Blow Job 2

Every two weeks, on a Saturday, the New York Times lends a cunning craftsman space on its Op-Ed page to weave a web of deception. Charles M. Blow was only their graphic designer until he displayed a gift for invective so sly that it aspired to be art. Every one of Charlie Blow’s opinion pieces is accompanied by one of his graphic presentations that is intended to bolster his well-chosen words with the solemn aura of science.

For example, on June 27th 2009, Charlie Blow lashed out at his favorite whipping boy: conservatives. Charlie’s intention was to tar conservatives as unprincipled hypocrites. To do this he employed his signature technique of drawing an overblown conclusion from a few selected statistics while remaining silent about facts that would compel a different conclusion. Charlie argued that high rates of divorce and teenage pregnancy in states that were won by John McCain in the 2008 presidential election are “proof” that conservatives are insincere about their devotion to marriage and chastity.

Mr. Blow began by mocking Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina who had flown away to Argentina to be with his “sweetest” Maria of the “magnificently gentle kisses.” Then, with a straight face, Mr. Blow said, preposterously, “I had no particular interest in rubbernecking this disaster.”

A paragraph later, still going on about Sanford, Mr. Blow intones:

“At the end of the day, aside from the dereliction of duty and malfeasance, this, for me, would be a private matter. That is if it were not for the appalling hypocrisy of yet another social conservative saying one thing and doing another.

“There are Democratic sex scandals to be sure, but Democrats didn’t build a franchise on holier-than-thou moral rectitude. The Republicans did. They used sexual morality as a weapon and now it’s shooting them in the foot.”

Got that? Those rascally Republicans used morality “as a weapon.” Charlie’s indignation grew hotter:

“Sanford voted to impeach Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky saga. According to the Post and Courier of Charleston, Sanford called Clinton’s behavior ‘reprehensible’ and said, ‘I think it would be much better for the country and for him personally’ to resign. ‘I come from the business side . . . If you had a chairman or president in the business world facing these allegations, he’d be gone.’ Remember that Mr. Sanford?”

It’s difficult to decide which of these two jerks is the more repellent, Clinton playing the hound dog or Sanford playing the lovesick puppy. In any case, Sanford’s pre-Maria assessment of Clinton is perfectly correct; it’s also the standard that Republicans would later apply to Mark Sanford. There is a price to be paid for being weak and foolish and Mark Sanford paid that price: His wife moved out of the mansion and filed for divorce; Sanford was censured by the South Carolina legislature; his sappy e-mails to Maria went viral on the Internet; he was forced to reimburse the taxpayers for his private indulgences, including taking an airplane to get himself a haircut. How embarrassing. We are told that he was so infatuated with his Latin mistress that he didn’t call home on Father’s Day. Not good.

Sanford had been called a “rising star” among Republicans; there had been anticipation that he would run for President in 2012; he had cultivated support groups. Then everything went all to Hell. On January 4th, 2010, Sanford opined, “If there’s anything that’s abundantly clear, it’s that I ain’t running for president.” Yup. He indicated that he would fade into the private sector at the end of his last eleven months as governor.

Having rubbernecked Sanford’s personal disaster while feigning no interest in it, Charles M. Blow warmed to the true purpose of his New York Times article – to smear all conservatives as moral hypocrites. Charlie assumed a righteous pose:

“And this kind of hypocrisy isn’t confined to the politicians. It permeates the electorate. While conservatives fight to ‘defend’ marriage from gays, they can’t keep theirs together. According to the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract, states that went Republican in November accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest divorce rates in 2006.”

This statistic is correct, but Charlie’s argument is rubbish. Worse yet, Charlie knows better. This sly dissembler graduated magna cum laude from historically all-black Grambling State University with a degree in “mass communications.” When it comes to statistics and graphic presentations, Charlie can spin nonsense into political propaganda with the best of them. His method is to withhold critical information from his readers so that his readers will draw the false conclusion that Charlie wants them to draw.

In this case, Charlie Blow’s phony presentation seems persuasive because Charlie leaves his readers to assume that all state populations are demographically identical – which they are not. For example, states in the American Northeast have populations that are, on average, older, wealthier and better educated that the populations of states in the American South and Southwest.

Also, there are several things that we know for a fact about marriages: If a marriage is going to fail, then it will probably fail sometime in the first four years; money problems are a common cause of marriage failure; older people tend to form more stable marriage bonds than do youngsters. From these facts alone we may conclude that the divorce rate in the American Northeast will be lower because married couples in the Northeast are in older marriages that are well past the most difficult first four years. Better educated people tend to marry at a later age, which means they are more emotionally mature when they marry and are probably better established financially.

