Paul Krugman on Right Wing attacks directed at Nate Silver.

Courtesy of the New York Times:

 For those new to this, Nate is a sports statistician turned political statistician, who has been maintaining a model that takes lots and lots of polling data — most of it at the state level, which is where the presidency gets decided — and converts it into election odds. Like others doing similar exercises — Drew Linzer, Sam Wang, and Pollster — Nate’s model continued to show an Obama edge even after Denver, and has shown that edge widening over the past couple of weeks. 

This could be wrong, obviously. And we’ll find out on Election Day. But the methodology has been very clear, and all the election modelers have been faithful to their models, letting the numbers fall where they may. 

Yet the right — and we’re not talking about the fringe here, we’re talking about mainstream commentators and publications — has been screaming “bias”! They know, just know, that Nate must be cooking the books. How do they know this? Well, his results look good for Obama, so it must be a cheat. Never mind the fact that Nate tells us all exactly how he does it, and that he hasn’t changed the formula at all. 

This is, of course, reminiscent of the attack on the Bureau of Labor Statistics — not to mention the attacks on climate science and much more. On the right, apparently, there is no such thing as an objective calculation. Everything must have a political motive. 

This is really scary. It means that if these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn’t what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign.

I would like to formally welcome Paul Krugman to the  thousands of us already freaked out by the Right Wing's constant attacks on logic and reasoning.

And yes his recognition of the underlying motive for this is dead on. If ALL information is subjective, then facts become irrelevant, and low information people are free to eschew anything which conflicts with their preconceived notion of what constitutes "truth."

In my opinion that was always the business model of Fox News, which has now been embraced by ALL of the Right Wing media.

Like they say, facts have a liberal bias, so WHY would the Right Wing want their constituents exposed to any of those commie liberal brain infections?

P.S. Speaking of facts, it appears that perhaps the pollsters, even our own Nate Silver, might have seriously underestimated the number of actual Obama voters out there. Can you say "cell phones?"