It is becoming painfully clear to me that, while there is doubtless no short supply of reasonably intelligent pundits on the political horizon, very few of them know how to think.\u00a0 <\/i>Or, if they do know how to think, they refuse to bring that knowledge to bear upon their craft.<\/p>\n
Indeed, reasoning is as lost an art upon the average commentator as ballet is lost upon an elephant.<\/p>\n
During just this past week alone I encountered two glaring instances of this misology <\/i>(hatred of reason) on the part of veteran journalists.<\/p>\n
First, Nicholas Stix accused me of \u201cripping off\u201d his work.\u00a0 This is the conclusion that he arrived at based solely on three considerations: (1) I wrote an article in which I relayed the ghastly fate visited upon a young white couple from Tennessee back in 2007 by four black men and one black woman; (2) Stix had been writing about this same case for years; and (3) I misspelled the name of the reporter, Jamie Satterfield (I wrote \u201cSutterfield\u201d) who I quoted in my article.<\/p>\n
As I made clear in my response, Stix\u2019s reasoning on this score was embarrassingly, even scandalously, poor.\u00a0 \u00a0I wrote the following:<\/p>\n
\u201cUpon googling the names of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, no fewer than 136,000 <\/i>results are listed.\u00a0 And the very first result is a link to the Knoxville-Sentinel\u2019s <\/i>archive on this case.\u00a0 The second result is a link to a Wikipedia <\/i>entry on the latter.\u00a0 To his eternal credit, Michael Savage, the third most listened to nationally syndicated radio talk show host in the country, a man with probably 10 to 12 million listeners, has talked about the fate of Christian and Newsom since 2007.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn other words, this story has been in the public domain since the time that it first broke\u2014and Stix was not <\/i>the person to have first broken it.\u00a0 It is preposterous to imply that any <\/i>discussion of this case that doesn\u2019t give a tip of the hat to Stix is disreputable.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs for my own piece, there isn\u2019t a single argument, turn of phrase, idea, or detail in it that can in any way be construed as having been lifted from Stix\u2019s work.\u00a0 It merely recapitulates the bare bones of the \u2018Knoxville Horror,\u2019 as Stix quite appropriately refers to it (Now, had I not credited him as having coined this<\/i> term, then I would indeed be guilty of \u2018ripping\u2019 him \u2018off.\u2019).\u00a0 To lend authority to my summation, I turned to the Knoxville-Sentinel <\/i>archive and quoted Satterfield, the local reporter who, I discovered, had been all over this story, as well as the medical examiner who she in turn quoted.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, Stix\u2019s argument boiled down to this: Either Kerwick was familiar with Satterfield\u2019s work or he \u201cripped off\u201d Stix.\u00a0 He was not familiar with Satterfield\u2019s work.\u00a0 Therefore, he \u201cripped off\u201d Stix.<\/p>\n
Moving right along, we come to Washington Post <\/i>writer Michael Gerson.\u00a0 The latter wrote a piece in which he blasted Rand Paul and his supporters. Paul, Gerson maintained, could never become a \u201cmainstream Republican\u201d because his supporters are both \u201cneo-confederates\u201d and the enemies of almost all war and federal coercion.<\/p>\n
I noted that this argument is incoherent: it makes no sense.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut Gerson would have us think that these libertarians are at once<\/i> consumed by an inordinate passion for liberty as well as<\/i> an equally inordinate passion for \u2018a regime founded on slavery,\u2019 a burning hatred for war, the penultimate emblem of coercion, and<\/i> a comparably intense affection for the coercion required by \u2018state-sanctioned\u2019 racism.<\/p>\n
Paul and his supporters love liberty and they hate liberty. They love coercion and they hate coercion.\u00a0 They are statists and anti-statists.\u201d<\/p>\n
It should go without saying that there are plenty of other exhibits that I could supply of the illogic that pervades the work of your average commentator.\u00a0 In the future, more such exhibits will be supplied.<\/p>\n
For now, though, let these displays serve as textbook cases of the misology of the punditry class.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is becoming painfully clear to me that, while there is doubtless no short supply of reasonably intelligent pundits on the political horizon, very few of them know how to think.\u00a0 Or, if they do know how to think, they refuse to bring that knowledge to bear upon their craft. Indeed, reasoning is as lost…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n