Correction

Last April I linked to a NYT Magazine story on El Salvador's abortion law that, among other things, described the case of a woman supposedly sentenced to 30 years in prison for having an abortion. In the interest of accuracy, I should note that the reporting of the story has come under criticism and they've retracted that one claim; while doctors disagree on what happened, the sentence was for infanticide. I find the bare fact of a ban so severe as to lack a life-of-the-mother exception to be appalling enough.

Shameful joy

In my third year of high school (1984-85) I attained justly brief and minor local celebrity for my performance on the PSAT.

For those of you who have not been subjected to the American educational system, the SAT (this used to stand for "Scholastic Aptitude Test" despite not measuring anything that could seriously be called scholastic aptitude; I think the official meaning has since changed) is a standardized test that most college-bound US high-school students take in their final year, which most colleges and universities consider in admissions decisions. It's been jiggered with in various ways in the past twenty years, but back in the era I'm talking about, it was an entirely multiple-choice test that was half math problems and half assorted tests of grammar and reading comprehension. It is supplied and scored not by a government agency or even an educational institution, but by a cabal of two private non-profit organizations, the College Board and Educational Testing Services Service, the latter of which charges a fee.

As with any standardized multiple-choice test, the best way to ace the SAT is to practice taking some form of it repeatedly, to become familiar with the style and with answering strategies. There's an enormous industry revolving around SAT test prep, and ETS participates as well by offering the PSAT or "Preliminary SAT", a half-length version of the SAT with similar questions that students typically take the year before they take the SAT, and often in other practice iterations before that. The PSAT is also the qualifying exam for National Merit Scholarships.

I took the PSAT multiple times, and the last time, I managed to get a perfect score. There was for some reason great interest among local media in students who managed to get a perfect score on the SAT, and I guess getting a perfect score on the PSAT was close enough, so I got written up in the Virginia Weekly section of the Washington Post (in a story with a strange accompanying photograph in which I was photographed from below, perched on top of a mailbox with arms crossed imposingly). The reporter must have been slightly nonplussed by the phone interview in which I vented the typical frustrations and resentments of a nerdy high-school kid, but fortunately none of that got into the story.



Anyway, I was then amazed and excited to learn that somebody from WRC-TV 4 news was coming to film a segment about me for the local early-evening broadcast. I wasn't sure what to expect, but when I walked into Mrs. Ferris's math class and saw the lights and cameras set up, I figured I was going to meet some sort of reporter.

Instead, they had sent their end-of-the-newscast wacky joke boy, an irritating man by the name of Steve Doocy.

I must have been Doocy's least favorite subject ever. He had a whole shtick plotted out in advance, and I mostly ruined it by refusing to go along with his gags. I did the bit where we went head-to-head solving fake gibberish math problems, but wouldn't supply him the closing line he wanted, which was me asking him "what is Leah Thompson^* really like?". The experience makes me sympathize with the oddballs who play good sport to the fake reporters on The Daily Show, except that The Daily Show has well-written jokes and does not claim to be an actual news broadcast.

When the segment aired, it turned out that not only was the whole thing incredibly embarrassing, Doocy hadn't even tried for something like a Daily Show standard of factual accuracy surrounding his jokes. Most egregiously, he claimed I'd gotten a perfect score on the SAT (people insisted to me for years afterward that I had done so, having seen it on TV). In the "math showdown with Steve Doocy" bit, a textbook figure that I identified in my Poindextery voice was named in an on-screen title as, I think, a "hyperbolic parabbola".



Years and decades went by, I stopped being an easily embarrassed teenager, and Steve Doocy somehow landed a national gig as a pseudo-news person and right-wing blowhard on the Fox News show "Fox and Friends". A few days ago, Doocy got some attention for more or less uncritically repeating, and expanding upon in moronic fashion, a hit piece about Barack Obama that had appeared in Insight magazine, a publication associated with the Washington Times and, like it, owned by lunatic zillionaire cult leader Sun Myung Moon that specializes in clownishly far-right politics. The article claimed to have information from operatives associated with Hillary Clinton's campaign (like Hilzoy, I suspend judgment as to whether that attribution is true, but wouldn't bet much on it) that Obama attended a Muslim school in Indonesia when he was a little kid, a school scarily referred to as a "madrassa". Never mind that the story was (a) false and (b) really shouldn't have been all that alarming if true; whether it originates from the Clinton campaign or from Moon's people, it's yet another chapter in the various coded attempts to frame Senator Obama as a crypto-Muslim-scary-brown-terrorist-symp.

You can read about all that elsewhere, but right now I'm just enjoying watching the office of Barack Obama rip Steve Doocy a new orifice.




* The mid-eighties six o'clock WRC anchor, not the similarly named actress.