Responding to Joel Klein & Condi Rice II: PUNDITRY AND THE ART FAILING UPWARD
BY ERIC ALTERMAN | THIS ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE APRIL 16, 2012 EDITION OF THE NATION | HTTP://BIT.LY/INPZHC
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaks at the ground breaking ceremony for the George W. Bush Presidential Center on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, November 16, 2010. REUTERS/Mike Stone
March 28, 2012 :: In the newly relaunched Baffler, now edited by John Summers, essayist Tom Frank expands on an argument that has obsessed your columnist for decades: that success in the punditocracy is inversely related to good judgment. Indeed, one can even find an almost perfectly proportional relationship between wrongness and success. Nobody was consistently more wrong about pretty much everything related to George W. Bush than William Kristol; and yet, following the Iraq folly, Kristol was rewarded with the single most