Sunday Discussion Group

January 14, 2007

Radar magazine’s Jebediah Reed noted this week that the New York Times’ David Brooks had a fascinating item not too long ago about the inherent benefits of a meritocracy. It is “a way of life that emphasizes … perpetual improvement, and permanent exertion,” he effused. Brooks went on to describe a meritocracy as being essential to America’s dynamism and character.

And yet, the punditocracy, of which Brooks is a major part, seems to have turned the idea of a meritocracy on its head, particularly when it comes to the war in Iraq. Jebediah Reed explained in a fascinating piece that, in far too many instances, pundits who got the war wrong have been richly rewarded, while those who those who were right have seen their careers suffer. In retrospect, it makes Brooks’ talk of a meritocracy look almost silly.

Noticing our nation is stuck in an unwinnable war (or two), we wondered if America hasn’t stumbled off the meritocratic path. More specifically, since political pundits like Brooks play such a central role in our national decision-making process, maybe something is amiss in the world of punditry. Are the incentives well-aligned? Surely those who warned us not to invade Iraq have been recognized and rewarded, and those who pushed for this disaster face tattered credibility and waning career prospects. Could it be any other way in America?

So we selected the four pundits who were in our judgment the most influentially and disturbingly misguided in their pro-war arguments and the four who were most prescient and forceful in their opposition.

The results of the research weren’t encouraging. Thomas Friedman got the war in Iraq wrong, and has parlayed his mistakes into significantly improving his career. Peter Beinart has seen his career standing improve dramatically since getting the war wrong, as has Jeffrey Goldberg and Fareed Zakaria. In contrast, Robert Scheer, William S. Lind, Jonathan Schell, and Scott Ritter were all right before the invasion, and have seen their pundit careers suffer.

How is it, exactly, that those in the punditocracy who make the most mistakes about the most important world events manage to fall up?

Glenn Greenwald wrote a piece recently for the American Conservative — yes, that Glenn Greenwald and that American Conservative — touching on the same issue. As he explained, one reason pundits are free from scrutiny is that several just pretend that they were right all along.

When political leaders make drastic mistakes, accountability is delivered in the form of elections. That occurred in November when voters removed the party principally responsible for the war in Iraq. But the invasion would not have occurred had Americans not been persuaded of its wisdom and necessity, and leading that charge was a stable of pundits and media analysts who glorified President Bush’s policies and disseminated all sorts of false information and baseless assurances.

Yet there seems to be no accountability for these pro-war pundits. On the contrary, they continue to pose as wise, responsible experts and have suffered no lost credibility, prominence, or influence. They have accomplished this feat largely by evading responsibility for their prior opinions, pretending that they were right all along or, in the most extreme cases, denying that they ever supported the war.

Are we at a point in which it just doesn’t matter if pundits are right? Where’s the meritocracy? And why is there no accountability for those who help shape the political discourse?

Discuss.

It’s the same philosophy that allows incompetents in the corporate world to rise to positions way beyond their meager competance. “Shit floats to the top.”

I wish I could really explain the force behind it, but my simpleton take on this is that the upper echelons don’t like complainers and folks who remind them of their blunders and prefer someone who is maleable over someone competent.

  • I suspect that pundits are judged on one criteria with readers and another with poliiticians. Readers want to know if the pundit supports the reader’s prejudice or not. The politicians want to know if the pundit is useful or not.

    I think one thing that happened to the anti-war pundits was that they were perceived as wrong while they were out in the wilderness that when they became right the idea of their wrongness persisted.

    Plus new is news and yesterday is less so.

  • This condition – that those who were (and continue to be) demonstrably wrong about the war continually being put forth as serious policy experts to whom the populace should listen – is what spotlights what is terribly wrong about the fourth estate in this country.

    How can responsible Americans – defined here by those who have (unfortunately) had to wade through this continual disinformation campaign to see what is going on here – expect this country to be honest with itself and to see real change, when those with the loudest, most far-reaching voices in the media are rewarded for their mistakes, while those whe were right (and who continue to be) are ‘punished’ through a scarily administered (for its implications for truly honest discourse) campaign of ignoring their demonstrated wisdom by the media decision-makers?

    It’s as if we live in an enforced cocoon of disinformation and smokescreens – enforced by those who have the (unfortunately consolidated – which has led to this condition in the first place) media power through bandwidth and visibility to determine what the “non-digging into what is told them” general populace see and hear regarding these issues of the day? That this condition continues is what is truly scary. One would hope that past mistakes, by both the Administration and its supporters in the fourth estate, would have been rectified by rewarding those who were and who continue to be correct, with the media bullhorn. But this is not the case. Some democracy we have here, and we are quietly, and quickly, I fear, slipping back into a political reality that we supposedly overcame in the 1940s. I am tired of writing posts that essentially say “I want my country back.” I wonder if I can ever say that it is back, the way things are going right now.

  • Yet there seems to be no accountability for these pro-war pundits. On the contrary, they continue to pose as wise, responsible experts and have suffered no lost credibility, prominence, or influence.

