New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent signs off today with a column where he lists the things he wished he had written about in his 18 months, but didn’t. Here’s one of them:

Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults.

Okrent doesn’t cite any chapter or verse for the attack on Krugman (or Maureen Dowd or William Safire, who he also cites). Here’s his cute line: “I didn’t give Krugman, Dowd or Safire the chance to respond before writing the last two paragraphs. I decided to impersonate an opinion columnist.”

The whole point of having Paul Krugman write, it seems to me, is that he is exercising his considerable judgment and expertise to single out the statistics that matter. He is trying to make a point, of course, that’s what opinion writing is about. But as a close reader of Krugman I’m not aware of a “habit” of distortion. Okrent should really put up or shut up. Not all statistics are created equal.

One of the tides that Krugman is valiantly trying to hold back is the right’s pseudo-statistical arguments. I recently saw that this is happening on climate change. Instead of dealing with the scientific consensus that it is carbon in the atmosphere that matters, the Bush administration is trying to push the notion that it is carbon “intensity” that counts. So you divide emissions by GDP and you find that the US isn’t so bad after all. But that “statistic” means nothing in the face of the evidence that it is the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere that is the problem — whether the use is intense or non-intense.

Okrent’s gullibility on matters economic may be revealed by his quoting the bizarre economics writer Jude Wanniski later in the same column. I hope his successor as public editor has more of a grip on such important issues.

Update: Brad DeLong weighs in and the comments stream is particularly worth reading. Many of his readers point out that if Okrent wanted to single out columnists that wilfully distort facts, there are plenty of more deserving candidates.