“(…) the volatile, astoundingly well-informed Joe Romm on the left who goes off like a Nile crocodile snatching wading gnus on everybody who displays the slightest inclination to give contrarians any slack, and the astoundingly well informed, and gifted as a writer, yet (to me, just an opinion here as I hear he’s quite charming) pigheaded Anthony Watts on the smug and immobile right.”

Forty years in science journalism and Charlie Petit actually thinks the solar nut Watts is astoundingly well informed, just as much as Joe Romm? There’s your problem, Tom. You don’t do much if any of this sort of thing, but it’s stock-in-trade for Keith and to a lesser extenbt Andy, and they being your friends and you being a nice guy you can’t admit it. All I can do is think of Okrent’s Law and giggle a bit, however cynically. (Actually I don’t think Charlie believes any such thing, but the point is that he wrote it anyway as part of an exercise, however tongue in cheek in terms of the phrasing, as part of a very real effort to convey to readers that Romm and Watts are equivalent.)

Also, don’t you think the timing of Keith’s piece is a little ironic given the current larger-scale effort (including at the NYT) to tag the left and right with equal responsibility for the AZ shooting. (Reality to Matt Bai: The phrase “dead to me” carries no implication of actual death or even violence, in rather sharp contrast to putting someone in a rifle sight. But of course the vaunted NYT fact checkers knew that and it ran anyway since it supported the desired meme.)