NAMING BOB SCHIEFFER! Today, we have the naming of names. We’ll start with a big name: Bob Schieffer:

MONDAY, AUGUST 8, 2011

Snapshots from a banana republic/Joe Nocera edition: In this blog post and in today’s column, Paul Krugman explains why Standard and Poor’s is wrong in its basic conceptual framework. (From the blog post: “US solvency depends hardly at all on what happens in the near or even medium term: an extra trillion in debt adds only a fraction of a percent of GDP to future interest costs, so a couple of trillion more or less barely signifies in the long term.”)

Is S&P wrong in its basic framework? Until someone shows us he’s wrong, we defer to Krugman’s judgment in such policy areas. But within our banana republic culture, it’s rarely enough for an “expert” elite to be wrong in its basic understandings. Such elites also tend to showcase their incompetence through groaning technical errors. They rarely seem happy until they have done so. And so it was when the S&P gang constructed its latest report:

KRUGMAN (8/8/11): Before downgrading U.S. debt, S.& P. sent a preliminary draft of its press release to the U.S. Treasury. Officials there quickly spotted a $2 trillion error in S.& P.’s calculations. And the error was the kind of thing any budget expert should have gotten right. After discussion, S.& P. conceded that it was wrong—and downgraded America anyway, after removing some of the economic analysis from its report.

Oof. For a fuller description of this error, see this Krugman blog post.

It’s surprising to think that our expert elites can’t even get the basic math right. But for decades, we have observed the same phenomenon in the groaning technical efforts of our “educational expert” class. In a banana republic like ours, many groups of players are assigned the role of expert elites. But these people are really Potemkin elites. In reality, they exist to recite preferred story lines—and to give the public the false impression that experts are still in charge.

All around your banana republic, you see the work of Potemkin elites. The career liberal world rarely mentions this fact. For the most part, they’re also Potemkin.

Today, let’s review the recent work of a journalistic Potemkin—the New York Times’ Joe Nocera.

On Saturday, Nocera apologized for the “intemperate” language in his previous column. We don’t think Nocera was necessarily wrong to apologize; we thought he said foolish, counterproductive things in that earlier column. But people! In this three-step history of his recent work, Step One is by far most important:

Step One, April through July: Nocera says nothing at all, in any column, about the debt limit debate. He clarifies nothing; he explains nothing. He sits like a bump on a log.

Step Two, August 2: After the debt limit deal is done, Nocera explodes in anger. “The Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people,” he writes. He refers to them as “terrorists” who can “put aside their suicide vests” now that they have won; in his headline, he says that these people have conducted a “War on America.” He doesn’t name any such people; he doesn’t say who exactly he means. Does he refer to all Tea Party supporters, including Aunt Madge? Or does he refer to professional politicians? In his fury, and perhaps in his cowardice, Nocera doesn’t say.

Step Three, August 6: Nocera apologizes for his previous column. “The words I chose were intemperate and offensive to many, and I’ve been roundly criticized,” he writes. “I was a hypocrite, the critics said, for using such language when on other occasions I’ve called for a more civil politics.”

Whatever. In the comments to Nocera’s most recent column, long lists of liberals urge him on, saying he shouldn’t have retracted his insults. In our view, that reaction is dumb enough. (To see the way your fellow citizens reason, just look at comments 20-25.) But much more importantly, we haven’t seen a single person in those comments who asked Nocera an obvious question:

If you felt so strongly about the debt limit deal, why didn’t you write about it until after the deal was done?

No one asked Nocera that question. But then, we liberals have terrible intellectual leadership, just like our neighbors who watch Fox. Beyond that, we liberals aren’t especially smart, and we aren’t always especially principled. We do like to call the other team names, though we tend to cry real tears when the other team does it to us. (“I was a hypocrite, the critics said, for using such language when on other occasions I’ve called for a more civil politics.”)

It gets worse: We don’t understand the way these tribal divisions serve plutocrat interests! But then, our “intellectual leaders” are much more likely to urge us to hate than they are to explain such matters.

Now that Nocera has snapped awake, perhaps he’ll start explaining basic aspects of the whole debt limit matter, which will likely come center stage again. Other “journalists” are still drifting along in a dream state. Consider the gigantic front-page report in yesterday’s Washington Post.

The report runs almost 6000 words. It explains the way the GOP leadership framed its approach to the debt limit deal, starting back in 2010. But guess what? Despite all those words, the team of authors never explain what would have happened if the debt limit didn’t get raised. There were several obvious places to do so—but they never did.

Can we talk? This country is full of people who have never heard an explanation of what would have happened if the debt limit stayed where it was! As best we can tell, the Washington Post reported this matter once, in a July 15 front-page report; the New York Times never bothered. Our question: How are voters supposed to know such things if people like Nocera, and the Washington Post, are too clueless to tell them?

Also in yesterday’s Washington Post, Nicolle Wallace seemed to praise Michele Bachmann for saying she’ll never raise the debt limit. How are people supposed to know how crazy that stance really is? How are people supposed to know that the number two GOP White House candidate has adopted a ludicrous stance?

Within our banana republic culture, such basic matters rarely get explained. We liberals then name-call the rubes who don’t know squat from squadoodle, even as our own dumb bunnies keep misstating what S&P said. Meanwhile, Nocera is there to give the impression that experts are in charge—that they’re crafting a real public discourse.

Guess what? They’re doing no such thing! But we liberals, bright as we say we are, rarely seem to notice. We’re living in a banana republic, where ignorance—mixed with name-calling—seem to constitute bliss.