RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://thefederalist.com/2018/07/11/jeffrey-toobins-clueless-supreme-court-meltdowns-embarrass-cnn/

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement has ignited a competition in Big Media for apocalyptic hot-takes on how a marginally more conservative Supreme Court will destroy America. CNN’s senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin seems bent on taking home the trophy for the most molten meltdown.

Toobin’s most recent rave, to the network’s Anderson Cooper, was that the stakes are higher on judicial confirmations today because “[w]hen the Constitution was written in the late eighteenth century, people were expected to die in their 50s. The framers never contemplated that these terms would regularly go to 30-plus years as they do now.”Toobin is as ill-informed about statistics as he is about the framers’ view on de facto life tenure for federal judges.

Toobin, like many people in the media, seems to have little idea about the difference between life expectancy—a figure including infant mortality—and life span. It also appears he may not grasp the difference between the mean and the median in considering what an “average” number is.
About Life Expectancy in the Eighteenth Century

Modern medicine has greatly decreased infant mortality and thereby increased average life expectancy in America and elsewhere. But after infant mortality is accounted for, the human life span has not changed nearly as much over time. During the late 1700s, males who reached age 20 could be expected on average to live to age 63-66. At age 30, they could be expected to live to age 65-68. At age 50—when Toobin thinks men were being wiped out—they could be expected to live to age 71-73.

Moreover, infant mortality will affect both the mean—which is what most people think of as an average—and the median, the number at which half the population will be above and half below. The median still provides the opportunity for half the population to live well beyond the average.

Of course, the framers were no more expert on these subjects than Toobin is. But James Madison lived to age 85. Ben Franklin lived to age 84. Paul Revere made it to age 83, while John Adams lived until age 90. Thomas Jefferson, while technically not a framer of the Constitution, lived to 83. The first Supreme Court chief justice, John Jay, lived to 83. They likely noticed that their contemporaries were not all keeling over in their 50s.

Jonathan Chait has now spun up an East-Germany-style vision of Donald Trump as Putin’s Honecker, a traitor to the USA since 1987.

Titled “What If Trump Has Been a Russian Asset Since 1987?,” the Chait piece does not even rise to the level of “conspiracy theory,” Chait having presented no conspiracy to theorize about. His technique is to raise, magnify and connect doubts. “How do you even think about the small but real chance — 10 percent? 20 percent? — that the president of the United States has been covertly influenced or personally compromised by a hostile foreign power for decades?” he asks. One answer is, you write a few thousand pointless words.

But only about Trump. Chait takes everything back to Trump’s July 1987 visit to Moscow. That’s because in September of that same year Trump took out a series of full-page ads in prominent newspapers noting that “Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.″ In his open letter to the American people, Trump asked, ″Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?”

Classic Trump — or was it really Gorbachev in disguise? As Chait notes, it is the Kremlin’s propensity to seek splits between the US and its allies. He writes: “The safest assumption is that it’s entirely coincidental that Trump launched a national campaign, with himself as spokesman, built around themes that dovetailed closely with Soviet foreign-policy goals shortly after his Moscow stay. Indeed, it seems slightly insane to contemplate the possibility that a secret relationship between Trump and Russia dates back this far. But it can’t be dismissed completely.” (Emphasis added.)