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.
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