Of the ten states on Charlie Blow’s list with the highest rates of divorce, the very first was won by Obama – Nevada. The next eight states were all won by John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. None of these eight states are in the older and wealthier Northeast. They are, in order, Arkansas, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Idaho, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi and West Virginia – all with populations that are younger, poorer and less educated than are the people in the Northeast. In other words, marriage is more of a struggle in the eight states that Charlie Blow wants to slander.

Charlie Blow chose to talk about the “Top Ten” divorce-rate states for a reason; he chose the top ten because the first ten seemed more persuasive than the top seventeen. Of the top ten states, 80% went for McCain, but of the top seventeen states that percentage suddenly drops to a less impressive 58.8% – a decline of 21%.

The first and last of Charlie’s top-ten divorce-rate states are the Obama states, Nevada and Delaware, which have median household incomes of $56,361 and $57,989 respectively. All of the McCain states have lower median household incomes than these two Obama states. For example, Mississippi households earned $18,571 less than Nevada households, on average – that’s one-third less and less income means more stress on Mississippi marriages.

So the real reason divorce rates are higher in Charlie’s selected “red” states is that couples there are experiencing greater economic stress on their marriages. These couples are also younger and in younger marriages. They suffer higher divorce rates because of economic hardship, not because they are hypocritical conservatives who do not value their marriages.

Not content with slandering struggling young couples, Charles M. Blow chooses to pimp slap unwed mothers:

“Conservatives touted abstinence-only education, which was a flop, when real sex education was needed, most desperately in red states. According to 2006 data from the Guttmacher Institute, those red states accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest teenage birthrates.”

Five of the top ten states on Charlie’s list are also among the top-ten divorce-rate states: Nevada, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Alabama and Mississippi. Also included are Texas, Georgia and Louisiana. What we have here are lots of low-income households and a high percentage of African-Americans. A few facts: 70% of African Americans are born out of wedlock; 90% of African Americans are raised by a mother with less than one year of college education, which puts mom somewhere between the fourth grade and a college front door. Few factors determine a child’s future achievement more than his mother’s level of education.

Charlie is silent about this vast and distinct population living within the borders of the “McCain states” on his list. Just because a state was won by one candidate or the other under our Electoral College system does not mean that this state voted solidly for the same candidate. In the 2008 presidential election over 90% of black folks voted for Barack Obama in every state, but in every state it was the larger vote of white folks that decided which candidate would win. In those states where Obama won, he would have won even if all the black voters had stayed home on Election Day. Likewise, in those states where Obama lost it was because the votes of whites overwhelmed the votes of blacks.

So the fact that a state was won by McCain or by Obama is only a crude indication of any state’s inner social dynamic. For example, a state that was won by McCain because that state’s white voters outnumbered its pro-Obama black voters by only a few percentage points could land on Charlie Blow’s Top Ten Most Divorced list or his Top Ten Highest Teen Pregnancy list even though the underlying cause of that state’s high divorce rate or its high teen pregnancy rate could be traced back to the mostly pro-Obama population living in that state. The poorest and the least educated in any state are also the least likely to vote in any election. So a state could have one population that won the state for McCain and also have a distinctly different population that gave that state it high teen pregnancy rate. Charlie Blow of the New York Times doesn’t even hint at such complexity. His technique is to offer only a simple premise and then to support that premise with only a few well-chosen facts plus a lavish graphic presentation.

Charlie is exploiting the power of suggestion; his columns in the New York Times are more akin to carnival sideshow routines than they are to honest arguments. Charles M. Blow, Mister Magna cum Laude in “mass communications” and designated hit man for the New York Times concludes his pious flapdoodle with an admonition to conservatives:

“They could avoid this hypocrisy by focusing more on what happens in their own bedrooms and avoiding the trap of judging what goes on in everyone else’s.”

Well, excuse me Mr. Blow, but the foot caught in “the trap of judging” is yours. As a lavishly remunerated scribbler for the Times you could busy yourself with something more praiseworthy than concocting phony arguments for the purpose of mocking conservatives. Slandering teenage moms and trashing young couples who are struggling to keep their marriages together in a horrid economy made worse every day by the bumbling incompetence of your beloved Barack Obama is the labor of someone with a dark and shriveled soul.