A few days ago, this blog wrote about a recent visit with James Underdown, executive director of the Center for Inquiry Los Angeles. Underdown wanted to talk, among other topics, about "Religulous," comedian Bill Maher's recently released major motion picture.
Here's a sort of coda, or hyperlink without the actual hyperlink, to that post….
On his October 20, 2006 "Real Time" HBO show, Maher raged against think tanks – calling out the Heritage Foundation and Project For A New American Century in particular – for providing intellectual justification, or cover, in the lead-up to and aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. Maher works blue, so again, no direct link here….
But here's one Maher line from the commentary: "You can't call yourself a think tank if all your ideas are stupid."
And another: "There a name for people who are always wrong about everything all the time: husbands."
Maher also said the following, which relates to this blog's ongoing 'What Is a think tank' discussion:
"You know, it's a shame what happened to think tanks. They used to produce valuable, apolitical analysis. But partisanship crept into many of them.…"
He's not alone in coming to that conclusion -- or at minimum, coming to the conclusion that tanks are partisan, or at least closely associated with partisan ideas. TTLA will feature much more on this particular topic throughout 2009.
Illustration copyright and courtesy Richard Nielsen, 2008
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I have to say, although I'm sympathetic to Maher's point, I feel like the problem is that "the ideas are stupid" rather than partisanship. Quickly produced hack-work uncorrected by rigor, craft, peer review and remains hackwork, whereas a biased or partisan intuition (say, that a given course of action might not be the best; an unprovoked invasion, for example) followed up by rigor, research and so on has a shot of yielding valuable results.
Anyway, just my 2 cents...
KCET Gary -- Much thanks for the thoughtful post; no matter how hard deflation hits in '09, your words above will always be worth far more than 2 cents....
As a satirist, obviously Maher's gig isn't always to be overly nuanced....
But without scooping ourselves, it seems worth mentioning here that during a recent interview with TTLA, a high-ranking official at the joint that this blog and many others consider to be far and away the leading think tank in the Southland said that he doesn't like to hear his workplace labeled a "think tank." Why not? Essentially, he said, because of the partisanship that label has come to imply....
Looking forward to sharing the specifics from that interview, and many more related conversations, in this space during '09. Please keep your comments coming...
And Happy New Year to everyone...
-Jeremy Rosenberg
Think Tank LA
This Paul Krugman bit brought to mind this convo:
If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/opinion/02krugman.html?em