The delusion is that the American people are stupid.

I easily could have written “hundreds of pundits” instead of three, but these three, CNN’s Michael Smerconish, often said to be the most fair and objective of CNN’s talking heads, which tells you something, the New York Times’ David Brooks, once an arrogant, pseudo-intellectual neocon conservative and now a fully indoctrinated Stockholm Syndrome progressive rationalizer, and Times guest Trump-basher Roger Rosenblatt, a writer of some note.

I read about Smerconish last night, and his assertion irritated me the most of all. His theory about why Harris lost and Trump won was based on what he calls “The Boomerang Effect,” “I don’t want it all distilled into this one sound bite or conclusion, but at the top of my list, I’ll say it that way … It’s like a parenting lesson. The more that you tell people what they can’t do, what’s intolerable, you must not do this, you should not do this, the more they’re going to rebel,” Smerconish said. “Maybe they would have ultimately come to their own conclusion and rejected Donald Trump. I don’t know. But I think that the constant browbeating and the combination of the media influence and the four indictments, one conviction, and showing that god-awful joke from Madison Square Garden a week in advance of the election on a loop — and I felt it, and I said it.” He went on, “I can’t sit here, Aiden, telling you, well, this is the way I called the election, but I definitely felt the potential for a boomerang effect, and I think that came true. I really do.”

Translation: “The American people are like children, and we superior intellects in the news media must lead them in such a way that the poor, ignorant, foolish dears think they are coming to their own conclusions.”

I was immediately reminded of song from the musical “The Fantastiks,” in which two father muse about the complexities of parenting. It’s called “Don’t Say No.” Sample lyrics:

“Why did the kids put beans in their ears?
No one can hear with beans in their ears.
After a while the reason appears.
They did it cause we said no.”

It never occurred to Smerconish, or any of the myriad other pundits who bias has made so stupid that they are useless, that the public, or enough of them to prove Abe right again, voted after correctly evaluating the issues, the choices offered to them and alternative courses for the nation going forward. No, they only voted for Trump because the Axis propaganda was too aggressive. After all, voting for Hitler is like putting beans in your ears.

Next up we have David Brooks. I’m sick of reading Brooks, who masks a simplistic view of politics with psychobabble that some might take and complex analysis. I have to give Ann Althouse a pointer for flagging his column titled ““Why We Got It So Wrong.” Ann writes, “If you were “so wrong” before, why would I look to you for right answers now?” Heh. She says she just skimmed it. I read the whole thing.

Brooks’s opening tells us everything we need to know: he also thinks Americans are simple-minded.(The numbering is mine):

Let me ask you a few questions:

1. If the Democrats nominated a woman to run for president, would you expect her to do better among female voters than the guy who ran in her place four years before?

2. If the Democrats nominated a Black woman to run for president, would you expect her to do better among Black voters than the white candidate who ran in her place four years before?

3. If the Republicans nominated a guy who ran on mass deportation and consistently said horrible things about Latino immigrants, would you expect him to do worse among Latino voters over time?

4. If the Democrats nominated a vibrant Black woman who was the subject of a million brat memes, would you expect her to do better among young voters than the old white guy who ran before her?

If you said yes to any of these questions, as I would have a month ago, you have some major rethinking to do, because all of these expectations were wrong.

Yes, you pompous ass, because all of those questions would only be answered “yes” by someone so simplistic that they would ignore all of the other, more determinative factors in play. My answers:

1. No, because the guy who was running in her place had the advantage of a pandemic lockdown that both allowed him to hide his advancing dementia and crippled his opponent’s economy. She was running after participating in the four year disaster the victor in that race presided over, and many women voters are not so foolish as to favor someone otherwise unimpressive just because of her ovaries, unlike the President who chose that woman as his DEI Vice-President.

2. No, not if the woman gave the black voters no clearly articulated reason to vote for her other than her skin color.

3. No, because Trump didn’t say horrible things about immigrants, only sufficiently fair ans true things about illegal immigrants, whom Hispanic-Americans, being good, law abiding citizens like any other Americans, can see as the undesirable law-breakers they are.

4. No, because the Democrats didn’t nominate a “vibrant black woman,” they nominated a weak, insecure political hack who couldn’t or wouldn’t answer simple questions about her true beliefs and positions without slipping into a Gabby Johnson impression. (“Rarrit!”)

Brooks makes it clear that he assumed that the answers to all of those questions was “Yes” because bias has made him so stupid that he is incapable of competent political analysis.

Finally, we have Roger Rosenblatt in “How to Be a Writer in the Second Age of Trump,” which he begins,

In my experience, good writing requires four things: precision of language, the freedom to say anything, respect and — perhaps most important — love. The responsibilities of the writer today are no different from those of any writer in any age. But the presence, character and now considerable power of President-elect Trump make the work of fulfilling those responsibilities all the more difficult and urgent.

Precision, freedom, respect and love: These qualities are sorely missing in Mr. Trump and his vision for our country. His “Make America Great Again” slogan, for instance, is deliberately imprecise. What does “great” mean, anyway? Richer? More powerful? How about more compassionate? I doubt it.

Freedom? He has indicated outright contempt for the democratic system and proposed rolling back freedoms of all kinds, from a woman’s freedom to make decisions about her body to an immigrant’s freedom to pursue the American dream. Respect? His racial insults speak for themselves. Love? Yeah, right. The only love he shows is for himself.

With a character like Mr. Trump in charge of our country, it is all the more important that we, as citizens, demonstrate these qualities ourselves — and that we, as writers, exhibit them in our work.But how to do it?

Again, if that’s an example of Rosenblatt’s depth of analysis, it is beneath the level of millions of America’s voters, which he, like Brooks and Smerconish, clearly view as morons. How to write? Maybe he should start by not lying to his readers. It isn’t Trump who has shown contempt for our system, but his opponents, who want to junk the Electoral College, pack the Supreme Court, censor “hate speech” and “misinformation” (that is, opinions that they disagree with), crush individualism and bypass democratic processes when it becomes advantageous to do so, as when, as a  wild hypothetical, they have been pretending that a puppet President was fully functioning mentally until he started speaking in tongues during a Presidential debate. Trump didn’t claim to want to “roll back” any abortion rights beyond what the Supreme Court already. ruled, and the right in question is not “to make decisions about a woman’s own body, but the extent that she should be able to make a decision to end the life of another individual’s body. There are no threats to any immigrant’s aspirations, only legitimate and correct opposition to illegal immigrants stealing  the opportunities this country offers law abiding citizens.

And what “racial insults”? On what basis does the writer conclude that “he only love he shows is for himself,” other than it is a popular Axis narrative?

Among the qualities writer must display in their writing is honesty and respect for their readers. Rosenblatt, like Smerconish and Brooks, thinks they are stupid, and easy to fool.