Jamelle Bouie's pundit malpractice!

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2024

But also, MVP Krugman's: It's very hard to avoid being angry at pundit malpractice like this.

More precisely, at what looks to be the latest case of scripted pundit malpractice. We've been commenting on such comment-by-the-numbers punditry going all the way back to the days when the standard bogus pundit recitations were aimed at Candidate Gore.

Let it be said that we agree with where Kevin Drum ended up in yesterday's post. The post appeared beneath this accurate headline:

Voters need to be more scared of Donald Trump

We agree with all those words. More on that post below.

For now, here's Jamelle Bouie, a very bright person, commenting by the numbers on the sayings of Donald J. Trump. Weirdly familiar headline included, the malpractice looks like this:

Trump Is Losing It

[...]

It is not just that Trump is ignorant on [NATO] and other vital questions; it is that he is incoherent.

Consider his remarks at a recent gathering of the National Rifle Association in Harrisburg, Pa. “We have to win in November, or we’re not going to have Pennsylvania. They’ll change the name. They’re going to change the name of Pennsylvania,” Trump said.

Who, exactly, is going to change the name of Pennsylvania? And to what? I don’t know. I doubt Trump does either.

Thus spake the New York Times columnist. In fact, thus spake the second New York Timers columnist! One day earlier, Paul Krugman had listed some of Joe Biden's legislative accomplishments, and then he'd offered this:

KRUGMAN (2/12/24): If you ask me, these achievements say a lot more about Biden’s capacity than his occasional verbal slips.

And what about his opponent, who is only four years younger? Maybe some people are impressed by the fact that Trump talks loud and mean. But what about what he’s actually saying in his speeches? They’re frequently rambling word salads, full of bizarre claims like his assertion on Friday that if he loses in November, “they’re going to change the name of Pennsylvania.”

Not to mention confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi and mistaking E. Jean Carroll for one of his ex-wives.

Krugman didn't know what Trump was talking about. Neither did Bouie.

We did know what Trump was talking about. The upper-class journalists didn't know because they're locked inside a blue lagoon, a self-satisfied type of blue bayou.

Needless to say, Trump's comment was hyperbolic, semi-comedic and stupid. That's true of almost everything he says or has ever said since he came down the escalator back in 2015.

His statement was typical Trump. That said, many people in his Harrisburg audience did know what he was talking about. They would have known because they live in Pennsylvania, and because they watch the red tribe's "cable news" channel, as few blue poobahs do.

What was the Trumpster talking about? The basics are included in this January 8 AP news report, headline included:

Park Service retracts decision to take down William Penn statue at Philadelphia historical site

The National Park Service withdrew a proposal Monday to take down a statue of William Penn at a Philadelphia historical site as part of a renovation that touched off a torrent of criticism over the legacy of the man who founded the province of Pennsylvania.

In a brief statement, Independence National Historical Park said it has withdrawn the proposal it had announced quietly before the weekend about a wider renovation of Welcome Park, located just blocks from the Liberty Bell and the National Constitution Center.

The proposal, it said, was released “prematurely” and hadn’t undergone a complete internal review.

“No changes to the William Penn statue are planned,” it said. The park service never explained the reason for the impetus to remove the statue.

[..]

Pennsylvania’s top Republican state House member, Rep. Bryan Cutler, had accused President Joe Biden in a statement of trying to “cancel” William Penn. Cutler called it “another sad example of the left in this country scraping the bottom of the barrel of wokeism to advance an extreme ideology and a nonsensical view of history.”

Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro took credit for the park service’s reversal, saying in a statement that “my team has been in contact with the Biden Administration throughout the day to correct this decision.”

That's what Trump was talking about. Upper-classmen Bouie and Krugman didn't know, and they didn't bother to ask around or check.

They simply plowed ahead with their blue tribe foofaw. It's very hard to avoid being angry about know-nothing conduct like this.

The William Penn statue was coming down. Perhaps through use of a ouija board, Governor Shapiro knew about the plan and took credit for reversing it. 

This whole thing was widely pimped within the realm of red tribe cable.

That's the incident to which Trump was referring in his silly statement. Bouie and Krugman didn't know.

They also didn't ask around and they didn't fact-check. Their lazy scribbling was close enough for mainstream press corps work.

This is the way this game has been played ever since mainstream pundits came up with Al Gore said he invented the Internet.(followed by its three thousand sequels). The basic credo has always been this:

If it feels good, repeat it! Always say what the last guy said!

Krugman was once on the side of the angels. He's become a bit of a blue silo man. Concerning Kevin's main point, his original 2/11 post had carried this headline:

The real Donald Trump is losing it

Two days later, there was Bouie, with the same tribe-pleasing line.

Yesterday, Kevin disagreed with our reaction to his initial post. That said, he ended yesterday's post with the passage shown below. We agree with the final highlighted statement, at least as far as it goes:

DRUM (2/12/14): There's not much to be done at this point about either Biden's appearance or the wilder precincts of liberal wokeness, so the only way to defeat Trump is to make center-right voters more scared of him than they are of Democrats. I'm not precisely sure how to do that, but one way is to keep banging on what he says until swing voters take it seriously and realize they really can't put the country in his hands again.

So that's what we need to do, even if it's not precisely accurate to say that Trump is only now losing it. One way or another, Trump's moderate fans need to start fearing him the way they should.

We agree with that final statement. Among other things, our blue tribe should be looking for ways to influence Trump's "moderate fans"—his more persuadable voters.

That's what we should be trying to do. The question we posed in our original post was this:

To date, why has our tribe been unable to accomplish that fairly obvious task?

We plan to explore that question in the days and weeks ahead. In our view, stumblebum punditry by people like Bouie and Krugman is one part of the reason Trump is ahead in the polls.

It's very hard to avoid being angry at high-end work of this type.  Krugman used to be our exalted MVP. Now he's sometimes just hacking it out, with Bouie square on his heels.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. We've been getting eaten alive by the lazy script-reading of the mainstream pundit class dating all the way back to the 1990s and the wars against Clinton and Gore:

Fools For Scandal got thrown down a well. The press corps' war against Gore was ignored, even as it thundered ahead.

The Ben Johnson character put it best in The Last Picture Show. "I've been putting up with this [lazy] behavior my whole life," the character memorably said.

Donald Trump feeds on meat of this type. We keep tossing it to him.