It is hard to overstate how ignorant and wrong Bletway pundits are about everything, and how barren and corrupt inside-Washington conventional wisdom is.
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The Beltway pundit class and the premises which generate conventional Washington wisdom are corrupt their core and always wrong. . . . They operate from a set of completely unexamined, empty premises that reflect their own character and belief system, but nobody else's.(emphasis in original)
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[The punditocracy] believe[s] in nothing. . . .
Not only do they believe in nothing, but they think that a Belief in Nothing is a mark of sophistication and wisdom.
This indictment, which should be read by editors and TV executives around the country, if only to give them notice of their utter lack of relevance for the near future, includes examples that should keep any thinking person from reading or listening to anyone claiming to be knowledgeable about politics.
I believe, with all sincerity, that columnists, television commentators, all the flapping-lips, bloviating-bobble-headed gasbags who have wasted our time and our oxygen convincing us how stupid we all are only to be proven wrong again and again, and finally, like all the rest of the political class (to which they cling like remora), getting a good smack-down in Tuesday should take a cue from Bob Cesca and shut the fuck up. Because you have been wrong, not just consistently but spectacularly wrong, and because the times are changing now, and you belong to an age that, as of January 1, 2007, will be obsolete, please be silent, and allow grown-ups not only to run the country, but to talk about how they are doing it.
UPDATE: Courtesy of Fire Dog Lake, in an essay that covers much the same territory, although a bit more coherently, I came across this piece from Rolling Stone. Besides being hysterically funny, I would like to include some of Taibbi's observations on what Glenn Greenwald has called the inside-the-Beltway consensus:
All politics has to be contained within the parameters of that who's winning narrative.
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What the Congress actually does, how it actually spends its money, what happens in its committees - it's all irrelevant, exdept insofar as that activity bears on the next presidential race.
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Our national political press is narrowly focused, schooled in inch-deep analysis, and completely results-obsessed.
All of this not only has to change, but I believe will change as the depth and breadth of the public's dissatisfaction with our current political culture becomes clear. Of course, the blogs are helping, as is (of all things) The Daily Show. As real analysis replaces the garbage spewed by talk-radio, and the narcissism of self-important blow-hards like Broder and E. J. Dionne, we may actually see substantive analysis return to America.
We shall see.
UPDATE II: Part of envisioning and practicing a new discourse means eschewing the horse-race mentality that sees each election as only a precursor to the next election, with substantive policy questions secondary to the popularity contest of elections. To that end, while I value much of the advice in this piece over at MyDD.com, it still deals with the horse race. I am more interested in the way the incoming Congress will actually legislate, oversee the Executive, and conduct its business according to rules than I am in whether Hillary or Al or John is or will be out in front. There is much work to be done to prove that the responsibility vested in the Democratic Party is earned. While I understand the necessity of getting oneself going as the primary season gets closer, we also have a duty to make sure the Democrats actually in office are doing what they were elected to do; and this is all the more important as many of those who will be seeking the Presidency will be sitting in the 110th Congress. That is why the horserace must wait for the humdrum business of governing for a little while.
