Greetings!  I’ll be covering online hyperbole for WFTC — what it looks like, how it works, how it might be refashioned into more artful statements or smoother arguments.  In a medium prone to unending tantrum, some focus on minimalism might counterbalance the tendency to write as if starved for attention.  And what better way to begin than with a wee exaggeration about a big hyperbole?  Today, Andrew Sullivan wrote a brief post entitled “What Paul Krugman Cannot Say.”

Well, he can say it but he has to withdraw it. Here’s an odd sentence from the NYT’s op-edder today:

Management wants me to make it clear that in my last column I wasn’t endorsing inappropriate threats against Mr. Lieberman.

Here’s presumably what he’s referring to:

A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy.

There is no “inappropriate threat” to Lieberman the person here. Just an endorsement, self-consciously hyperbolic, of attacking his public image. Did Lieberman complain?

Sullivan makes two errors.  First, Krugman is not withdrawing the statement, he’s clarifying it.  Second, Sullivan’s quote omits that the “odd sentence” was in parenthesis.  In a column that uses dashes to frame asides or interrupt thought on eleven occasions, the singular usage of parenthesis clearly indicates what Krugman really thinks about the editorial instruction contained within it.  In this way, Krugman vividly communicates his dissent, so Sullivan has no reason to accuse him of being unable to speak for himself.  Actually, the subtlety of the use of parenthesis is a nice counterexample to the excess of the original post.

And what about that underlying hyperbole?  Obviously, the Times got squeamish about lining the word “hang” next to “Senator Joe Lieberman” because the sentence can be too-easily misread by nutcases, anti-Semites or ideologues.  That anxiety is perfectly understandable.  Why not admit it?  Krugman should have unearthed the subtext and given the rationale behind the managerial position while explaining that he used the piquant statement for dramatic flair.  Clarify away, but tell us why you’re doing it.  Putting motives on the table would set the column somewhere between understatement and exaggeration, but in a spot that would surely satisfy the Times, Krugman — even Sullivan.

Expect posts along these lines in the future; looking for hyperbole on the internet is less like looking for a needle in a haystack, and more like looking for hay.

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