    Yeah, in a society like America, a democracy, there should be some sort of accountability to the public. These people are mouthpieces to the public. There should be some sort of collective shunning, a modern version of the stocks and tossing tomatoes.

    I’ve met people who were always right before. It’s pretty annoying. I wish there was some way to persuade them, but I’m not able to do it. I think you just have to step around them.

    All people who are really accurate observers of and commenters on life start out in life by taking on an attitude of doubting their own beliefs, and accepting that it’s just an illusion that we always seem right to ourselves- just caused by the fact that we’re only forming a judgment, in each situation, based on the information and experience we already have- they realize that their reliefs have to be subject to a more thorough and far-reaching examination before they can form their opinion about something complicated or something they know little about so definitely. After years of treating every issue like this, a person’s process becomes really good, they start to rely on their being right more because they prove to be really right more, and you turn into a swelled-headed asshole like me.

    That’s not exactly the case with these pundits- their careers depend on them being accurate, I guess they feel, and they’re just crappy enough to pretend their mistakes didn’t happen when in honesty they could recognize that it was a mistake. Maybe also they spent too mucj of their lives being spared the rod & spoiled, so they’ve been conditioned to hold an irrational belief in their own opinions.

  • The reason shit floats so well is because the American people want it to float. The pundits who remain despite their repeated attempts to guess the most disastrous course and then advocate it, are reflections of us. Not us in the left-out, the us in America. Americans believe they are special, and these pundits stroke that ego, giving us loads of shit about how we have to attack the whole planet when 3,000 of us die, but whenever 3,000 others die (i.e. Palestinians) those people better not go crazy or anything.

    When we have WMDs, it’s defensive. Other people get them because they want to attack us. We give the most money, except when you factor in our wealth. We have “strategic interests” under other people’s soil, which they “grab” and “nationalize” to the horror of our popular pundits. Dropping bombs from an F16 is so much more civilized than sending a suicide bomber.

    I would guess that the readers of these pundits in general use the work of the always-wrong to make themselves feel better, about themselves. Those who were right are criticized for being shrill, for saying things in a way that makes the American feel icky. It’s not what you’re saying, America says, it’s the way you say it.

    Somehow the pundit left needs to square the circle by learning to guide the people without making them feel like idiots. Of course a grat many of us are idiots, so this is no easy task.

  • I think the majority of Americans have reached such a level of apathy that they are happy to be told what to think. People were angry enough to change the balance in Congress in November but still, what percentage of eligible voters actually voted? While I am not in favor of reinstating the draft, I have an 18 and 17 year old, it’s going to take something as momentous and far reaching as that for most Americans to wake up and want to have an active voice on issues such as foreign policy. Until then, well, maybe my favorite pundit did get everything wrong, but hey, they’ll get it next time.

  • I can’t remember the pundit class as being particularly insightful with anything other than what other pundits think. Right or wrong doesn’t matter, so long as they can agree on a ‘conventional wisdom.’ From there, they debate the minutia of their manufactured universe, taking great care to never challenge their agreed ‘wisdom’. This became too obvious to ignore with the Iraq war.

    The American people decided this war, and the deciderer who launched it are terrible for this country. This was nowhere to be found in the pundit’s ‘conventional wisdom’, yet the consumers of punditry came to it in large numbers. Do the pundits matter? Is anyone giving them the credence they have agreed they deserve? Is anyone even listening?

  • Are we at a point in which it just doesn’t matter if pundits are right? Where’s the meritocracy? And why is there no accountability for those who help shape the political discourse?

    Of course it doesn’t matter if they are right. They aren’t hired to be right, they are hired to be entertaining. You know, “readable”, “provocative”, “opinionated.”

    It’s showbiz, and they are the Britney Spears of the Journalism Branch.

  • I stopped paying attention to political pundits several years ago. Although I can’t give solid numbers or percentages, I came to understand — by virtue of watching too many Sunday talk shows — that the pundits, right and left, are far more often wrong than right when making predictions.

    I don’t see much difference between political pundits and sports yammerers. They both speak with great confidence, and are usually wrong. Both are chewing gum, entertainment.

    Here, I’m mostly talking about predictions, and predicting is a game we all enjoy. Analysis is another matter. There are pundits who seem to be fairly good at analysis, which is worth more to me than predictions.

    (By the way, last night MSNBC had a repeat of a discussion with the authors of “Fiasco” and “Cobra II” together at the same table. Terrific show!)

  • I agree with Martin but will take his point a bit further. The most successful entertainers are shameless self-promoters. Pundits are entertainers, therefore….

  • Some of the comments are right about different things. I think the American people are indifferent about what the pundits say. I don’t think the pundits really get influence by stroking the people’s ego, or that they stroke the people’s ego. I think the American people are pretty good, and that it takes tremendous resources and efforts to deceive them. After a while, they come around, as they have about this Iraq war- no pundit told them to do that, they figured it out because they are not as stupid as the right wing thinks they are.

    CB asks:Where’s the meritocracy?

