Mark Twain once said, "Figures don't lie, liar's figure." They also post on NRO, National Review Online.
Rich Lowry, who never lets facts interfere with ideology, recently posted: "Frontrunner Numbers . . . I think this new Fox poll is interesting. . . . John McCain . . . has a very strange status for a front-runner (and I do think he's the frontrunner). He's in second place by double digits and only leads by five points a guy everyone thinks probably can't win. It's Giuliani 34%, McCain 22%, Gingrich 15% . . . 02/02 04:08 PM"
You see, in Lowry-world, McCain is the frontrunner, even though he trails Giuliani by 12%, because Lowry thinks he's the frontrunner. Lowry refuses to see that McCain's "very strange status for a front-runner" is due to the fact that McCain is not the frontrunner, McCain is in second place.
Because Lowry doesn't support Giuliani, Giuliani can never be the frontrunner, even when Giuliani is the frontrunner. It's almost as if Lowry is 1984's Winston Smith, conditioned to see whatever conforms to the orthodoxy of the day, going so far as to ignore basic rules of mathematics. ("How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?" "How many do you want me to see?")
Lowry's disregard of elementary numerical concepts is so Orwellian, so "double-plus-ungood" in Newspeak, that even the consistently offensive, odious John Podhoretz is offended: "Rich, McCain is in second place because he's not the frontrunner. 02/02 04:13 PM"
The ideological blinders at NRO are so thick and tinted that they actually debate whether the frontrunner is the fellow at 34% or the one with 22%.
Remember, I report, you deride! Was Lowry's NRO post crazy, stupid or evil?