One thing I can guarantee you: if there's a massive turnout and Bush gets his ass kicked, all the pundits will be saying, "Gee, we
all thought it was going to be a close election.
Nobody guessed this would happen!"
Bullshit. Just like they all said "everybody" thought there were WMD in Iraq. Blatantly untrue. Scott Ritter, among others, was yelling at the top of his lungs that Saddam had been disarmed years ago.
These guys have the system cooked so that they're never held accountable, whether they're right or wrong. NY Times gets the WMD story wrong? Well, we all thought blah-blah-blah....Washington Post wakes up one morning to find Bush vulnerable? Gee, we all thought he was a lock to win re-election. All of us! All the pasty little white rich guys!
I am so sick of watching Chris Mathews and Pat Buchanan and Joe Scarborough and that guy who looks like a dentist on CNN...Aaron Brown...keep shilling the line that this election is a dead heat. Any honest person looking at the huge increase in registered voters and increased voter turnout would have to say that Bush is a goner. Instead, they keep quoting polls whose methadology is totally antiquated, leaving out massive numbers of new voters, concentrating only on people who've voted in previous elections. Yeah, Bush looks almost tied if you look at the 2000 election. But this year, as we can all feel, he's gonna get slammed.
If it's an honest election.
And that's what they should be concentrating on: the attempts to steal another election. That's the big story. Instead, they keep spinning horse race numbers and electoral strategies. Saying BUSH HAS THE MOMENTUM!!!!!!
But here's my question: will any of these supposed experts (isn't that why they're on TV, 'cause they're supposed to know something?) be held to account when their crystal balls turn out to be useless? Will we still have to listen to Pat Buchanan spew nonsense, even after he's been proven wrong again? Will Charlie Rose get to go on kissing the ring of whoever's in power, nodding his head, pretending to be thoughtful? Does David Remnick at the New Yorker get to act like he was never seduced by NeoCon fantasies of American Empire? Now all these guys are shaking their heads. But where were these fuckers when a few incisive questions could have stopped the war in Iraq? They were embedded in the conventional wisdom, where they always are.
The punditocracy seems immune to results. Morton Kondracke gets to keep blowing spittle all over the TV screen even though he's never done anything but spout whatever the latest line of the status quo is. Week after week after week we get the same tired faces reassuring us that the powers that be know what they're doing. Have you noticed that they're 99% white men making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year? What is that supposed to be? A coincidence?!
This is what the conventional wisdom boils down to: whatever the professional corporate class wants you to think.
Why shouldn't there be people on TV with opinions who make less than $50, 000 a year? We are a majority, after all.
I can't stand seeing people get off the hook just because they don't have the guts to ever say anything outside of what is conventionally accepted as correct. For a pundit who wants to have a career pontificating, toeing the party line is far more important than having anything intelligent to add to the national discussion. 'Cause you're never wrong if everybody's wrong. Then, it was just "a surprise!" It drives me nuts to hear them say that "everybody" thought Saddam had WMD. It drives me nuts to hear them say that "everybody" rallied around president Bush after 9-11. That "everyone agrees" this election is so damn close. That "we all" want government to stay out of health care. It just goes to show you that they don't recognize our existence. We're right on all these things - but it doesn't matter, because we're "outside the mainstream."
Well, the "mainstream" may be about to become something very different than it has been for the last 25 years. Will we get a punditocracy that reflects this new mainstream, or will the corporate media keep trotting out the same idiots to spew the company line until they're completely and totally irrelevant?
Joe Scarsbourough should be out of a job. Ditto Fred Barnes. Brit Hume. Morton Fucking Kondracke. Newt Gingrich!!!?!!!!!!! You know who these guys are. The list is a mile long. Who annointed these clowns? GE? Disney? Viacom? Fuck them.
The thing the corporate world hates above all else, the one sin they cannot forgive, is losing - whether it's an election, a war, or the race for ratings. So when they give themselves a make-over after the ass-whupping they're about to take in this election, when they re-calibrate their image to reflect the "new reality," let's force them to at least acknowledge our existence. Otherwise, let's just turn the damn thing off.
We've got our own media now.