    Well, that has to do with something that is very significant for a lot of things that you left wingers usually complain about- which is that that critical 18-36 years old group of guys is not paying that much attention to what the pundits say; more generally, they’re not paying that much attention or acting as sentinels of their culture at all, like they were in the ’60s and ’70s. They’re not that politicized (that’s the Poli-Sci 101 term) or that excited about anything you want them to care about. If they were, we’d see even conservative staid guys and game show hosts and talking heads acting groovy and all that again.

    Left wingers are so delusional sometimes that they still think some massive revulsion is eventually going to happen in this country, and the system is going to be reformed according to their preferred tastes. Wrong! What’s in fact happening is the right-wingers are the ones who are discontented. Look at What’s The Matter With Kansas, the rise of the Religious Right or Moral Majority, etc. You are not doing anything to get the kinds of people you need in your camp- you need to go out to schools and speak to kids about basic liberals values like diversity, etc. Is it just me or does anyone else see that the right wingers are making huge concerted efforts to tell people about their beliefs and we are not? And then everyone wonders where all these right wingers come from. If the right wingers don’t get them, people have Dance Dance Revolution, Britney Spears, Pokemon and going out to clubs to distract them when they’re kids and teenagers, and with all these modern distractions they start to think that’s all that matters in life, so who wants to read a newspaper editorial, or even worse, think about a newspaper editorial. That’s why black people etc. are slowly but surely getting more and more alienated from the left wing; they see that things haven’t changed all that much for think them (a lot of success isn’t happening quickly, despite social programs and affirmative action) and they may be starting to believe that a lot of you don’t want to talk to them, because it may be true. Some people may have their priorities a little backwards, and may see the leftwing as foremost for obtaining a rewarding social life and only secondly for advancing the left wing’s political goals. The long term trend is toward more sympathy with the right wing, and it’s only switched a little for this Iraq war thing because the truth is too plain to deceive people over completely. But none of this is inevitable or anything that can’t be changed, it’s just it can’t be changed without you people making the necessary efforts.

    Because people aren’t as politicized- don’t care as much- they’re forming their basic opinions on society’s institutions based on things like TV dramas (they think all prosecutors are honest and good, even though they’ve learned the lesson that only some of the people they meet in their own everyday lives are honest and good) and tabloid newspapers and TV shows. This shouldn’t be; they should be forming their opinions based on the facts. Every kid who hears that someone’s an ex-prosecutor shouldn’t think that he’s an angel for that fact.

    The pundits are just totally off people’s radars and it’s because the people don’t care. It’s not because there’s something wrong with the people, it’s because the right wing has been more successfully reaching out to the people and the left wing hasn’t been reaching the people. The people care, and if people were more aware, they’d write to newspapers more about what pundits say and they’d know more what’s going on beyond just what a pundit or talking head tells them.

  • A perspective from a former newspaperman. Pundits are not judged by whether their ideas are right or wrong. They’re hired to express a certain ideological point of view or plain old point of view (Mo Dowd and snark, for example. None of those points of view are further left than, oh, Harry Reid, because newspapers and TV networks are run by corporatist shitheads who’d lose a million wars to keep their marginal tax rates low.
    Otherwise, the point of the pundit is to be reassuringly consistent, so people know what he or she will say without reading the piece. This is the sort of bold, forward thinking which explains the surging business success of newspapers and cable TV news

  • This whole situation with not only the pundits but the MSM in general is a symptom of the collective psychosis that American society is suffering from at the moment. All artfully engineered and so subtle that we still don’t fully understand how pervasive it is.

    When Bush can go on radio to say that it’s ok for Democrats to complain about his escalation in Iraq but they have to come up with their own plan, he conveniently ignores the fact that Demcrats *have* come up with alternative plans, but these are almost totally ignored by the MSM, allowing the White House to pretend that they never happened.

    It’s the moral equivalent of Hannity and O’Reilly shutting off a speaker’s mike and then smirking that they have nothing to say. We really have to change occupants in the White House in ’08 to finish the job we started in ’06 or it’s going to get even uglier than it is now.

  • Pundits are like politicians – they tend more and more to say what people want to hear. Is it surprising that newspapers and tv networks owned by rich Republicans tend to hire pundits with Republican viewpoints?

    The fact that news and commentary is viewed as entertainment explains the success of Stewart, Colbert and Olbermann. Olbermann’s odd ball and worst person of the day segments are skits. And I have to admit I prefer laughter to the ranting/raging on the right.

  • I was reading an article about criminal jury trials from an old undergraduate textbook last night, and describing the purposes of a jury, the article stated that “Juries disperse power from the state to the people.” As much power as a prosecutor and judge would exercise in a criminal trial in the absence of juries, some of that power is given to lay persons in the form of a jury.

    After three years of law school, this rationale was not on the tip of my tongue. It’s so clear, but for all I was taught in law school I think I learned the point of view and my fellow students came away with the point of view, more than any other, that juries are anachronistic historical mysteries, pointless institutions. Not a way to make sure some chump who you don’t know, in the form of a prosecutor (who is really just some little greedy right wing guy too much of the tim) isn’t just doing whatever the hell he wants.

