Kristol Klear 0
Dick Polman is one of my favorite political analysts. He’s perceptive and fact-based, writes well, and has a sense of humor.
His blog post today is a potpourri of comments about the election and its aftermath; it is well worth five minutes.
The best part, though, is this, occuring about 2/3rds of the way down the page:
The neoconservative talking head and columnist is always worth hearing and reading, if only so that we can safely conclude the opposite of whatever he is predicting. For instance, he said during the runup to ’08 that “Fred Thompson knows what he’s doing, and he will be formidable,” which meant, of course, that Thompson didn’t have a clue and was destined to be toast.
This summer, Kristol envisioned a GOP ticket of “McCain-Lieberman” or “McCain-Ridge,” which meant that we could safely conclude that neither guy had a prayer of being picked.
Last year, he predicted that voters would “recoil” from the prospect of electing a Democratic president and Democratic Congress, thereby alerting us that ’08 would be a good Democratic year.
Last year, he also predicted that George W. Bush would go down in history as a successful president, in part because he would leave behind “a strong economy,” which meant, of course, that Bush would play out his string with the economy in free fall and the conservative deregulation credo in disrepute.
And his sunny 2005 economic prediction – “Last week the Bush Administration’s second-term bear market bottomed out” – was sufficient proof that the worst second-term bear market was still to come.
Obama supporters can only hope that Kristol will soon insist, in his New York Times column, that the new president will prove to be an unmitigated disaster. Such a prediction may well trigger further dancing in the streets.
I wish I could get established as a right-wing pundit; I’d love to be in a line of work where being consistently and persistently wrong just seems to cement job security.
Never happen, though. I’m not a very good liar.
