Not only have most of the candidates, abetted by the press and television, misrepresented themselves and their records, but much about the process of choosing the next nominee of the Democratic Party has gone seriously wrong, largely owing to mismanagement on the part of the Democratic National Committee and the treatment of the candidates by the press.

The idea behind bunching up the primaries within a few months, the brainchild of Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, was that the Democrats should select a candidate as quickly as possible, giving the nominee more time to raise the enormous amounts of money needed to respond to the heavily funded Republican advertising campaigns that have already begun. But what if the primary voters haven't had enough time to learn about the candidate they select? What if there could have been a better decision? Even with more time the Democrats have in the past made some weak and even preposterous choices of nominees, as they did with Michael Dukakis in 1988. The nominee could possibly govern us for the next four or eight years. In view of what's at stake, why should it be so important to complete the process so early?why not take two or three more months?

Under the new, compressed calendar, the nomination battle whooshes from state to state without giving the voters much time to reflect on the candidates and to take account of what has happened in the most recent contest, or contests. Larry Sabato, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, has found that Kerry's Iowa victory gave him an additional twenty to thirty percentage points virtually overnight in New Hampshire and several other states. The pollster John Zogby has said, "This year's front-loaded primary schedule appears to have worked well in favor of the front-runner?as it apparently was intended to." In previous nomination fights, a two-week gap occurred between Iowa and New Hampshire (this year there was just one), and that gave the voters some time to distance themselves from the hyperbolic television coverage and consider what they'd heard. Citizens in seven states voted on February 3, requiring a frenetic dash from state to state that left the candidates as dizzy as the voters. This is no way to pick a possible president.

It's worth reading, even though I get the distinct impression that Drew's take is somewhat based on her dislike of Kerry as a candidate -- she seems to have favored Clark.

Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is not more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

Having a multiplicity of facts at your command is a good thing (certainly better than having a multiplicity of errors available), but facts are worthless if the framework you use to evaluate them isn't in accord with reality, especially if it's warped by dogmatic considerations generated by ideology. When that happens, you can have access to all the facts in the world, and the conclusions you come to are going to be suspect, and will ultimately prove to be incorrect.

Which is to say that the world, especially the social world created by man, is complex enough that a good theory which organizes the facts is more important than the facts themselves. Bad theory -- garbage in, garbage out.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Voltaire

I would love a definite citation of where it came from if anyone has it.

Interestingly, in Googling it I came across someone who cited it in skepticism of global warming!! I guess it all depends on what you mean by "absurdities." If you define them before the fact by ideological prediposition, that's not so good. My preference is to define what is absurd by an absence of supporting facts.

1 in 250 Americans is HIV positive.
1 in 500 knows it

These ads bother me, because of their lack of clarity I don't understand exactly what they're saying. Do they mean that only 1 in 500 of the Americans who are HIV positive know about it? Or do they mean that 1 in 500 of all Americans know that they are HIV positive? If the former, that's really difficult to believe. If the latter, then it would be much stronger to say

1 in 250 Americans is HIV positive.
Only half of them know it.