Saturday, December 03, 2016

Today In Fairy Tales The Beltway Tells Itself: Matthew Dowd


Mr. Dowd makes a whole buncha sweeping assertions in this brief article such as...
Certain people in the media think leaders need to be more like Trump in attitude, tone, and language.
Which people?  What are their names and, given your long record of making shit up and being wrong about almost everything, why should anyone believe you know what they think anyway?
I believe the vast majority of Americans still want humble servant leaders who respect others and who are dignified in manner. Given the choice voters had this year, they reluctantly chose between two awful choices.
At the rick of repeating myself, given your long record of making shit up and being wrong about almost everything, who cares what you believe?
2018 will be the beginning of the revenge of independent candidates on our broken party system...
The return of Son of the Friedman Unit.
The truth doesn't matter in politics anymore is another unfortunate myth arising after Election Day. Because Trump won and was the least truthful candidate to run for national office in the last century, pundits think this means facts don't matter anymore. In fact, representatives of the Trump campaign have been saying just that. There has arisen a problematic situation in politics and news where there doesn't seem to be a common set of facts, and this will make it hard to come together in consensus on the common good...
The truth is, Matthew Dowd is a terrible, terrible "journalist".  Hey you're right!  The truth does matter!

But far and away my favorite is --
Let's not fall into the trap of thinking anecdotes are a good path to the truth. Anecdotes can reveal certain things, but they can't tell us what a large body of voters are doing.
-- because at no point does Mr. Dowd ever back up a single word he says with, y'know, facts. No links.  No charts.  No studies.  No polls, not even Rasmussen which is basically one step up from a six-year-old doodling on the back of an Arby's place-mat.  Hell, he doesn't even bother to salt his Fool's Gold mine with a few of those charming anecdotes that we're not supposed to pay attention to. Instead all Mr. Dowd's readers get is what they always get from him:  a steady stream of Beltway bromides issuing straight from his ass.

But Mr. Dowd's wild, Beltway-friendly speculations does make Mr. Ron Fournier big in the pants.

And really, isn't that the most important thing?



6 comments:

dinthebeast said...

Gee, I wonder why they don't want facts to matter?

-Doug in Oakland

Batocchio said...

Gaaaaah. All right, off to drink.

Mike Lumish said...

The post modernists demonstrated the slippery nature of Truth under the impact of speed-of-light communications, and I say that they did so as a warning to us all of what was coming.

The Republicans, they took it as an operator's manual. Michael Berube had some trenchant observations about this as he live blogged the 2004 RNC convention. Something about "our hamster died," IIRC.

rickstersherpa@msn.com said...

When did Hillary kill Ron Fournier and Michael Dowd's puppies? Because they hate her passion. Also, Dowd's cherished common people are going full mob with the all time favorite "Lock them Up."

Jimbo said...

People like Matthew Dowd are allowed a platform because of lazy editors who go with a known name however utterly worthless they are in terms of critical thinking. I can only hope that nobody is paying attention to this juvenile POS.

Edward said...

Ropn Fournier retweeting Matthew Dowd is like Pat Roberson telling us to donate money to that man of God Jerry Falwell Jr.