“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
Today’s “pundits is going a left turn from the “norm” and give thanks and high praise to Alex Pareene chief “warrior” of the War Room at Salon for his compilation of the 30 worst Pundits of the MSM. I don’t necessarily agree with the order of his picks but I do like his selections giving true meaning to “punting”
Your regular “Pundits” will return tomorrow.
I give you the Top Ten of the Hack Thirty with links to the rest of the worst.
The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen has been a columnist since 1976. He’s good friends with Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn. He works one day a week. At a certain point, in that exceptionally privileged and cushy position, his brain disintegrated. He’s not so much an old liberal who grew conservative as he is a simplistic old hack who believes his common prejudices to be politically incorrect truths and his Beltway conventional wisdom to be bracing political insight.
I thought we were all done talking about
former Bob Dole speechwriterformer ABC News political director Mark Halperin, whose star had seemed to stop rising toward the end of the Bush years — but then he attached himself, leechlike, to reporter John Heilemann, to co-write “Game Change,” a lengthy catalog of the 2008 presidential campaign’s moments of least import.Halperin used to write this thing called the Note, which was an e-mail newsletter that various Washingtonians whom Halperin referred to as “The Gang of 500” used to read to find out what they themselves thought about the news of the day. It was written as privileged wisdom from Beltway insiders — cryptic references, obscure jokes, endless name-dropping, constant inexplicable plugs for the Palm restaurant — when it was in fact just “whatever a professional political operative recently told Mark Halperin, along with links to political stories in the major papers.”
Thomas Friedman is an environmentalist, now. When he’s not jetting around the world on the literally unlimited expense account his money-bleeding newspaper provides him with pondering KFC billboards he spots outside the windows of gleaming office towers in Delhi — or when he’s not lounging beside the pool at his absurd home — the [second-most-influential business thinker in the country] is worrying about carbon emissions. Which is, I freely admit, a nice change of pace from back when he was telling the world that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would lead to a glorious new dawn of freedom/democracy/whiskey/iPods/Old Navy in the Middle East as a whole.
The dean of the Washington Press Corps, David Broder has also been What’s Wrong With the Washington Press Corp ever since he stepped off the campaign bus and began applying his wisdom toward the great problems plaguing the country.
He has a simplistic understanding of politics and no understanding of the electorate except as an abstract concept. His hatred of partisanship is actually a thinly veiled disdain for popular rule itself. He defines extremism as principled adherence to any sort of ideology. When he wants to understand what The Voters are thinking, he asks a think tank academic. Despite his disdain for the fiery populists that the idiot voters repeatedly send to our sadly broken Congress, he remains convinced that The American People are a wise and noble breed who long for sensible, bipartisan moderation in all things.
While the opinions of publisher/pundit Mort Zuckerman tend to be rather banal, New Republic owner Marty Peretz uses the power of the press to let the world know what he really thinks about Muslims and Arabs. (He doesn’t think much of them.) At least Zuckerman is courteous enough to let professionals look over his work before it’s published. Because Peretz fancies himself both the nation’s foremost authority on Middle Eastern affairs and a scintillating writer, he has named himself editor in chief of the magazine, and his work goes up before a grown-up can look it over.
In the growing pantheon of “Bush speechwriters hired as columnists,” Marc Thiessen’s moral depravity set him apart. The man wrote a book about how the Bush administration was right to use torture. In addition to being a morally unsupportable argument, the book was full of falsehoods and misinformation. For this, instead of being shunned by polite society, Thiessen is treated as just a serious man on one side of a contentious issue.
But while the worst thing about Thiessen as a person is his unequivocal support for torture, the worst thing about hiring him to pen an Op-Ed column is that he’s a boring, predictable columnist. The man got famous for arguing that plainly illegal treatment of prisoners is in fact both legal and necessary, and then he writes columns about how earmarks are bad. It’s like telling Torquemada to film a TV pilot and he comes back with a three-camera sitcom about a lovable fat guy dealing with family life. Seriously, his first Post column was about how Olympic hockey should go back to being all-amateur.
Jonah Goldberg writes the political column equivalent of weekly fart jokes, but longs to be taken seriously as a public intellectual. He has a job solely because his repellent mother took credit for inspiring Linda Tripp to secretly record private conversations with Monica Lewinsky. In 1998, in the midst of a terribly boring career producing PBS documentaries and local television, young Jonah somehow managed to get a plum gig at the National Review, the leading journal of conservative opinion.
Oh, MoDo. Maybe there are still people who thrill to her dated pop culture references and tiresome “wicked” nicknames for politicians. Maybe somewhere there’s a reader who still finds it illuminating to examine elections as battles between effeminate girly Democrats and straight-shooting Republican cavemen. Maybe someone’s glad that the most prominent female political columnist in the nation tends to consider every powerful female politician a castrating bitch.
Laura Ingraham is just awfulness personified. Pointless, talentless, a second-rate Ann Coulter without the wit. Her day in the sun is long gone, her novelty has evaporated, and yet still she remains. Old shameless right-wing TV stars never die. They just move into talk radio and release horrible books.
Peggy Noonan might be the single funniest Op-Ed writer currently working, and for that I do, honestly, respect her. Her red wine-and-laudanum-inspired tales of wandering the Upper East Side in search of some clue to the Contemporary American Mood, her ability to wring a column out of the phenomenon of seeing a Mexican, her sentence fragments and Golden Books prose — all of this makes for a reliably entertaining Friday read. It’s certainly much more fun than a Krauthammer column.
11. George Will
12. John Find
13. Roger Simon
14. David Ignatius
15. Mort Zuckerman
16. Michale Borone
17. Bill Kristol
18. Tina Brown
19. Joe Klein
20. Howard Fineman
21. S. E. Cupp
22. Tucker Carlson
23. Howard Kurtz
24. Dana Milbank
25. Mickey Kaus
26. Jeffrey Goldberg
27. Pat Cadell
28. Andrew Malcolm
29. Matt Bai (heh, this one is for you, ek)
30. David Brooks
3 comments
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And I’m pleased that he’s almost an afterthought.
Matt Bai has never said anything I considered insightful. He’s just a conservative who because Reagan was President while he grew up considers him the Bestest One Ever!