    People don’t know this, do they? They think that when they go to sit on a jury the prosecutor is a nice man who knows what to do and that to some degree they’re there to act as a summary approval of his actions.

    Point being, people have to be taught the basic stuff, the basic points of liberal values. They would have gotten this in the ’60s and ’70s. Now, everyone wants to start telling people what they should think of the criminal justice process as it applies to foreign-born-citizen terrorism suspects, or comparable complex questions, when you’ve never even asked them to think about the more basic ones- i.e. why should the people get to view what the prosecutor and judge are doing, where did civil rights and the rights of women come from (i.e., from the efforts of civil rights activists and feminists, not just through serendipity) etc.

    You liberals nowadays too often want to tell people, or at least seem to (and seems matters) want to tell people, about issues like abolishing religion, teaching kids that it’s ok to be gay or promiscuous, etc.; for God’s sake, can’t you even get their kids out of the way of harm in Iraq first? We can’t even manage having a Lockeian non-monarchical civil government- which was a concept introduced in the 1600’s. It’s 2007 and just yesterday and idiot and a bunch of his crass idiot friends took over the country with the help of a bunch of modern technology. We’ve got to figure out how to prevent that. A lot of these issues you care about talking about have so little acceptance now that talking about them publicly does more to alienate people than to help anything. They’re kind of issues for another era.

  • I’m not saying abandon liberal social issues entirely, I’m saying sometimes the emphasis is wrong. And if you haven’t talked to your would-be supporters enough about the premises of your basic beliefs, you won’t be on the same page as them when you need them to support you on the big political issues of the day.

  • Punditry exists to function as a mouthpiece for the ruling class. Brooks is one such example of a useful idiot, dutifully doling out Republican talking points irrespective of the content, or lack thereof. Pundits pass themselves off as “serious” people, those who know more than the rest of us and are therefore more qualified to hold opinions. Witness the little weasel, Joe Klein, running down bloggers as “unserious” and “antagonistic”, etc. These self-inflating windbags do very little for me and I’ve yet to hear one of the haircuts add anything of value to a discussion of issues facing America. In earlier eras they would be nothing more than court sycophants and tongue-wagging hangers-on. Their opinions mean nothing to me and do not help me make sense of our country’s dilemmae at any time.

  • Frank Rich asks who this generation’s Barry Goldwater will be when it’s time for Bush to drop out in disgrace? Will it be John Warner or (snort) John McCain? My choice would be Lindsey Graham or the war’s biggest GOP critic, Chuck Hagel.

  • What pisses me off about pundits is that there is supposed to be a degree of expertise in what they postulate, and Iraq shows many of these pundits are not engaging in expertise but in areas of wishful thinking.

    JMB offered a really good perspective above when he stated that these opinionators are hired to espouse a particular political slant and provide that side’s commentary on issues of the day. This “fair and balanced’ approach to commentary is the Jerry Springerization of the op-ed pages: lets watch two partisans hit each other over the head with a chair for our entertainment.

    In a meritocracy, the op-ed pages would select people with expertise on particular issues to post opinions, not just a knucklehead from either the right or the left to offer a jack of all trades but master of none ignorant rant as either a conservative or liberal. David Brooks should not turn up on a show talking about things he is not an expert on, nor should Jonah Goldberg write about things on which he doesn’t have a clue. Neither of these guys know Iraq, or Iran, from a hole in the ground, They proved that.

    But better yet, the media should avoid altogether people with a political ax to grind and find people who are level-headed and outside the beltway. Well-reasoned commentary from someone who is smart and observant would add a dispassionate perspective on what really is going on. We need more commentators who are reality based and can call a spade a spade and carefully note when the president is wearing no clothes.

    But as we’ve noted before, the pundit class is not a meritocracy, but an insiders gang. It’s a group of the usual suspects who gamed the system and became self-appointed opinion czars. How they ever got into the positions they are in is as big a mystery as voodoo.

    And worst of all, the pundit class no longer comments on the issues of the day. They are now people who force the issues that will come into play in the future. They no longer comment from a perspective, they are now a tool of advancing that perspective. That is clearly outside their area of expertise and it is outside the boundaries of their true role.

  • I have to say, my good friend Former Dan got it exactly right, right off the start (#1):

    my simpleton take on this is that the upper echelons don’t like complainers and folks who remind them of their blunders and prefer someone who is maleable over someone competent.

    I am absolutely certain that everyone reading this has at least a few horror stories of their own of seeing this process in operation. Myself, several times I saw in the civil service how “the rule of three” in choosing someone for promotion off the list of those who were qualified invariably resulted in the person who was most like the one (or ones) making the promotion. And since they themselves had been the winner of a similar winnowing using similar standards, the entire upper echelon thought alike, acted alike, covered for each other,and frowned most mightily on those who did not “support the team” – their frowns became angry scowls whenever that person was also determined by events to have been right to start with. It’s just how large bureaucracies work, corporate, government, the military. I’ve seen the same thing go on in the promotion of studio executives in Hollywood.

