Bashing BB with feigned naivité just for fun

Not Big Brother, or even Ben Bernanke but Brian Beutler

First QOTD "The Fact Checkers™ clutched their pearls and, in the most enabling display of feigned naiveté I’ve ever seen"

Also epistemic snark

"PolitiFact called the “end Medicare” claim the “lie of the year” for 2011 and entered a brave new epistemological world defending the assessment."

Heh indeed.  In fact, after reading the headline of the post I went off on an epistemological bender which lasted about two hours (now you know why my blog is so long and my CV is so short).

Hmmm I wonder what its like to display feigned naivité.  Well I'm about to find out.

Well what about that  headline "

Tommy Thompson Makes The Case For ‘Doing Away’ With Fact Checkers"

Look I've had my disagreements with Glenn Kessler too (minutes 30-120 of the bender) but I oppose the death penalty and think that "doing away" with him is going too far.

Toning down the feigned naivité a notch, I now assume that Beutler meant to write 

Thommy Thomson Makes The Case For 'Doing Away' with Fact Checking"

Or Fact Checking Columns and Sites but, you know not offing the people whose judgment may have been a bit off.

Thi still seems a bit drastic.  The fact that factcheckers make mistakes doesn't imply that their efforts are worse than worthless.  By that standard one might do away with newspapers and blogs and science journals and [get a grip Robert -- your time will be wasted anyway but think of your probably hypothetical readers]

What we have here is a failure of communication.  The headline is silly because the over-riding aim was to fit a quote of Thomson into it. 

So also we find the Krugman Column written just to include the sentence "Now I come to berry seizures not to praise them" 

Don't ask me ask Krugman -- he was insisting that he didn't write an op-ed just to conclude (arguably correctly) "In the long run we are all the Grateful Dead." (link hard to google as it contains neither Seizures nor Dead).

Or Michael Kinsley (outsnarking himself warning) who proposed an insane reform just to end a TRB column with "make "The Plum Book" a prune book (quoting from memory)