Personal reactions.  Own your sources or leave them out of your essays.  That’s my advice to my fellow historians, because mixing facts and feelings can be problematic.

“As reality-based members of the American community, we have an obligation toward the truth, even when it isn't particularly convenient.”  That was Jamelle Bouie’s conclusion at the end of a review of Markos Moulitsas’s new book, American Taliban.  Bouie said of Moulitsas’s effort, “Like [Jonah Goldberg’s] Liberal Fascism, American Taliban is another entry in the tired genre of ‘my political opponents are monsters.’”

Bouie pointed to the popularity among some conservatives of non-governmental personalities whom he called “quasi-religious charlatans, rent-seeking celebrities, and failed ex-governors.”  (The left has its blowhards, too.)  But in a pitch for upholding standards, Bouie argued against fighting fire with fire.  Kevin Drum took note of the review, asking whether Goldberg’s polemical book received a similar reaction from mainstream reviewers on his side.

Advocacy can make effective use of evidence.  But my favorite history blogger, Timothy Burke, asked in August, “Is Evidence Old-Fashioned?”  Burke pointed out that in the past, “both academics and non-academic professionals often tried hard to get it right, changed features of the arguments they were inclined to make based on evidence, and when their evidence was found seriously wanting, abandoned or strongly modified views that they’d previously held.”

Burke believes that “There are a zillion reasons why that spirit has receded strongly from public life. . . . we’re in a moment where it’s not clear that there are any meaningful professional, social or personal consequences to believing whatever you want.”  Burke asked, not entirely seriously, I think, if academics simply should start teaching students how to argue based on mutable substance, with an emphasis on effect.

The answer, of course, is no.  If more and more people wrap themselves in their own comfort-blankets of echo-chamber reality, who's going to be left to come into archives and actually study the records of governance and the presidency?  And to write fairly and thoughtfully, without screeching, about presidents of both parties?

Sites where people pout and call each other Libtards and Rethugs are a dime a dozen.  For fact-based analysis, I turn to my fellow historians.  I’ve read many interesting, persuasive articles about political figures by scholars.  But sometimes, I turn away disappointed.

Why did Ron Briley write of Glenn Beck and his classroom that “Women must be denied their right to choose, gays and lesbians must not be allowed to marry, and immigration must be controlled in the name of restoring honor”?  Why would exaggeration help persuade readers that (hello!) Beck’s hyperbole is wrong?

Why did Chalmers Johnson write in a review of Charlie Wilson’s War, “It makes the U.S. government look like it is populated by a bunch of whoring, drunken sleazebags, so in that sense it's accurate enough.”  Really?  The “U.S. government”?  As opposed to specific individuals whose actions were the subject of legal or journalistic or historical investigations?

What about Timothy Furnish’s recent assertion that “[o]ur President, alas, has become a modern-day traditor:  a “Christian” who betrays co-religionists to their persecutors—only now it’s the Muslims, not the pagan Romans, doing the persecuting”?  Or Moshe Dann’s view that Obama “is probably the first American president to malign his own country while in office” and his call (from abroad) for an apology to the American people.  I learned more from a 2007 speech on hard and soft power by a non-historian, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, than I did from their recent essays.  Yet Furnish, at least, is someone who could teach readers about his field of study.

Should historians adopt the tone and methods of political bloggers?  Griping about apologies is a hallmark of some writers at National Review’s blog, The Corner.  Some of their counterparts on the left seemed peeved that George W. Bush wouldn’t bow his head at a press conference and confess to, I don’t know, something.  It’s a shtick some on the left and the right use—reaching into an always-present bag of weapons to throw something, anything, at an official for whom the writer didn’t vote.  But is a jarring ingredient to mix in with historical analysis.

If an historian is going to write from his personal perspective, why not tell us that up front?  The writing of history is much like performance auditing.  The auditor and the historian both gather data, assess its reliability, use critical thinking to analyze known facts, and write up findings.  But there is one key area in which historians and auditors differ.  Professional standards require auditors to acknowledge impairments to their independence in carrying out work.

Such impairments can be personal, external or organizational.  If an auditor has impairments that would affect his independence in carrying out an audit, the standards call for him to decline the engagement.  If that is not possible due to a legal mandate or the organization for which he works, the final product must disclose the impairment and the auditor must modify the claim that he has followed professional standards.

Scholars are human.  They have just as much right to feel anger or frustrations as do Joe and Jill Sixpack.  And, if they choose, to write as advocates rather than analysts.  But when they write as polemicists, why not tell us up front, “I, as an individual, wanted the U.S. to take this domestic or foreign policy action and am angry that it did not”?  Why not confront and own the sources of personal reactions?  It’s not as if readers won’t see that something has knocked the writer’s historian hat askew, anyway.  So why not spell it out, if objective analysis is not the goal?