Getting Paid for Getting it Wrong: Bad Brokers Get Fired, Bad Pundits Get
Hired

By Ted Rall
Created Dec 8 2006 - 9:00am

NEW YORK--"Past performance is no guarantee of future returns," investment
firms warn their clients. Be that as it may, no standard disclaimer can
shield stockbrokers from accountability for lousy advice. Those who earn a
reputation for picking good stocks become wealthy. Those whose counsel
consistently costs their customers money get fired. On Wall Street, hard
work and a little luck pay off.

It's the same for other professional prognosticators. Doctors who
misdiagnose, lawyers who file doomed lawsuits and film directors who go over
budget suffer opprobrium, damaged reputations and--ultimately--diminished
incomes. Even our political leaders, who enjoy access to up-to-the-minute
assessments by high-tech intelligence agencies and are thus presumed to know
what they're doing, are expected to foretell the consequences of their
actions. Six months before invading Iraq, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld
assured us that "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of
mass destruction." "I doubt it will last six months," he predicted when the
war began. Rumsfeld, always wrong wrong wrong, got fired.

Political pundits are the exception to the rule that applies to everyone
else--the more they're wrong, the more they're paid.

Millions of people turn to America's top syndicated newspaper columnists and
broadcast talk show hosts to place the day's events into context and to get
a sense of what will happen on the national and international political
scene in years to come.

All this inside-the-Beltway chatter is serious business. The prognoses of
opinion mongers influence policymakers and investors whose decisions
determine whether economies rise or fall; their take on foreign policy can
drive Congress to war or pressure a president to make peace. Had Rush
Limbaugh opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, to cite one example, there's
a substantial chance that 600,000 Iraqis and Americans would not be dead
today.

Unlike stockbrokers and doctors and lawyers, however, no one holds pundits
accountable for their predictions. In opposition to logic and the tenets of
capitalism, editorialists who repeatedly get it wrong prosper nevertheless.
The biggest morons in print and on the air are hired for increasingly
prestigious and lucrative gigs on radio and TV, invited to give
$10,000-an-hour talks, and showered with awards and six-figure book deals.
Strange but true: repeatedly screwing up is a prerequisite for making the
bestsellers list.

During the run-up to the Iraq war, syndicated columnist Ann Coulter
repeatedly parroted Bush Administration talking points that will go down in
history for their depraved falseness and brazen illogic. "As
George Bush pointed out in his State of the Union address," she wrote on
January 31, 2003, "dictators are not in the habit of 'politely putting us on
notice before they strike.'" By the time a threat is 'imminent,' Chicago
will be gone."

Everyone, including Bush, now admits that Saddam never possessed or tried to
develop nuclear weapons. Given the information available at the time,
however, Coulter ought to have known that Chicago--and the rest of the
United States--had never been endangered by Iraq. The reason: Saddam's
missiles had a maximum range of a few hundred miles. If she knew that fact,
she lied. If she didn't, she should have looked it up. Whether she was
dishonest or lazy, neither conclusion speaks well of her skills as a pundit.

During the early days of the invasion U.S. troops faced fierce
resistance--not just from regular Iraqi army troops but by the Shiite
civilians we'd expected to greet us as liberators. Clued-in pundits
recognized these incidents as the beginnings of an insurgency that would
later reduce the U.S. to near financial and moral ruin. Not Coulter. Typing
from the comfort of her Manhattan apartment, she ridiculed the accounts
filed by reporters embedded with U.S. troops half a world away: "The [New
York] Times said our troops were 'faced with battlefield death, human error
and other tragedies.' The task 'looks increasingly formidable.' There were
'disturbing events,' and American forces were engaged in a 'fierce
firefight--an early glimpse of urban warfare.'...We're losing this war! The
Elite Republican Guard is assembling outside New York City! Head for the
hills!"

But the Times was right. Coulter committed the cardinal sin of the paid
prophet. Not only was she wrong, she was snotty about it.

