And They Can’t Drive Either, AmIRite?

This is actually the opening paragraph of an editorial in the New York Sun, the highly numerate newspaper initially founded on the belief that a fourth right-wing newspaper in one of the nation’s most liberal cities was a sound business proposition:

James Thurber once drew some cartoons of a woman playing poker. In one, she is seated at a table clutching her cards to her breast, eying the capacious pot, and inquiring, “What do four ones beat?” In another she is glaring across the table, demanding to know, “Why do you keep raising me when you know I’m bluffing?” Whether Brother Remnick of the New Yorker could get away with publishing such japes nowadays, we don’t know. But we were put in mind of the cartoons by the alarm at the New York Times over the possibility that President Obama might pass over Governor Janet Yellen as the next chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Ha ha, women are totally dumb with the numbers, even if today the New Yorker is too politically correct to acknowledge this obvious truth!

Via Chait, who notes with respect to the slightly less obviously idiotic Wall Street Journal version of the argument:

Here the circle is closed, uniting the Journal’s conviction that Fed appointments must be governed by strict intellectual merit with its conviction that the Fed must be run on the basis of “price stability” rather than “politics.” Here the Journal flicks at an idea that has in fact been proven its ridiculousness. The Journal has been waxing hysterical since the outset of the crisis. Inflation was just around the corner, the Journal has screamed. It’s here, it’s here! (For those of you who don’t follow this, it’s not here and has never been here, but the Journal refuses to acknowledge its terrible predictions.)

As it happens, the Journal’s news writers, who frequently infuriate and embarrass their editorial-page colleagues by reporting facts, published a report today measuring which members of the Federal Reserve board have made the most accurate predictions since the crisis. The Journal-style inflation hawks who have predicted rising prices around every corner have scored terribly. The highest scoring member — that is, the one whose predictions were most frequently borne out correctly by events — is none other than Janet Yellen.

Given this record, “the female dollar” looks awfully appealing. But it puts a fine point on the gender panic that is now infusing the hard-money cranks. They have constructed a fantasy world in which they sit in their plush leather chairs, calmly defending the rigors of tough-minded empiricism while feminists bellow from the street below. Yellen keeps analyzing the world in a sound and clear-minded way while they bay at the moon.

But a dumb broad like Yellen probably thinks that four ones beats the Journal‘s eight high or something.