Mathodicy*

In his Wonkblog article in yesterday’s The Washington Post online, “What Obama stilldoesn’t get about American politics,” Max Ehrenfreund uses a lot of graphs, because that’s what wonk-bloggers (who do get it) do. (That’s how they get it.) This one, for example, proves† that “as voters have polarized, the disagreements among American legislators have sharpened.” The result: “More and more votes are cast on party lines, political scientists have found. Republicans, in particular, have become more ideologically committed.” Voilà.**

Right. Though let us see, please, how Messrs. PolScentifiques Poole and Rosenthal generated the math that generated the graph.

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Glossary of terms:

     theodicy – attempt to justify God’s goodness given the evil in the world
 (because God ought to be good).

   *mathodicy – attempt to make numbers prove what you think they ought to.

     generate – diddle into existence

     political science – a contradiction in terms

(Elsewhere in the article available political science links not to a political science lab or an article in a peer-reviewed journal of science detailing a laboratory experiment but to another WaPo blog post from the “Monkey Cage.” Not by Darwin.)

†As dropping an Alka-Seltzer tablet in a glass of water proves that it dissolves stomach acids.

**We should add that if Mort Sahl had drawn the diagram, using the same data(!), it might well have looked like this: