Election 2012

Unskewed Dean Chambers Blames Me for Nate Silver Attack

This was a bit of a shocker. Several weeks ago, Dean Chambers famously attacked Nate Silver in an Examiner.com article:

Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the “Mr. New Castrati” voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program. In fact, Silver could easily be the poster child for the New Castrati in both image and sound.

And yesterday, Chambers wrote a second post in which he blamed this ad hominem rant against Silver on something I wrote about Chambers. Yes, me.

While I make absolutely no excuses for my inappropriate comments in that article, I will mention this which was my motivation for writing them. Again, I make no excuses whatsoever, I want that to be clear. I only mention this to provide context.

In this article about me and the UnSkewedPolls.com web site, on some web site called “The Daily Banter” whatever that is, I was described this way by the author of the article, Bob Cesca, writing about me and judging me by only one picture of me he saw, because I”ve never personally met Mr. Cesca...

Yes, I referred to Chambers as "portly." The horror! However, I was attempting to describe the total contrast between Chambers and Silver. Chambers, I wrote, is the "Bizarro Nate Silver," a reference to the Bizarro Superman character who's exactly the opposite of Superman in every way. That's Chambers. Elaborating, I wrote that Silver, among other complimentary things, is "a skinny New Yorker who’s devised astonishingly accurate forecasting models for both sports and politics." Conversely, Chambers is a "a portly Southern amateur who thinks he’s uncovered a widespread polling scam when, in fact, he’s merely stripped out any and all accuracy or calculated methodology and just, you know, made stuff up." Etc, etc, etc.

Odd that Chambers would retaliate against Silver for something that I wrote.

Whatever. None of it changes the fact that Chambers was wrong about everything because he was in total denial about math, reality and his candidate's flailing campaign -- indicative of the broader contra-reality crisis within the Republican Party.