Saturday, November 7, 2009

Getting so much better

Jon Chait's post about the Weekly Standard (via Jon Bernstein) is quite good. He goes through an extensive list of examples from that magazine in which it advances no conservative principles ("We're winning" is not a principle) but just predicts that Republicans are forever poised for victory, predictions that are invariably proven wrong. Chait wonders why the magazine's readers continue to subscribe to a magazine that so frequently lies to them.

It's a good question. I can remember reading Ruy Teixeira's blog leading up to the 2004 presidential election. He kept making these arguments about how the polls underestimated Kerry's strengths, how turnout for Bush was going to be weak, etc. I had all the evidence I needed that pointed to a likely Bush victory (modest economic growth, small but consistent poll leads, etc.), but I chose to listen to these other arguments because they told me what I wanted to hear. I felt like a mark after the election and I never went to that blog again.

Do others like being lied to?

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