Ezra comments on Paul Krugman’s recent pwnage of George Will on ABC’s This Week.
The pity is that there’s no judge, or score sheet, so folks who wanted to agree with Will probably still do, while those find Krugman’s commentary more convenient to their biases will happily nod along. Lots of folks are applauding this video, and I do too, but insofar as there are no consequences for being wrong on TV, I think the actual takeaway is that sounding like you know things and actually knowing things are, in this forum, pretty much equal.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, but I think it’s a bit more distressing when removed from the realm of discourse. That is, as distressing as it may be that there are no consequences for being wrong on TV, there are about as many consequences, at least in the short term, for being wrong in the real world. For example, there was never any conclusive evidence to support the notion that Saddam Hussein had WMD. But it didn’t matter. The Bush Administration dexterously massaged the media to shape the debate so that objective fact was obscured and war was predicated on false pretenses. In the long term, the serial dishonesty and poor policy choices of the Bush Administration have hamstrung Republican candidates up and down the ticket, but it’s pretty indisputable that 4,000 Americans have sacrificed their lives in the name of pretense.
Perhaps George Bush will be convicted of war crimes in an international court, but I tend to doubt it. Might has an unfortunate way of making right.
