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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

In Consideration of Why Anyone Can Be A Pundit 

...anyone can be a pundit at some level. You can write a letter to The Editor, start a blog, comment at major league websites and blogs, or in other ways fling your thoughts into the vast electronic river that flows through all of our lives...

That's Ground Level Punditry.

You can become a captivating writer who garners tons of hits on your blog, or you can become one of the trusted acolytes at some larger blog, or you can actually enter the world of the ink-stained wretches of journalism to have some sort of local voice...

That's Journey Level Punditry.

Or you can rise to the top of the mountain, gaining access to a national audience, regardless of your actual qualification to share any sort of meaningful opinion, via employment at a national media source. This is the region of rarefied air so lacking in oxygen that only a limited few favored beings ever develop the lung capacity to function successfully...

That is what I think of as Star Level Punditry.

The sad thing is that, while you can aspire to and perhaps successfully rise to that "Star" level, it will probably be necessary to check your intellectual capabilities at the door in order to walk through it. As an example, I simply offer this article, which by itself isn't so much a demonstration of my argument as it is a demonstration of where intellect "check-out" leads...

One can't help but wonder, while reading such articles as this, what strange calendar the Star Level Pundits are looking at. May Day is this coming weekend; we haven't even celebrated Mother's Day or Memorial Day or Labor Day, but we are many months into a fevered dialogue who's origin stretches back over a year about just how badly Democratic butts are going to get kicked in an election that is over five (as in FIVE[5] months away). This sort of conversation looks like nothing more that the mock draft talk leading up to the actualy real live NFL draft that ends up looking nothing like the vision painted during the run up...

May Day is on Saturday. It will be over five months before voters will actually select Representatives or Senators or a host of state, county, and local officials. It may be fun to game this whole system out and make predictions about What Will Be, but we are looking at the remainder of the spring, all of the summer, and a sliver of the fall before people will actually vote in an election that truly matters to the country. It really is a long time until the next election and there are many streams to cross before we get to that day. It is simply absurd to speculate about what the outcome of all those elections will be at this early date...

But that is, I suppose, what being a pundit at the Star Level is all about...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:00 PM 5 comments

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