    Past the middle level, meritocracy doesn’t work and will never work unless the entire upper echelon is removed first and replaced. And the sun will go supernova before that happens. Any spark of intelligence or ability above the equivalent rank of Lt. Colonel in the Army is pure coincidence and they’re always the ones who get blamed by the herd when the herd decision doesn’t work (watch what happens to General Petraeus this time next year).

    The idea of “meritocracy” is needed to attract all the bright young things who actually go out and lead the troops to take the hill, and who usually come home in a box. That may have been put in military terms, but it holds true everywhere.

    YMMV

  • Also, how meritocratic is our current stock market paradigm, which encourages dynamic, overpriced stock values in order to create quick kills for speculators often at the expense of the long term health of the company?

  • Re: my comment

    I don’t really think a lot of liberals spend time trying to convince people that religion should be abolished, but I know from having known other liberals and reading comments on blogs that there are a few liberals (not enough to justify the religious right being worried about it, but enough for it to be a political problem for us), too many liberals, who really feel that religion should be abolished and who consequently spend too much time thinking and acting towards that goal and too little time thinking and acting towards other goals- and unfortunately they are often too smart and influential to be spending their time doing this.

    Rather, these people think it’s good to spend their time trying to convince a person that the personal pronoun ‘he’ or the words ‘man’ or ‘men’ should no longer be used to refer to human beings generically, or that Christmas is bad, and so on. Relative to the real challenges we face today, these kinds of problems are not important at all.

  • You have to think of it in terms of “advocacy”. They aren’t being paid to be “right” and there is no reward for being “right”. Just like attorneys in legal cases, pundits are paid talking guns whose job is to present and advocate a particular point of view. Doesn’t have to be right – no one cares if its right – the sole reason for their existence is to get the argument out there. You do it well, you’re rewarded, regardless of how “right” you are, you don’t do it well, you’re replaced by those who do.

    In a world where the Moonies subisidize the Washington Times to the tune of over $1 billion over 20 years solely for the purpose of having a voice, it is naive to think that this business has anything to do reward or punishment for being “right” or not. It’s all about being an advocate and putting the argument out there rgardless of how “right” the argument is.

  • Perhaps a bit of-topic, other than as a demonstration of my theory that “meritocracy” among the pundit class is purely coincidental, Glenn Greenwald – in my book the best pundit there is out there, right from the beginning and right all along – has one incredible post this morning at his blog. If you don’t read anything else, make it your “daily must-read”.

    I’m sure you all know where to go.

  • I’m almost starting to think that I could write at length about the importance of politicizing people, establishing and maintaining a political base, in comments and it would not matter.

  • First, a couple of comparisons based on admittedly sketchy data.

    The four “pro war” pundits are generally younger: Thomas Friedman (b. 1953), Peter Beinart (1971), Jeffrey Goldberg (1965), Fareed Zakaria (1964). The “anti war” pundits tend to be older: Robert Scheer (1936), William S. Lind (1947), Jonathan Schell (1943), Scott Ritter (1961).

    The four “pro war” pundits are generally ivy-league but not standout scholars:: Thomas Friedman (Brandeis, Oxford), Peter Beinart (Yale, Oxford), Jeffrey Goldberg (Pennsylvania), Fareed Zakaria (Yale, Harvard). The “anti war” pundits, from what their bios say anyway, are more earnest scholars than frat men: Robert Scheer (CCNY, Syracuse, Berkeley), William S. Lind (mcl Dartmouth College, Princeton), Jonathan Schell (mcl Harvard), Scott Ritter (Franklin and Marshall College).

    Part of the answer to this week’s puzzle lies in our recent shift from journalism to celebrity worship, largely associated with the shift of punditry from newspapers to TeeVee. Intelligent crabs don’t “play well” on TeeVee. Schmoozing rah-rahs play very well (provided their hair is styled properly). In fact the “clubiness” of the “pro-war” types, both with each other and with the celebrities they fawn over, seems to dominate this division. I have a feeling that any of the “pros”, being more personalities than position people anyway, would be easy to get along with. The other four, on the other hand, seem as though they might rip you to bits if they smelled any phoniness.

    So … do we want our pundits to be likeable, or do we want them to be well-informed? In the TeeVee age, I’m pretty sure its the former.

  • Jefferson put a lot of faith in Locke, and especially so the 2nd Treatise on Government, describing a social construct where the basis of wealth is the individual’s work. That’s all well and good, up to a point. When Locke went on to say that this was valid only through the duality of (1) work, and (2) meeting one’s own immediate needs, it gets a little shaky.

