Blah Blah Na

This may shock some of you. When I first read newspaper columnists, back in the fifties, my favorite was conservative William F. Buckley, Jr. It wasn’t because I agreed with him. By age five I was already well on my way to becoming the pinko commie sympathizer I am accused of being today. It was because the liberals were much less fun. Where’s the fun in reading what you expect to read?

Now that Buckley has left us I have to find others to entertain me. Recent favorites are Charles Krauthammer, John Leo, and Seattle’s own, but not for long, James Na.

Mr. Na recently wrote telling us all why he was leaving Seattle. It seemed to boil down to our insularity and our Blueness. He says we should be Purple, instead. Purpleness provides better balance, like eating your vegetables with your meat and getting plenty of roughage, I guess.

The evidence for our insularity was that Seattleites think Seattle is the world’s most beautiful city even if they’ve been nowhere else. How true. It’s a phenomenon I have discovered in every other town I have lived.

Years ago a woman in New Brunswick, New Jersey, told me no other place was as beautiful. She was subsequently forced to admit she had never been more than ten miles away. But then she reasserted her original claim, because it was still “obviously true.” Whatever you do, Mr. Na, don’t go live in New Brunswick NJ and risk meeting that woman. You would run away screaming. Besides, New Brunswick is as ugly as my grandmother’s knees.

John Leo is often whinging on about the evils of Liberal Political Correctness, which turns me off because I totally agree with him on that. Liberal Political Correctness is the worst thing the Left has ever done to itself. I agree so much it bores me to tears to read about it in every other Leo column. But when he gets away from the mostly campus news from the PC War front, Leo can be delightfully refreshing.

A great example is his recent column that, among other things, attacked homeless advocates for inflating homeless numbers. This was a joy to read. Every sentence boosted my circulation. The piece stirred my soul, like an elephant in a hot tub.

Particularly delightful about his July 27 column is the way he knocks homeless advocates in general for pushing faulty statistics that, in fact, homeless advocates in general don’t push. John is the master of the Straw Dog argument. First, the straw: “One report a few months ago reported that nearly 300,000 veterans are homeless on any given night.” While fashioning your Dog, don’t bother to cite the source, because you don’t want people to know it’s straw. You want them to think this really comes from the actual enemy, so when you knock down your Dog we can be impressed.

It happens the “one report a few months ago” referred to a report by the National Coalition of Homeless Veterans which in turn quoted Veterans Administration statistics.

So what’s the puff of wind that’s going to knock down this Dog? A blogger (Megan McArdle) says the 300,000 figure, if accepted, would mean that all homeless people are veterans, because 300,000 is about the total number of all homeless people. And that number comes from … the US Census Bureau!

So we have a discrepancy between VA and US Census figures, not a problem with homeless advocates at all. In fact the National Coalition for the Homeless warns against accepting any such statistics, and the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans echoes the NCH warning.

So when Leo finally says “The lesson? Don't trust advocacy numbers,” he’s actually agreeing with the advocacy agencies he’s quoting, so he’s agreeing with me (because I agree with them that the numbers are untrustworthy), but he’s says it like he’s proved we’re all wrong, which he hasn’t! What a great ride! Thanks, John!