Organic saffron over the flavor of bullshit

Most of our big media pundits are worse than useless.  They are actively contributing to the decay of America into banana Republicanism.

They are lazy- Reading the commentary from Sullivan and Brooks and Klein and others, aside from being completely wrong, what stood out to me was how simply predictable it was, regurgitating the coalescing villager CW about Ryan: The plan is bold! It is serious! It took courage! It re-frames the debate! The ball is in Obama’s court! Very wonky! It is a game-changer! Did I mention it is serious? The math demands it! We need to have shared sacrifice! This puts us on the right course! It’s serious and bold!

Read any one of their pieces the last couple of days, and it was like conventional wisdom/villager mad libs. Actually reading the bill, realizing it isn’t serious, it isn’t bold, that it won’t set us on the right path because it gives away as much in taxes as it cuts from the needy, realizing the only people sacrificing are the poor while the well-off are lavished with trillions in tax cuts- well, doing that and actually thinking, like Bruce Bartlett, James Fallows, Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, and others managed to do, that would be just way too much work. Better to roll with the conventional wisdom, churn out a load of bullshit, and when confronted by people that you are wrong, have a hissy fit about the hard left, whine about being picked on and someone using four letter words and capital letters, and dig in. Instead of absorbing what people are telling you, link to the National Review and McMegan, and don’t even bother to figure out basic math such as 22-18. There is a word for this behavior- it is lazy. These guys are on autopilot, have their narrative, and they are sticking to it.

Even Fox notices

Silence Do-Good may scoff, but there are qualitative and quantitative differences between lunatic loons on the left and frothing wingnuts on the right. To name one, gun ownership...

I'd guess that Shepard Smith is looking to make a career move.

(h/t Philosoraptor, linking to Andrew Sullivan, embedding Talking Points Memo)

Flush the conservative movement

Andrew Sullivan still owes a lifetime of penance for enabling the Bushists, but this take-down of McCain's Hail Mary helps keep him out of neocon hell:

The Palin pick says much more about McCain than it does about Palin (all it says about her is that she didn't have the good sense to turn it down). What it says about McCain is that he is more interested in politics than policy, more interested in campaigning than governing, tactical when he should be strategic, and reckless when he should be considered.

He is as big a gamble as president as Palin is as vice-president. This decision was about gut, about politics, about cynicism, and about vanity. It's Bushism metastasized.

Nice to know that Sullivan's eyes are now open enough to see what's right in front of him. Seven years after, he has a clear-eyed view of the Bushists.

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons. Click for details.

Standards of credibility

It's no surprise that I think our national conversation is thoroughly messed up. It's dominated by bullshit and rampant insiderism. No opinion or analysis can be so vapid (think Cokie Roberts) or so wrong (for example, the whole industry of Iraq cheerleaders) that it lowers the credibility of any pundit. Andrew Sullivan is only the most recent exemplar.

At least - and it is a small virtue - Sullivan admitted error. The usual wingnut tactic, adopted as well by Karl Rove and the Bushists, is never to admit error. Everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Duhbya himself show by their behavior that they would rather be loudly, biliously wrong than to risk inconsistency with past errors and thus to risk learning. Learning is very dangerous to the conservative world view, since that view mostly consists of speaking from prejudice and fixing the facts around it to any degree necessary.

Even so, networks and talk show hosts continue to invite proven idiots to comment without the slightest acknowledgement that what they say today has little or no chance to be both insightful and true, based on past experience. Hell, Bill Bennett and Peter Beinart are in the Rolodexes already, why not take the lazy way and call them? Who needs a real anti-war liberal who actually got Iraq right in real time? With the guys we've had on before, we're getting known quantities who know the politesse of network talk. Even if the people who pay attention know that the known quantities often spout utterly specious useless crap.

Silent penance in some abbey for failed pundits

Just turned off Bill Maher's panel discussion. Is there anything rational about a media culture in which Andrew Sullivan can admit to having finally accepted the scientific consensus on global warming and then belabor Hillary Clinton for not having a strong enough plan to cope with it?

Really, can we at least agree to send the psychopathically certain - and wrong - off to silent penance in some abbey for failed pundits?

Sullivan wouldn't even admit to having been wrong. Instead, he made some excuse about now having the scientific evidence, while slamming the standards of truth of liberals. What a piece of work!