    The foundational weakness of meritocracy is that there is no objective control over who determines what merits the merit in the first place. If, as is the case with these pundits, the primal goal is to promote the vision of the administration, then merit will be awarded accordingly to those who promote “the company line”—no matter how factually wrong they are. A pro-war media outlet, supported by pro-war stockholders, viewed by pro-war audiences, and staffed by pro-war peddlars of various generic cure-all medications of intellect, simply will not bear a negative adjudication against someone who’s wrong about the war It works like this:

    **********I think such and such, and personally believe that so-and-so is an incorrect message. I have internalized this, and founded my existence upon it. Pundit A promotes the meassage I agree with, while Pundit B does not. To accept that Pundit A is wrong is to acknowledge that my internalizations are also wrong.**********

    Where we are at today in society is that not only have these pro-war pundits internalized their message, but so have their employers, their stockholding entities, their advertisers, and their audiences. It is no longer about debating the concept of this-and-that; pro-and-con; pro-war and anti-war. On that front, the pro-war group has the anti-war group seriously out-gunned. All of the major media outlets have their dummies; with Fox, you’ve got to be a dummy just to work there.

    Bluntly put—you cannot wage war against an entire corps of dummies with just a squad of Olbermanns. This is a war that must be waged one radio station at a time, one television program at a time, and one editorial at a time. One mailbox at a time. One cornfield at a time, even—because the Left can no longer afford to alienate anyone, and that includes the guy who puts food in the bellies of the People….

  • I don’t know if this is on topic or not, but knowing the difference between fact and opinion is critical to reasonable discussion of issues. I’ve said this before, but there seems to be a conviction that a strong opinion is just as good as a fact.

    If I had my way, I would require all schools to spend as much classroom time as necessary to teach that difference. Even knowing the difference is no guarantee of reasonable debate, because too often facts are used out of context in order to make a more compelling argument. (“A drunk uses a lamp post for support, not illumination.”) But knowing the difference is important to many aspects of daily living, not just politics.

  • Brooks went on to describe a meritocracy as being essential to America’s dynamism and character. — CB

    It’s quite ironic, actually, that even as we know that Brooks is wrong more often than right, we still swallow, whole, his premise that America *is* a meritocracy and spend Sunday morning and afternoon discussing how it applies (or doesn’t) to the pundit class…

    Brooks is, once again, wrong. And his premise is *false* — America is not a meritocracy any more than any other country is. Sure, there are people who have pulled themselves by their bootstraps and reached prominence. But that’s why we hear of them — it’s a rare event. Most people reach pinnacles beause they got a leg up one way or another.

    Seriously… If America *were* a meritocracy, would we have a president we have now? On his own merit, I doubt he’d have reached college graduation, much less governship or presidency.

    Any spark of intelligence or ability above the equivalent rank of Lt. Colonel in the Army is pure coincidence — Tom Cleaver, @21

    Reminds me of that old joke about jokes and the military:
    Q: When you tell a joke in the army, when do people laugh?
    A: The private laughs when he hears it. The sergant laughs when he understands it — the next day. The captain laughs a couple of days later still — when someone explains it to him. The general never laughs — he doesn’t understand it but won’t let anyone explain it to him, either.

  • I’m almost starting to think that I could write at length about the importance of politicizing people, establishing and maintaining a political base, in comments and it would not matter.

    That’s because we don’t come here to listen to your off-topic rantings and attempts at self-promotion and blogjacking. WHy don’t you go infest some other blog where people might actually care? As soon as I see a post is written by you (and I look before I read) I automatically skip to the next post.

    And when you come in here and start lecturing to “you liberals” – dude – get the phuck over yourself.

  • We have a tradition in this country of paying attention to “seers” who are consistently wrong. And pundits really want to be viewed as seers. In reality they are much more like the poor ground hog which is wrong in its predictions of continuing cold weather something like 80% of the time. Perhaps our problem is that we, like the weather forecasters, should just do some reverse logic. I for one listen to Joe Lieberman or read David Brooks to find out what definitely isn’t true or accurate.

  • Libra @ 31. “Seriously… If America *were* a meritocracy, would we have a president we have now? On his own merit, I doubt he’d have reached college graduation, much less governship or presidency.”

    Luv it! Merit is for the little people who don’t have privilege or the advantages of beautiful minds, rubber ethics, criminal inclination, brown noses or other personality disorders.

  • Just a few things to offer by way of clarification:

    I sometimes forget that it’s not as easy to concretize things for everybody as it is for some. I didn’t mean to make anyone feel pointlessly harangued, like I was insisting that we have to do something that isn’t even clear and sounds either futile or like the same things we’ve already been doing. The abstract point of my comments was that we need to keep up with the right wing adding more politicized persons to be as politically successful, and that lack of this is probably part of why the media is so screwy, in addition to being the reason for a lot of other things that annoy us, but we usually don’t think through enough to understand the source of the problem (that is, with respect to a few different problems that annoy us, the source of the problem is in part less successful politicization than we have had in past decades). To concretize it more for people, we need to do things like think about Fox News Channel, and politicizing people like the Republicans have been able to with the abortion issue. Fox News is such a big problem, and what CNN is becoming is such a big problem, that it’s worthwhile for a lot of capable people to start thinking of how we can try to do something to counter them and to begin implementing it.

