UPDATED! MICHAEL PATRICK LEAHY STILL ENGAGES IN “REPEATED INSTANCES OF PROFOUND STUPIDITY”

It turns out I need to revise my previous post because Leahy did, in fact, have access to the “secret report” he wrote about on 11 June 2012. He just preferred to withhold any of the actual evidence contained within it until 25 June 2012, because as an acolyte of the The Dearly Departed Breitbart, Hashtag War Be His Name, he cares far more about clicks than claims. He decided to smear Warren, sans evidence, on 11 June 2012 and hope that his readers would absorb the opprobrium of the first post and blindly consider the “facts” presented in the 25 June 2012 as evidence that the initial smear was warranted.

It wasn’t. Leahy doesn’t even think so:

Breitbart News is not alleging that Sullivan, Warren, and Westbrook engaged in scientific misconduct.

So why is he writing this?

The 1991 University of Texas Preliminary Inquiry Report fails to answer Shuchman’s charge that “the authors arranged matters…preventing any independent check of the raw data.”

That’d be Philip Shuchman, the Rutgers debt expert who complained that Warren and her co-authors “prevent[ed] any independent check of the raw data in the files from which they took their information.”* Feel like hoisting Leahy by his own petard? Because I do. Leahy claims:

[T]he central charge made by Professor Shuchman was neither investigated nor refuted in this secret report. Shuchman cited four specific criticisms of the 1989 book. It is the fourth and last complaint upon which charges of scientific misconduct hang.

What, as quoted by Leahy, is that “central charge”?

But the authors arranged matters so that they could not provide access to the computer printouts by case, with the corresponding bankruptcy court file numbers, this [sic] preventing any independent check of the raw data in the files from which they took their information.

How about we let Leahy restate that in the form of a question?

Did the authors arrange matters so that they could not provide access to the computer printouts by case, with corresponding bankruptcy court file numbers, thus preventing any independent check of the raw data in the files from which they took their information?

So all of this about access to the “raw data” that Sullivan and her co-authors used in their book. And by “all of this” I mean “everything” in the Catholic sense, as in this is the Original Sin, the fruit of the poisoned tree from whose seeds the entirety of his case against Warren sprouts. What does the letter from the Office of the Inspector General of the National Science Foundation that Leahy provides say?

I talked to Prof. Sullivan [one of Warren’s co-authors], and she says that they have offered to provide you with a machine-readable copy of the raw data file.

I’m going to offer Mr. Leahy a piece of advice: if you want to claim that someone committed “scientific misconduct” by withholding their “raw data,” you might not want to produce a quotation indicating that this person was perfectly willing to provide the raw data all anyone had to do was ask. Moreover, if you want to claim that people are withholding information about “scientific misconduct” you might not want the sole source of your evidence to be one of the people you claim is withholding information.

This has been an updated lesson in how not to be profoundly stupid.

*Trained scholars will note the difference between my quotation of Shuchman here and Leahy’s above. It seems only one of us actually know how the rules of proper citation. I’m not going to ding Leahy for this little white lie of academic misconduct but I could.