Sun rises, air clears as Ohio primary ends

WE THOUGHT THIS DAY would never arrive. I mean, the Ohio Republican primary. To borrow a recent reference to Californians by our Gov. Kasich, the four wackadoodles who formed the GOP candidate pack will have to turn their attention elsewhere and Ohioans will be able to breathe clean air again.

It was not a campaign of highlights. Even when the wannabes pranced beyond the Buckeye State, the word instantly got back to us in 2o12's technological glare. For example, there was McMitt Romney singing about Davy Crockett in Tennessee in his usual atonality and telling us that. Gosh and Jeepers, there was nothing in America that he didn't love. (His wife Ann lately assured us not to take the family's Midas-like wealth seriously inasmuch as she really didn't consider herself wealthy. Image problem solved.) It made us yearn for the return of Herman Cain, who, if nothing else, had a great on-pitch voice.

Across Ohio, McRick Santorum continued to run as a Manichean seminarian dividing all of humankind between good and evil. Thankfully, I don't think he sang about it.

McNewt Gingrich, who has long come across as Crazy Guggenheim since he chose to shut down the government as House Speaker, tried to soften his scary decrees by describing himself as the "cheerful" new Newt. That avowed conversion lasted for no more than a brief moment before he tore into Romney as a basically dishonest person who is trying to buy his way to the nomination.

Finally, Libertarian Ron Paul went around was just being Libertarian Ron Paul.

I write this without knowing who will win in Ohio. But does it matter? Even conservative icon George Will now tells us it doesn't, which opened the hostilities on another front by minor philsopher Donald Trump. Damning Will's pessimism, Trump erupted in an interview with CNBC morning host Joe Kernan:

"I think George Will is a loser...He actually spoke for me at Mar-a-Lago a long time ago, I was very unimpressed..You take away his little round spectacles and his cute little greasy haircut, and I think he probaby realizes he's not a very smart guy."

We'll save a profound essay on Trumpish haircuts for another day.

The trend toward being noisily wrong

BACK IN the 1960s, a rather perceptive radio news analyst, Edward P. Morgan, began his nightly broadcast by confiding to his audience that he knew absolutely nothing at all about agriculture.   "Therefore," he continued, "I believe I am eminently   qualified to talk about agriculture on tonight's program." It was his sardonic way of emphasizing that to be a national pundit, one does not need to know what he or she is talking about.

Boy, would Morgan have had scads of material for his programs today!  Spend five minutes (that should be enough) viewing the  scrums of rowdy political analysts shouting their conflicting views and you must surely conclude that no one has a clue, either about the issue on the table, or whether the panelists wouldn't be better off analyzing old Disney cartoons. 

With their counter-spins whirled into the camera on, say, the remedy for our economic woes,  it should soon be obvious that they can't all be wrong - or right? -  despite whatever claims to expertise the panelists accord  themselves.  In the end, it is only a  charade and a  show-biz line of work that pays well.  What else can you be forced to conclude when two such "experts" (economists, politicians, analysts from each network's private stock) arrive on the scene quite  prepared to disagree?  Fact is, there is much less expertise than there are experts today.  And that's not saying a helluva lot. 

I recently came across a piece on a blog named Bryan Appleyard.com (an Englishman, I believe) that was titled Pundits Are Wrong About Everything.  That sounded about right to me (else, why would I be referring to it?)   Appleyard drew his inspiration from a study by Philip Tetlock, a professor at UCal Berkeley.  Tetlock   asked 284 pundits about their forecasts for the future, and recorded the findings:  The experts were right less than 33 pct. of the time!

Appleyard happily notes:

"A monkey chucking darts would have done better.  This is consoling.  More consoling still is Tetlock's further finding that the more certain a pundit was, the more likely he was to be wrong.   The problem being that they couldn't self-correct, presumably because they'd invested so much of their personality and self-esteem in a specific view." 

Some salient examples come to mind:  Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle et al saying the war  would be brief with Perle going so far as to say that within six months, the Iraqis would honor liberator George Bush with a big plaza in downtown Baghdad;  Alan Greenspan vigorously supporting the hollow mortgages that got us into so much trouble; George Bush's Mission Accomplished caper. 

And of late, the economic experts on CNBC, the cable channel of choice for hyenas, are gravely endangering their lungs defending the  millionaire executives  on Wall Street with their  own versions  of Economics 101.  I was left to wonder, for instance, when CNBC host Mark Haines insisted that Wall Street companies "can't be run well by a bunch of people who don't make more than $250,000."    Oh?  In light of today's Wall Street Meltdown, let's give the $250,00o entry level applicants a try. How much worse would they be?  Trust me. Despite what Prof. Tetlock might tell you, I am never wrong.  Well, almost never.