    I’m not one of those guys who has been burned by feminists insisting and aruing that I use the word ‘she’ or a gender-neutral pronoun like ‘s/he’ as the generic personal pronoun, so I’m not saying the stuff I was saying just for reasons like that. I’m about 80% convinced that feminists are right to insist on the generic personal pronoun thing, and at least, I think it’s graceful to try to use an alternative to ‘he’ at least a significant amount of the time. I don’t write stuff on this blog for personal reasons or anything like that, so please don’t discount anything I say thinking it might be something like that- I’m trying to give good advice.

    Steve at 29, I’m totally not trying to invite another flame war with you, and I’m totally over that, so I hope you realize that- but I just want to mention, in case people want to know, that I believe that a Lockeian democracy or parliamentary democracy organized along the lines of what America has now or several western European states is probably the most sophsticated and succesful form of political organization, or second to the most, kind of the “end of history” of political development. I wouldn’t change anything about America that I see as fundamental to the kind of political system we have. I would change districting to reduce gerrymandering and introduce proportional representation to reduce the influence of money on politics. I’m no expert on this and this is just tentatively what I think without researching it a lot. If I could suggest how America could change its Constitution and my suggestions were going to be considered for serious efforts to promote a Constitutional amendment, I would like a lot of time to think about it and consult. But in case anybody would like to know where I stand, my basic feeling is that Lockeian parliamentary democracy as its been practiced is one of the most just and has the potential to be the most just methods of institution of government the world has ever seen, and my opinion is that liberal really just have to think of how to improve it and how to make it work well.

  • Swan, Another one of “you liberals” (@32) is absolutely right; “nobody minds you, mister Benerdick”, because you don’t seem to mind anyone yourself.

    Most people here post maybe two-three times on any given thread and their postings are well-reasoned, often amusing and, usually, strictly on topic. You, OTOH, are like fungus — you grow unchecked (your posting @35 was *ninth* on the same thread. You do the math regarding proportions). Any fleeting thought — however trivial, and however not a propos of anything being discussed here — seems to you to be worth airing.

    Your musings are not legitimate conrtibutions; your attitude is that of a typical 3 yr old: “look at me, look at ME!!!”. It’s no wonder we ignore you; we’re adults. If you want to consort with adults, then you have to learn to live by their rules.

    You have your own blog. Why don’t you stay there? There, you can muse and clarify your musings to your heart’s content, without any the wiser or annoyed. Here, you have reverted right back to the Ugly Duckling status, I’m afraid.

  • Swan:

    Now that everyone else has had a say, I’m going to have to agree with them. There’s a theory to writing that most successful writers use, and that unsuccessful writers don’t understand (whicy is why they are unsuccessful):

    Less is more.

    One or two of your posts are usually close to the subject and halfway contribute to advancing the conversation. The rest is “white noise.” Were you to restrict yourself to no more than two posts on a thread, and take your time with what you write, rather than run a stream of consciousness, which is what most of them appear to be, you could change your reputation here in a week.

    And you do have your own blog. In the marketplace of ideas, if your ideas are as good as you believe them to be, others will find them and the proof of their validity will be the increase in visitors there.

    At least give it a thought, OK?

  • Swan, my concern still remains. You’re promoting Lockeian philosophy as almost sacred without addressing its shortfalls. Coming back to the concept of meritocracy, I repeat:

    1.) “WHO” makes the determination as to what defines merit?
    …………dare I answer with “Heckuva job, Brownie?”
    2.) “WHO” decides what need is immediate, and what need is of less import?
    ………..or the infamous “better armor for the guys in Baghdad, or more guys in Baghdad with the same junk armor?”

    Submitting something that’s inherently flawed, and then defending it by challenging others to fix it for you, might be deemed by some as a cop -out. Others may label it an absolute form of intellectual cowardice. Still others may view it as an attempt to smother reasoned thought with just so much anorexic, childish, political bovine excrement.

    I can presnt the “merit” construct in two distinct formats. First, we have Locke, and his arguments designed to establish an un-named societal authority. Meritocracy, under a Lockeian tutelage, becomes little more than cronyism.

    And yet, I can also presnt meritocracy’s foundational constructs and ideals from a Thoreau-esque POV, whereby the individual establishes merit-to-self via meeting the immediate needs of the self, and earning the merits inherently validated of/by/for that unique self—without the trappings of society (as demonstrated through his Walden experiment and his discourse on Civil Disobedience).

    IMHO, the latter model is the better, simply because it promotes the meritocratic base of self-value and self-survival without the hoops promoted by society—thus immediately demonstrating a severing of the “WHO” concerns identified in the above questions. Consider the following model:

    I can, with the aid of a few books on the topic, a modest supply of tools, adequate funding for materials, and a substantial piece of time, construct a complete house from the ground up. It can be a house that exceeds each and every zoning and code requirement ever devised that governs each aspect of how that house must be built. That house can be built in such a way as to be basically impervious to tornadoes, fire, flooding, hail, lightning, and secondary damages brought about by drought, excessive heat, excessive cold, and power interruption. I can, with little effort, raise enough food to feed my family throughout the year. With my academic experience, I can educate my children to a better degree than any K-12 institution currently in existence—public or private.

    In short—I can function, as an individual, a husband, a father, and a household head—without any input from Locke’s mandamus of societal interdependencies.

