Dancing On Parody’s Grave
By Shorter Verbatim Mark Steyn:
“Ann Coulter’s new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism is a rollicking read very tightly reasoned and hard to argue with…Lest you doubt the left’s pieties are now a religion, try this experiment: go up to an environmental activist and say “Hey, how about that ozone hole closing up?” or “Wow! The global warming peaked in 1998 and it’s been getting cooler for almost a decade. [Sadly, No! –ed.] Isn’t that great?” and then look at the faces. As with all millenarian doomsday cults, good news is a bummer.”
The fact that a third-rate theater critic who knows nothing about foreign policy (or anything else) is taken as a foreign policy guru by the right-blogosphere makes perfect sense; after all, a fusion jazz musician and a Second Amendment scholar who know nothing about foreign policy are the most popular “warbloggers.”
Speaking of which, flogging the deadest of dead horses Reynolds has a post totuting an idiotic WaPo story (amazing how much less scrutiny the dread MSM “527 Media” gets when it reaches politically convenient results) which compares death rates of American soldiers in Iraq to the death rate of the American population, and finds that it’s only half–apparently it’s like a gated suburb! Surely, you say, the Post must have at least taken death rates for the age segment of the population most likely to serve in the military? I’m afraid not–it really does compare the population as a whole to the frequency of much younger soldiers dying in Iraq. An intellectually honest five year-old could see the utter uselessness of the comparison. Reynolds, conversely, crows that “it’s hard to look at these numbers and see the catastrophe that the “527 media” are proclaiming.” Needless to say, to Reynolds the death rates (not to mention the basic inability to even make a living or purchase essential goods because of the lack of a functional state) of Iraqi civilians who don’t live in heavily fortified areas and walk around with flak jackets aren’t weighted in the discussion at all; as long as American soldiers have less chance of dying than an 85 year-old with cancer, everything is great over there! Perhaps he’ll be leaving soon to report, without a military escort, from a typical Iraqi city and confirm his analysis…
…more at The American Street.
…and, of course, it’s not just age demographics; soldiers are pre-selected to be healthy and fit, and are further trained. As Brian notes in comments, “So, it’s seven times more dangerous to serve in Iraq as it is to serve somewhere else among the identical popuation (the peacetime military). In fact, peacetime soldiers are 2.7 times less likely to die than the same male age cohort in the United States, according to the article.”
Also, some commenters make the (correct) point that calling the Post article “idiotic” was glib; it did a bad job of presenting the data, but did ultimately conatin some more useful information. All of this is irrelevant to the central point about Reynolds, who cited only the first (entirely meaningless) data, and made the even worse mistake of generalizing substantial-but-not-catastrophic American casualties to the success of the situation in Iraq itself while completely ignoring the more relevant question of the casualty rates among people in Iraq who don’t have access to armored bodies and vehicles, heavily fortified areas, etc., as well as broader questions of the efficacy of the current Iraqi (non)state.
…and, as Brad notes, it’s unclear why the ozone hole closing up after a set of regulations favored by environmentalists was put in place should be embarassing to environmenalists, but then maybe I lack Ann Coulter’s deft reasoning abilities…
…And I’ll give Kieran the final word.