The electoral map looks almost exactly as it did in 2000, and yet you would imagine, from the expert post-election media "analysis," that there was some cataclysmic shift, that somewhere out of the ground in Idaho and Montana a mass of survivalist fundamentalist End of Days Christians appeared from Middle-Earth to vote.

What actually happened was that some of the people who voted for Gore in 2000 this time voted for the other guy. This time Bush got fifty-one percent of the vote -- and it wasn't all crazy people. Nevertheless, you had the press two days before the election saying that college kids were coming out in record numbers and cell-phone users were going to make polling obsolete. So the one truism that emerges from all of this is that there continues to be zero accountability in the press. There is not a profession in the world where you can be that wrong, that consistently, and still continue to practice your job with greater job security than before.

Posted by: Jonathan Singer / 9:18 AM | Basie! Home