    Some people would view this as apathy, and squeal that I lack caring for the social order. It is not a lack of caring; it is, rather, a freedom from the addiction.

    Others may declare that I am demonstrating angst against society, based on some underlying traumatization; it is, instead, the joy of knowing that society itself is not of immediate need.

    And yet, I can be required to fund many things that I have no need for, via taxes. I can be forced to pay exhorbitant prices for things that I have a need for, because of all the middlemen who take their cut, even though they are not in any way connected to the production, distribution, or final marketing of that item or service. In short, I am required by society to pay for the “merit” and “immediate need that is not immediate” of many others. All, it seems, in the name of “a dead guy named Locke.”

    A final question now seems applicable. Is society, whether Lockeian-based or otherwise, so afraid of the lessons of Thoreau that it must codify, zonify, and otherwise legislate those lessons out of existence, offering instead the false securities of the social order, in exchange for the liberties of individual-centric merit?

  • Steve, I just don’t understand your comment.

    CB was just asking us, I thought, “These pundits suck- why is that?” and I thought that’s all he really meant, so as far as that goes, your comment and another comment or two like that seemed to be missing the point. I don’t think he really meant this post as some kind of discussion of some ideology called meritocracy (I’m guessing that’s what you and other are referring to? I think I’ve heard of this). Maybe I’m wrong but I’m not going to write Steve B. an email over it.

    As far as the Locke stuff goes, maybe you’re referring to ancillary parts of his theory that I don’t really know or have an opinion on. As far as I defend Locke, it’s just for the parts of his theory (and Hobbes’) I’ve already written about in comments on this blog, the Federalist papers stuff- dispersal of power away from a central authority and separation of powers and the like.
    I do really like Locke and I like him and Hobbes probably more than I like Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Marx, and that’s probably all I can say. I really think that you’re misconstruing me when you write at length about what I say about Locke and you’re not understanding that I’m just expressiing my own opinion from what I know and not advocating as an activist or trying to discourage or browbeat other people who are socially conscious and who ascribe to a different theory of social change that is inconsistent with Locke. I’m just not a communitarian to the extent that I believe that a parliamentary democracy like the Western nations practice today is necessarily inconsistent with a just society and its my own opinion that those constitutions do in fact hold the greatest hope for freedom and justice.

    Other people, I don’t understand why you’re attacking me. I just can’t phrase all of my ideas in a form calculated to stroke people’s egos. I feel like liberals have really fucked a lot of things up (like the Kerry campaign) and I feel alienated from a lot of liberals. I don’t know how I can grab people’s attention except by ‘speaking’ in an urgent tone. You just can’t expect everything in life to be packaged in a way that makes you feel special when you’re an adult. There are a lot of important things that when you fuck ’em up, that’s it, there’s no going back, no do-over. I feel like you people aren’t even acknowledging a lot of things that have gone really wrong. I think a lot of people are mentally chewing gum on these blogs all day long and meanwhile we’re not even bothering to learn the lessons we need to learn, because we’re so in denial. All we can do is to try to make things better, and sometimes that means acknowledging that you’ve got to do things better and a little differently than you did last time.

  • Other people, I don’t understand why you’re attacking me. I just can’t phrase all of my ideas in a form calculated to stroke people’s egos. — Swan, @39

    OK, my 3rdposting, breaking a self-imposed “rule” to *listen* more than I yammer. But it’sin response to your 10th…Proportionally,asniothing.

    I don’t want you to stroke my ego. I don’t want you to stroke *any* part of me; not only are you far too young (it would feel like incest), but you just don’t get my juices stirring.

    By the same token, I find it obscene that you should stroke yourself here, in public. Because that’s all your postings are, when all’s said and done. Go do it in private or, if you’re too much of an exhibitioninst, do it on your blog.

  • I relate this issue to the blogosphere, and why some bloggers get huge and others don’t.

    For example, you can’t tell me that Instacracker is a great blogger. Sure, he puts a lot of links out there, but simply posting “Indeed. Read the whole thing.” is not blogging. It’s a link farm. And when he does post longer stuff, it’s almost always wrong. (Atrios really isn’t in the same category, IMHO, because he’s been so right so often.)

    I’d add Firedoglake in there as well — yes, I realize it’s insanely popular. But the only reason it got so big, so fast, was because of who started it (Jane) rather than the quality of the content (although it is getting better as of late).

    Sure, there are great blogs that get noticed (this place, Glenn Greenwald, to name two), but there are so many great blogs that just wallow away because they’re not part of the “club” or have owners with day jobs and can’t update eleventy bajillion times a day or just, for whatever reason, can’t get the love they deserve.

    And punditry is the same way: One person gets noticed not based on the quality of his/her content, but on who they are, who they know, and how much crap they throw out there in the hopes some of it will stick. Meanwhile, another person is right but gets shut out because they did something to not be part of the club.

    It’s maddening.

    (Note: I in no way classify myself as a blogger deserving of more love. I kinda suck at it, but am okay with that. 🙂 ).

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