Inspired by Things I Learned From Movies, I humbly present "Things I Learned From TV News". These concrete laws of Washington aren't written down in any textbook, and can only be discovered by spending outrageous amounts of time watching the news, especially 24 hour cable news. In the interest of educating our community, I thought I'd be so generous as to share these important facts:
- It is absolutely unreasonable to expect Congress to get anything done in the two months prior to an election.
- The most important measure of the quality of a Bill is the number of votes it gets from Republicans.
- The most important measure of the success of legislation is how it polls.
- There's nothing more to any Bill than its title. All the 600 pages attached to it are copy-pasted "ipsum lorem" designed to get the Congressional Pages some exercise.
- Regardless of complexity or factual basis, there are exactly two sides to every issue, and each is just as valid as the other.
- The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a perfect encapsulation of the entirety of the American economy, boiled down to one number.
- Someone making $350,000 in New York City is middle class.
- Anyone to the economic Left of Barack Obama is unquestionably either a crazed socialist or completely uneducated about economics, even if they're an extremely successful CEO or an economics professor at an Ivy League university.
- Just because you're a Nobel Laureate doesn't mean your opinion is suddenly more valid.
- Franklin Roosevelt prolonged the Great Depression by acting too liberally. Had he just waited it out for 3 years like Herbert Hoover did, everything would have been fine.
- It's never helpful to try to figure out why something catastrophic happened or who was at fault.
- The guys who got us into a mess are the best qualified to get us out of it. After all, they have experience.
- It's rude to ask someone to provide a source for a claim, no matter how outlandish. Flatly calling someone wrong is out of the question. It doesn't matter if the explanation given has glaring holes in it, or requires time-travel - they answered the question, move on.
- Filibusters, like bell bottoms, go in and out of fashion. While a total faux pas in 2002-2006, they came roaring back into style in 2007.
- All reports from the CBO and GAO should be read only for their bottom line (often helpfully included in the accompanying GOP press release). All that stuff about "preliminary" and "partial" and "unfinished legislation" is just CYA legalese and totally irrelevant.
- What the American people say they want in a poll is far less interesting than what the pundits think the American people want.
- When a celebrity dies, nothing else newsworthy happens for 2-3 days. Michael Jackson's death resulted in a temporary ceasefire in 3 wars and the suspension of any work in all world governments.
- When determining whether or not something was predictable, it's completely acceptable to ignore the people who correctly predicted it. After all, we all thought they were crazy wackos then - What's changed?
- Once signed by the President, massive spending bills take effect within seconds.
- If something is happening in front of a camera and the stock market is moving by statistically insignificant amounts, it's a sure sign that Wall Street approves/disapproves of what's happening.
- Lobbyists and interest groups and completely fair proxies for what their self-proclaimed constituents believe. If something is called "The American Council on Families", then obviously they speak for every American family.
- The American economy turns on a dime. It can go from "Great Depression" to "Roaring Twenties" in the space of a week. Conversely, when it goes from "Roaring Twenties" to "Great Depression", the cause was much more likely someone screwing up the day before, rather than underlying systemic factors.
- If a new disease appears and epidemiologists are keeping an eye on it, it's obviously either going to kill us all within days or become a complete non-issue within a week.
- No newsworthy event lasts longer than a week. If the Iranians didn't overthrow their leaders after a stolen election within days, they're obviously not going to, and we should look somewhere else. Similarly, all the consequences of Katrina were rectified within a month of hurricane season ending.
- Anonymous sources always tell the truth and are never motivated to spin things for their bosses' reasons or their own reasons.
- Blogs are always stealing content from the TV news and AP. Reporting which appears on blogs first and then migrated over to the mainstream news is more likely evidence of a time machine than evidence of blogs doing actual reporting.
- A television personality making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year is obviously completely qualified to discuss what average Americans like him think.
- A debate is won not by facts or logic, but by the pithiest sound bite. After all, if it's catchy and easy to remember, Occam's Razor obviously applies.