Quantitative atrocities among the wishful thinking

IRS scandal: Peggy Noonan vs. Nate Silver

By Erik Wemple, WashPost, Updated: May 17, 2013

Columnist Peggy Noonan wrote yesterday that the Obama administration’s difficulties with the IRS story aren’t limited to the political organizations that were targeted for audits. The rot goes much deeper, she writes:

The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration. The Journal’s Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who’d donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government’s attention. He told ABC News: “It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare.” Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was targeted. A conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages faced questions about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these stories will come out, but not as many as there are. People are not only afraid of being audited, they’re afraid of saying they were audited.

Opinionators be on notice: When you venture into the realm of the quantitative — even when you may not realize it — there’s a number-crunching ombudsman waiting to audit you. Nate Silver, the biggest winner of the 2012 presidential election, saw an opportunity to use numbers in fact-checking Noonan’s representations about this “second part” of the IRS scandal.

His conclusion? Uh, Noonan needs some more data if she’s going to corroborate her contention:

(More here.)