Comparative Reality

I need to stop talking about politics for a while. It just annoys me. But sometimes I just can't resist, and I have a question: Why the hell are conservative pundits still getting work?

Millions of people losing their jobs, and yet there's still a bunch of idiots who receive regular paychecks, for no reason that I can discern.

Take Robert J. Samuelson, of the Washington Post. I'm no economist, but I've read far too many of his columns...actually, I could stop there, and you could pity me for that. But, continuing...I've read far too many of his columns, and then immediately wondered what the damned hell he's talking about. He once claimed that economists just cannot figure out why people would pay more for an original painting than they would for a reproduction.

No, really, he did. Which means that either he only knows the stupidest economists on Earth, or else he's a complete, blithering idiot. Or both. But definitely the latter.

I took ONE course in econ in college, but I do remember something about "supply" and "demand," and how they're related in some way.

(That column, by the way, is one of the reasons why I finally stopped reading Newsweek.)

Then there's Ben Stein. If I know more than economics than Robert Samuelson, then a concussed gerbil knows more about economics than Ben Stein. The man has done one thing well in his life, and that involved about, what? A minute of screen time?

The man has been wrong, just massively wrong in his economic predictions. Obviously, howlingly wrong, with a failure rate that would've had anyone fired from a normal job many, many years ago, and utterly and completely blacklisted.

Then, of course, you have someone like Bill Kristol. He doesn't even rise to the level of "concussed gerbil." If you picked any policy matter and flipped a coin, you'd have a success rate at least 50% greater than his. And yet, even after he gets fired, he's hired again in a matter of hours. Even though basing every decision on a coin toss would be far, far better than taking his advice, he still has a job.

Either these people know that they're lying, in which case they're evil, mendacious bastards, or they don't know, in which case they're criminally stupid.

Yes, I know: This stuff has been hashed over again and again. But why do we still need to hear from them? When the Republicans were in power, we were told that of course we needed to hear from the Conservative viewpoint! And now that they're out of power, of course we need to hear from them!

All of which might lead one to think that the bad old Liberal Media is doing a really bad job of being even remotely liberal. But since people with a vested interest in having us believe that that's true case keep telling us that it's true, then, obviously, it must be true.

And Bill Kristol is bound to be right about something, someday.