During Bill Clinton’s little bobble-head impeachment troubles, Slate’s Will Saletan gave us the Clintometer. With each bump and grind in the news cycle, Saletan would update the odds of Bill being kicked out of office. As I recall, the Clintometer peaked early, rising to 40% early in the crisis, then slowly and unevenly lowered to a far less tumescent 0%.

Cute, eh?

Now comes the Saddameter, Will’s almost-daily update of the odds of war against Saddam.

Cute, eh? Cute and useless. Oh, and pretty damn stupid, too. Let me explain.

For the first week or so the Saddameter ran, Saletan pegged the odds of war anywhere from just over 50 to just under 60%. With daily updates. I can tell you for sure that my political radar isn’t finely tuned enough to tell the difference, one day to the next, between a 57% chance of war and a 58% chance. Yet Saletan thinks his is that discerning – and that an impossible-to-determine 1% change is somehow newsworthy.

That’s the useless part. But just how stupid is it?

Let’s say you have a coin, and you claim it’s rigged to score heads slightly more often than tails. Let’s then say that in a dozen tosses, the coin comes up tails every time. That’s highly unlikely tossing a regular quarter, and almost impossible for a coin rigged to show heads more often than not.

But that’s what Saletan has claimed, and that’s what he’s done, but every time the coin comes up tails – no war for Saddam.

Perhaps Will thinks his daily projections are long-term, ie, today’s 62% chance of war (with afternoon fog) really means a 62% chance from now until some later, unspecified date. You stretch that probability curve out to, say, March, and the odds of war approach certainty. Peg it at 95%, with those five points for wiggle room in case something unpredictable happens, like Saddam’s cronies presenting him with the 9mm retirement plan, or a sudden epidemic of coup flu.

Whatever. Today’s odds? Zero percent – the President didn’t call up the Secretary of Defense and give a Go order. Odds out to March? About the same odds your local movie theater has of selling some Lord of the Rings tickets next week.

Will Saletan’s daily updates are invented news of the silliest kind. Instead of sound and fury signifying nothing, we get cutesy little pictures. But I always read Slate for the articles, anyway.