[S]cience writing, like every other endeavor, comes in many forms. There is good science and good writing (Stephen Jay Gould), good science and bad writing (Stephen Hawking), bad science and good writing (Oliver Sacks) and, finally, bad science and bad writing.

Michael S. Gazzaniga
"All Mixed Up"
New York Times Book Review (10/24/93)

Let me first say that I've read pretty much everything Oliver Sacks has written, and I love his writing, so I don't necessarily accept Gazzaniga's judgment in that respect, and also that over the years I've begun to have some doubts about how good Gould's science is, but I still like the kind of categorization presented and want to extend it to the political realm.

My experience with amateur or semi-amateur political analysts is that there are those who have a strong hold on the facts and wrestle from them relevant and trenchant analyses which are useful and help others to see more clearly the shape of the situation under examination, then there are those who somehow (rather mysteriously, sometimes) see shape and form of the forest despite not having much real knowledge of the trees, and finally, and most confusingly, there are those who are brimming over with facts, objectively true and verifiable information, more facts than one could ever hope (or want) to have, and yet somehow cannot seem to manage to put together a useful or true picture of what the facts mean.

The failure of the third type of analyst is, to my observation, primarily a failure of ideology. That is, these folks, although they can toss around an encyclopedia's worth of facts related to the question at hand (and often even more facts that are completely unrelated or only of the vaguest significance), can't arrange them into a coherent and useful whole because the template they use to build their analysis is sullied by ideology. (This is the same problem, clear-thinking clouded by dogmatic ideology, which plagues the neo-cons, although I can't speak for their command of the facts.) And I'll tell you, with this type of analyst, sister, one is best advised to accept the facts as true, and reject the conclusions, because they rarely prove to have any relationship to reality.

Since I myself am, by virtue of this webblog, an amateur political analyst, it's legitimate to ask which kind I see myself as. All I can say is that as I don't have a fabulous command of a great number of facts about a myriad of subjects, all I can do is hope that I am of the second type, the kind that sees the forest despite knowing little about trees -- but it's just as likely (even more likely, I guess) that, more often than not, I'll turn out to be of a fourth type, the kind that doesn't know facts and can't see the forest either.

But at least it should be easier to smell that out when it happens.