Nobody Knows Anything

Nothing, Nothing At All

Let’s take a little trip back in time, to a simpler era. It was well into summer, much like now, and I was just a few years out of college. My boss was out of the office, so I was in no hurry as I went to work from my cheap apartment. I was expecting I could sneak out in late afternoon to snag a sixpack or two, and my coworkers and I could blow off the last hour of work with some beers.

This was still the time when newspaper boxes were all over, and for some reason that morning I looked at the headline of one near the entrance.

My boss was in the headline. And it was bad. Really bad.

I worked, by the way, in DC. This wasn’t a Clinton or Trump-level scandal, but I promise you it was a scandal at the level not too far below that. And now I was caught completely unaware right in the middle of it all.

Although I had a very junior level job, I dealt with the boss all the time and knew them well. And this was bad. Really bad. We’re talking front pages of the NY Times and Washington Post bad. We’re talking leadoff topic of the TV news talk shows bad. And as soon as I showed up that morning, the phone started to ring. And ring. And ring. All regular work for the rest of the year ground to a halt, and all the office did was answer the phone and recite statements.

The conventional wisdom from day one was that this was the end. This was impossible to survive. And suddenly, the DC pundits who had never dealt with my boss before had a laundry list of reasons why they were toast.

The news cycle spun, and still my boss stayed a part of it. When I finally got away for a long planned vacation later that year, I still remember seeing at the airport the cover of one of the top newsweeklies, back when they had circulations in the millions. The cover story was asking how long my boss would survive.

If you want to know why I have so little faith in the quality and integrity of the Washington press corps, it dates back to those days. It became blindingly obvious that they knew nothing. They did no homework. They made no effort to uncover facts, just recycle what everyone else said, and they made up their minds based on the most superficial evidence and the most conventional wisdom possible.

Faced with a vacuum of actual news, but desperate to keep the story alive, they took their talking points from the growing right wing media and the GOP. It was all a game and it was all about doing their best to position themselves in a way that sounded smart but hid within the crowd.

And they were wrong.

In fact, after a year had passed, the scandal died. There was no longterm political fallout. As best as a DC scandal can ever come to an end, this one did. The pundits were wrong, and it happened in large part because they never bothered to understand either the details of the issue or the politics. They didn’t care then, and they don’t care now. It’s all a game of musical chairs, with the goal of not being caught too far from safety, and nothing else matters.

Remember that today and in the near future as you hear about what the successors to that generation of pundits intone, oh so gravely, oh so sure of themselves.

They know nothing. They care about nothing.

This is not to say that there aren’t a few people who understand and care about the real world. You can find a few like Jamelle Bouie who persevere, surrounded by chowderheads and propagandists. But they’re rare.

There’s a telling video from 2015 when Keith Ellison warned that Trump had a serious chance of winning, and the panel, including NY Times reporter Maggie Haberman, laughed at him.

Of course in a rational world the failure of this crew in 2016 should have cost them their credibility and their jobs. Instead, they’re setting the agenda today.

Walk away from them. They know nothing, and if they are ever right, it’s the same way that a stopped clock is right for a moment, just a moment, twice a day. Even a blind squirrel can find a nut. So what?

Find those few people in the morass of the pundit class who have the bravery to say how little the pundit class knows, and can make a convincing case as to why they know so little. They’re the only ones you can begin to trust to talk about what little is actually known.

We don’t know what will happen in November. We don’t know what will happen after November. The best thing we can do is forget about the people who insist they know everything, listen more to the people who admit they only know a little bit, and start to lay the groundwork for the world we want to unfold.