My electoral predictions are much better in the intermediate term, say from now to the 2012 election, than most people’s.
As I have complained many times before, no one ever checks out the predictions of expert predictors. So the “experts” consulted about what is going to happen can make all the totally screwed predictions they wish, so long as those predictions are popular at the time they are made.
ALL of our commentators get paid for CURRENT commentary.
The fact that “all the experts were wrong” is a repeated phrase makes not the slightest difference. Regardless of their track record, we keep the same “predictors.”
One reason I was able to foresee so many outcomes was my ignorance of the Latest Thing. When speaking of elections, for example, you are dealing with a result that will be the outcome of choices of real voters, and real voters have the same ignorance gap that I do.
Why is this information produced?
Columnists submit their columns and those columns are printed according to the newspapers’ needs RIGHT NOW. You predict whatever seems to be wise at this moment. Nobody will notice it a year from now.
So politicians, right and left, keep on the good side of Mommy Professor’s Press Corps until the election is breathing down their necks.
Senator William Fulbright was a favorite of the press corps for five and a half years out of his six-year term. But as his reelection came due, he was literally in his overalls out in Arkansas right up to the November polling.
A reporter asked Fulbright what one must do to be a Great Senator, flattering him by reminding him that he was a favorite Great Senator to the press corps as a solid liberal five and a half out of each six years.
Clearly remembering the media’s attitude to the other six months, Fulbright replied, “First, you’ve got to be a Senator.”
Back about 1960 it was a standard brag on the part of the sophisticated that “I never watch television.”
Being culturally out of touch with the Lowah Classes was always highly fashionable among the self-styled Intellectuals who, at the same time, loudly proclaimed their Solidarity With the Working class.
Then a politician said he had never heard of Elvis. This was about 1960! It was simply what would later be known as an Inside the Beltway comment, showing that a conservative politico fit in among the “I don’t watch television as the peasants do” Uppah Clahss.
It backfired big time. You’ve heard of “I was country when country wasn’t cool.” This was Elvis when Elvis wasn’t cool. He wasn’t really cool with the “I don’t watch television” crowd until he died.
But even back then, people smelled something wrong with an elected representative who was so out of touch he had never heard of Elvis.
He ended up writing a letter to young Elvis.
#1 by Dave on 07/10/2011 - 11:32 am
These conceits of Establishment politicians are part of a syndrome of enslavement.
The arrogant civil rights concessions made by our white people were part of a syndrome of enslavement.
What kind of a people allow themselves to be enslaved?
What kind?
#2 by BGLass on 07/10/2011 - 1:28 pm
What kind?
a) people terrorized by the age of five on a steady diet of being sinners, t.v. tsunami du jour, bio-terror, news of impossible economy, etc.
b) people terrified of how to “make it” in the bare bones way of just eating, since the economy is so micro-managed by self-described elites on t.v. juggling interest rates, and “stimulating money” and so on. This is verbatim the narrative on t.v. during the Carter “stagflation” years, the exact script the 70s children were raised on also; that, or the food rations and having to plant your “victory” garden to eat during the wwII, etc., always the fear of not eating (forget the more elevated ideas in spiritual life that people used to more often pursue).
c) people in various forms of boot camps where they “strip them down” to “build them back up,” whether churches or schools or army or psychotherapies that “re-birth” them and build whole new personalities.
d) the ones who make it past that, and “sellout” in arrogance, having been taught by various institutions that they have the only true god, and therefore are above others, and must minister to them, and owe them, and the others are not as lucky, etc… whether a church god or a pc god, or whatever, they ‘are the lucky ones who got the true message,’ and never suspect this is just institutionalizing arrogance, which used to be the sin of pride
e) if they aren’t arrogant, maybe they are greedy, or gluttonous or something else, which works as well.
did i miss anyone? arrogance or fear seem mostly the kind– underlying fear may be a lack of faith that it all somehow matters. so, lack of faith… underlying greed is often arrogance, needing to be the big “winner,” the one everyone looks to, etc…
yuck.