If you want to establish yourself as an expert in a field, be consistently wrong. If you know what you’re talking about, have coherent ideas about how the world works and those ideas are often borne out (nobody gets them all right), you’re relegated to fringe blogs. From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:
How do we account for the fact that the pundits and media outlets who have been wrong about everything are still considered reliably “mainstream” – and still get to determine the parameters of allowable debate?
Let’s take the most egregious case imaginable – Bill Kristol. Here is someone who has been wrong about absolutely everything for as long as anyone can remember. On the foreign policy front, he wasn’t just on the wrong side of the barricades, he was wrong about the outcomes of our disastrous interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Iraq would be a “two month” war, and in Afghanistan we would be welcomed as “liberators” (just like in Iraq!). “If we prevail in Libya,” he averred, “the victory will be America’s.” We did indeed succeed in overthrowing Gaddafi: and shortly afterwards, a US ambassador was dead and terrorists were cavorting in the swimming pool of our former embassy.
When it comes to the domestic front, his record is even more dismal: he predicted Mitt Romney would be a strong GOP candidate for President, he said Barack Obama wouldn’t beat Hillary in a single primary, and he continually presaged the downfall of Donald Trump in the Republican primaries.
It’s become something of a standing joke that the “Kristol ball” is a nearly infallible indicator of what isn’t going to happen. And yet he’s all over the media – and personally profiting from his utter wrongness. In 2009, he received the Bradley Prize for outstanding conservative thinkers, taking home $250,000.
Yes, the neocons got it wrong, but they weren’t alone: before Dan Drezner was a Washington Post columnist who is the perfect weathervane by which to chart the prevailing winds in Washington, the Fletcher School professor of international relations was a prolific blogger who stated his reasons for supporting the invasion of Iraq here. My favorite: “[A] successful invasion not only eliminates the Iraqi threat, but over the long run it reduces the Arab resentment that feeds Al-Qaeda.”
Since we live in Bizarro World, where up is down, black is white, an analyst who was completely wrong about the most important foreign policy issue of the new millennium is naturally going to be rewarded with a column in a major newspaper.
And it wasn’t just the neocons and their “centrist” enablers who were the wrong-way drivers of the “Iraq will be a cakewalk” narrative. Who can forget liberal pundit Chris Matthews proclaiming “We’re all neocons now!”? Howard Fineman told us “We had controversial wars that divided the country. This war united the country and brought the military back.” And then there was New York Times reporter David Carr declaring: “Now liberal commentators must address the victory at hand and confront an ascendant conservative juggernaut that asserts United States might can set the world right.”
To continue reading: Toldja So: Does Being Right Count Anymore?
