems the bureaucrats don't want them to notice. Ryan is pulling the same thing here; he knows that other than a few wonks like Krugman, the media will simply accept the thing (after all, there are footnotes); not bother to examine it; and report it in just the way Ryan wants.
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