Slow learners

American voters are that special needs kid in elementary school who keeps making the same mistake over and over again. The kid is sweet but easily manipulated by the class bully to do what the bully wants done. The bully doesn't spend any time actually helping the special needs kid. He uses people.

Of course, the Republicans are the bully. But the special needs American electorate never learns that practically everything the Republican say is either an out and out lie or bullshit puffery.

This story alone should be enough to swing the election to any yellow dog. Imagine the controversy if Hillary Clinton had fibbed about being under fire in Bosnia. Or just remember. American swing voters are incapable of this. They would think that I know all I need to know about England; after all, I changed planes at Heathrow once.

It's not that foreign travel is essential. It's that they are puffing up refueling stops into visits and next door visits to a trip into Iraq.

The Obama campaign -- which has increasingly accused the McCain campaign of deliberately lying in ads and on the stump -- was quick to highlight that story, along with a news report that explored whether the McCain campaign has been sending out wildly inflated crowd estimates.

The McCain team has twice pointed to law enforcement as the source for those estimates -- but the same officials denied to Bloomberg News that they had provided the numbers cited by the Republican nominee's campaign.

"The McCain campaign said Gov. Palin opposed the bridge to nowhere, but now we know she supported it," said Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor in a statement. "They said she didn't seek earmarks, but now we know she hired a lobbyist to get millions in pork for her town and her state. They said she visited Iraq, but today we learned that she only stopped at the border. Americans are starting to wonder, is there anything the McCain campaign isn't lying about?"

For that slow kid, here it is in a nutshell: You can't believe anything a Republican politician says.

More real journalism

The Fix assesses the "McClellan mess" with the help of four Republican spinners and zero Democrats of any kind. Oh, and this poses "no immediate danger to [McCain's] presidential campaign"!

Too bad Cillizza didn't take the buyout.

Frankly, I'll take the liberal bloggers over this tripe any time.

Bitter truth

It's no accident that the elite media is combining with the elite candidates to tar the one non-elite candidate with the brush of elitism. It's the Rovian method.

Obama's in trouble over something he said, and the trouble doesn't have even the slightest bit of logic. He spoke the truth to his California contributors:

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Working class voters, in and out of Pennsylvania, who for some reason have gravitated to Hillary, are suffering. Read the income stats; they prove it. Yet, the Clinton campaign and the McCain campaign have jumped on any acknowledgement of this as elitist and condescending.

Huh? The millionaires in the race are telling us that it's condescending to express sympathy for the exact people that the consensus of late 20th century economic elites - including both of them - has beggared and left unrepresented.

A McCain spokesman, Tucker Bounds, makes this bullshit claim:

Barack Obama thinks he knows your hopes and fears better than you do. You can't be more out of touch than that.

No? How about not knowing their hopes and fears at all?

Hillary claimed that Pennsylvanians are persevering, as if Obama had said anything to the contrary. She calls his remarks "demeaning". Uh, how? Does she believe that it's wrong to identify people who need help? That it's condescending? That it's demeaning?

It's bullshit, intended to cripple the Democrats' effort, started by John Edwards, to recapture their natural class-based constituency. It's another thing that Hillary has done that's bad for whoever the Democratic nominee eventually is.

Sing this corrosion to me

Why work for a scoop when you can predict the future? I'll give Chris Cillizza this: At least, he matched up his predictions against reality and found them often wanting.

So, what's the harm in it? Here's how it works:

• Reporters, whose job is to report what has actually happened, give their take on the conventional wisdom on the press bus. There's some variation from one reporter to the next but not enough - that's why it's the conventional wisdom. Besides, they really want not to be blatantly wrong.
  
• Once the CW goes out under their names, they commit to it. To stay consistent, they then are much more likely to write stories that reinforce their predictions.

If you think this is nonsense, read Influence, by Robert Cialdini. Ch. 3, "Commitment and Consistency", should convince you. Here's the opening:

A study done by a pair of Canadian psychologists uncovered something fascinating about people at the racetrack: Just after placing a bet, they are much more confident of their horse's chances of winning than they are immediately before laying down that bet.

It should be just as unethical for a reporter to place bets as it was for Pete Rose.

Flinging the conventional wisdom

The Washington Post is only interested in the story line, not in helping the country rise above its junior high school cliques.