Media: Republicans Are So Stupid They Thought They Could Win An Election That Everyone Said Was Too Close To Call And Would Depend on Turnout

Jonathan Martin of Politico has been pushing that line -- shock of shocks. Nolte rebuts him some. So did AllahPundit.

Here's a quote from liberal hack Jonathan Martin:

GOP officials have chalked up their electoral thumping to everything from the country’s changing demographics to an ill-timed hurricane and failed voter turn-out system, but a cadre of Republicans under 50 believes the party’s problem is even more fundamental.

The party is suffering from Pauline Kaelism.

Kael was The New Yorker movie critic who famously said in the wake of Richard M. Nixon’s 49-state landslide in 1972 that she knew only one person who voted for Nixon.

Now, many young Republicans worry, they are the ones in the hermetically sealed bubble — except it’s not confined to geography but rather a self-selected media universe in which only their own views are reinforced and an alternate reality is reflected…

In this reassuring conservative pocket universe, Rasmussen polls are gospel, the Benghazi controversy is worse than Watergate, “Fair and Balanced” isn’t just marketing and Dick Morris is a political seer.

The liberal media cannot actually win on non-factual points, as they are supposed to be in the fact business. Not the opinion business. They actually are in the opinion business, but they're not supposed to be.

They cannot "win" an "argument" over raising taxes, or gay marriage, or abortion, even though they would really, really like to. These things are generally not matters of fact. There are some facts to be argued about in each case, but the facts are just selected to prove a belief. It's really the belief that comes first; the facts are secondary.

But the media wishes to win these arguments.

What they do instead is push proxies for the real arguments they wish to win. For example, the media covers the living hell out of every conservative sex scandal, and every conservative money scandal. They try to draw "larger lessons" from such things.

They do not cover Democratic scandals with anything close to the same level of flood-the-zone enthusiasm, and do not attempt to draw "larger lessons" of politics from these scandals. The only larger lessons to be are entirely human ones. Bill Clinton's sex scandals were his own; no larger lessons about the Democratic Party could be drawn. Cold Cash Jefferson's freezer full of bribes was just one man's failing. Etcetera.

Now, when a Republican falls, that's not really evidence that his policy preferences were wrong. But the media plays it that way.

They can't win on the facts as far as policy. And I'm not just saying "conservative policies are factually correct;" I mean no one can win on basic assumptions and beliefs, really. These aren't fact-dependent questions (or, at least, aren't chiefly so).

Which is why, then, they rush to link Good Facts For Democrats for Vindications of Democratic Policy. And, of course, Bad Facts for Republicans to Repudiations of Republican Policy.

This is what this whole "Should we have foreseen this?" argument is about, as usual. The election was very close -- just 2%. Only a few presidential elections in all of American history were closer.

But the media now has a Good Fact for Democrats. So what do they do? They attempt to link this fact to Democratic policies -- their policies are based on facts and science and numbers and things that liberal reporters are entirely ignorant of, but which they approve of, in the abstract. See, the Democrats are rational and reasonable and we know this because they won a 2-point-margin election. They knew they were going to win. That proves they're smarter, and more rational, and they Love Science (from afar-- sometimes they read the review of Malcolm Gladstone book in the New York Times Review of Books and isn't he sort of science-y?).

Republicans, on the other hand, thought they were going to win, and they were wrong wrong wrong, which proves, like everything else about them, that they are Anti-Science and Anti-Reason and think that the energy crisis can be fixed if we just all love Jesus enough and are basically dumb, crude, and crazy.

Note what we're talking about here.

The New York Giants defeated the New England Patriots in a very close Super Bowl this past year, in a game most people thought was a toss-up. A game which most people thought would come down to execution and the last few plays (and it did).

Are the people who thought the Patriots would win crazy? Anti-science? Too Jesusy to understand football?

Were those who predicted a Giants win geniuses? Their heads Full of Math?

No. It was a tossup game, and some people guessed one thing, and some people guessed another. There was evidence to support the idea that the Patriots were a stronger team (they performed better all during the season, had a better W-L record) and there was evidence to support the idea that the Giants would win (they had suddenly come alive late in the season and made people sit up and wonder Where the hell has that team been all season? had the Smell of Destiny about them).

Kind of like the 2012 election, no?

But if anyone seriously attempted to turn his correct guess into a general proof of his Complete Interdisciplinary Mastery of All Fields, we'd call him an idiot and a fool. And if the tried to claim an incorrect guess was proof that Patriots fans were all stupid and anti-science, we'd call him a lunatic.

We'd say he was a sad troll trying to turn something trivial -- a guess about the outcome of a close toss-up contest -- into evidence of something large. Like the fat loser at the bar who still wants to talk about the time he won Trivia Night six years ago.

One last thing -- if liberals all "knew this would happen" (which proves they Love Science), why did I see so many damn articles like this before the election?

Things We Didn't Know: I don't think liberals knew in advance that ORCA would fail, or that the 2012 electorate would be about as non-white as 2008, or that Republicans would actually turn out only at the same low levels as in 2008.

Or that a lethal hurricane would suddenly give Obama the chance to put down the golf club and pick up his spiffy leather jacket.

These things did in fact happen, and they're what turned the election (among a few other things).

But I didn't predict the last five minutes of the Giants-Patriots game, and neither did the media, or liberals generally, predict the specifics of this very, very narrow election.

posted by Ace at 05:01 PM

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