I took yesterday off from blogging because my wife and I took our dog out to Rostellan Woods on the east side of Cork Harbor. (This will mean nothing to anyone except my readers from the Cork area, but half the pleasure of blogging is being self-indulgent. For everyone else, suffice it to say a lovely woods.) Because of the rain, we wore our boots, and hiked for a few hours. By the time we got back, the dog wanted to do nothing but sleep, and we pretty much agreed with her. A good day all around.

Getting back to blogging today, it is not such a good day. On Saturday, I noted the flurry around Stephen Moore's error on National Review Online. What has happened since? Before shutting down on Saturday night, I sent a somewhat annoyed email to NRO's editor (there is no email listed for Moore), pointing out the error. As Kieran Healy points out, NRO changed the column to read "supply-siders" instead of "supply-side academics", without any sort of acknowledgement of how misleading the original paragraph was. And it still (as of 7:30 A.M. eastern time) refers to Wesbury as being "of Chicago" which remains misleading given that the other two are referenced by their employer, not the city they live in. Not a good day for NRO. Healy has a lot of fun with this, but strangely manages to conclude that I have offered "the case for the defence". I did not offer a defence of the offending paragraph (the only part of Moore's column Healy is talking about), I criticized DeLong and Quiggin for claiming that Moore was trying to lie, without offering up any evidence, and I criticized DeLong for completely ignoring Quiggin's errors. I did defend Moore on an entirely different point, specifically Jason Soon's silly idea that Mankiw was qualified simply because he is very smart.

In response to a suggestion from me that DeLong actually provide some evidence that Moore is a liar (not careless, but a liar), DeLong responds in his comments section with, roughly, Moore is eeeevil, therefore he is a liar. Sigh. (CalPundit seems to take this seriously.) Well, that makes life easy. I know, so skip evidence. A big part of the reason I am so annoyed here is that DeLong is a talented macroeconomist with non-trivial government experience. Is it asking too much for him to address Moore's substantive point, that Mankiw's political views on taxation matter to the appointment. Simply saying that Mankiw is really smart does not cut it, and DeLong knows this. Otherwise, why was Mankiw not running the CEA during the Clinton administration? Granted, part of the fun of blogging is yelling at the opposition, but it would be nice if DeLong put aside his Randian partisanship once in a while.
UPDATE: Lest you think I am being unfair to DeLong, try out this post. He says of Bob Woodward: "There are extraordinary problems in using anything by Woodward as evidence for anything." He admits that Woodward's comments on Wolfowitz, Perle, and company come from their opponent Powell (or one of his people). Yet he still uses it to describe Bush and Rumsfeld as "wavering" and Wolfowitz as "mad".
ONE LAST UPDATE: In a comment below on my Update, Brad DeLong says, in the short version, "Read it again, dummy." I have, and again, and again. He is right. I was wrong. I'm going off into a corner to grumble and kick the cat.

Come on now:

"This picture, as painted by Powell or whichever of Powell's people is Woodward's source, is not at all pretty. It has a wavering president, a wavering secretary of defense, and a madman of a deputy defense secretary (Wolfowitz)..."

"Wavering" and "madman" are words I use to summarize what Powell (or Powell's underlings) wants us to think about the world. I've tried hard to make--and reinforce--the point that what Woodward's sources tell him and what Woodward's sources write is not reliable.

While we're at it, you missed my point on the Ohio State/University of Ohio thing. I'll quote Mark Lindemann from Brad's comment thread "As is clearer in the original (q.v.), part of Quiggin's point is that if you have to go as low on the academic food chain as Ohio University -- which has some fine scholars, but is (like my own) no one's idea of a first-tier research school -- to find a "brilliant academic" economist with the right ideology, it's a stretch to claim academic support for the ideology at all."

I was giving my reactions as I went and after "Chicago" it seemed natural to expect a reference to a top-tier school like Ohio State.

Less importantly you missed my point on Bear Stearns. As I observed, while it seemed surprising that an academic would have that affiliation, quite a few academic economists have been lured into the financial sector - notably including Merton and Hayne Leland.

"If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war... our children will sing great songs about us years from now." -- Richard Perle, qtd. in John Pilger, Two years ago a project set up by the men who now surround George W Bush said what America needed was "a new Pearl Harbor". Its published aims have, alarmingly, come true.

Actually, Pilger seems to have first introduced the term "madman" to describe Perle subsequent to the interview from which the above was selected.

The "interview" is really an amalgamation of pre 9/11 and post 9/11 discussions between Pilger and Perle.

But Perle describes a vision to which his disciple Wolfowitz surely adheres, thus Wolfowitz, by extention, has been described as a "madman" by other sources. Afterall, it's the described vision, not the man per se, that leads us to conclude insanity.

Links, if anyone is interested, can be found on DeLong's blog toward the end of the thread "into Iraq"