On May 27, 2004, Coulter claimed on Fox News: "We have found weapons of mass
destruction. That is something the media is repeatedly lying about. We have
not found stockpiles. We found the plants for manufacturing, we found the
experiments, we found the room for human experimentation labs. We found lots
of weapons of mass destruction." In the same interview, she said "it's
pretty darn safe over there [in Iraq]." Obviously, none of this was true.

Coulter has been wrong about just about everything. She defended Bush, his
preemptive wars against
Afghanistan and Iraq, torture programs, unilateralism and deficits. All have
been proven disastrous; all have been repudiated by most Americans,
including Republicans. Yet Coulter continues to cash in. All five of her
books, thanks to heavy promotional campaigns by Random House and mass buys
by right-wing organizations, have been bestsellers. She continues to be
asked about, and paid for, her opinions on Fox News and MSNBC. She's so
powerful and influential that liberal authors have published three new books
attacking her--none of which stands a chance of matching her sales.

Liberal Times opinion columnist Thomas Friedman is more proof that, for
pundits, being wrong pays off. When U.N. illegal arms inspectors went to
Iraq in 1997, Friedman shrieked that "Saddam is up to something serious this
time."

As subsequent events have proven, Saddam wasn't up to anything. He had
destroyed his chemical and biological weapons at the end of the 1991
Gulf War, as the U.S. had demanded. Nevertheless, Friedman went on, "it
cannot be just to obliterate those sites where he [Saddam] is still hiding
weapons--although that's important. The U.S. has to try to destroy him too.
Because the worst of all worlds would be if we destroy his weapons but he
survives and throws out the UN inspectors. He would then be able to rearm
without anyone watching Iraq. And he will try to rearm."

In 2003, a week before the invasion, Friedman was giddy that his war lust
was about to be sated: "I deeply identify with the president's vision of
ending Saddam Hussein's tyranny and building a more decent, progressive
Iraq. If done right, it could be so important to the future of the
Arab-Muslim world, which is why I won't give up on this war."

As if Friedman's support for the attack wasn't morally and tactically
heinous enough, he posited a ludicrous supposition: that the Bush
Administration, which had already botched the occupation of Afghanistan,
could have "done" Iraq "right." Friedman continued to pimp the war in column
after column, pausing occasionally to bemoan what he described as the faulty
execution of a noble idea.

Now it's obvious that the war itself, rather than the plan for a subsequent
occupation, was intrinsically flawed. But it was Friedman's job to see and
convey that before the tragic waste of thousands of lives and billions of
dollars--carnage that his work helped promote and prolong.

Despite his dismal performance Friedman's star still rises. His job at the
Times secure, he recently collected an Overseas Press Award and was named to
the Order of the British Empire by
Queen Elizabeth II. His latest book, the turgid pro-free trade screed "The
World is Flat," has been on the New York Times Bestsellers List nearly two
years. Among its many laughable errors is its central premise that
Christopher Columbus set out for the New World in order to disprove the idea
that the world is flat. It has sold over two million copies; assuming a
standard royalty rate of eight percent and $30 cover price, he has received
at least $4 million for this title alone.

Christopher Hitchens, the socialist-turned-neoconservative who famously
gloated that Afghanistan was "the first country in history to be bombed out
of the Stone Age," continues to collect four bucks a word from Vanity Fair
despite widespread consensus that the United States hasn't rebuilt anything
since its fall 2001 bombing campaign. Given that virtually everything Hitch
writes gets debunked a few months later, it's reasonable to assume that
editor Graydon Carter doesn't worry about credibility when picking his
roster of well-remunerated writers.

Some pundits' predictions prove prescient. On March 13, 2003, MIT linguist
and political critic Noam Chomsky warned against invading Iraq. "The
consequences," he wrote in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, "could be
catastrophic in Iraq and around the world. "The United States may reap a
whirlwind of terrorist retaliation--and step up the possibility of nuclear
Armageddon." Terrorist attacks against Americans have become an hourly
occurrence in Iraq;
North Korea's dangerous nuclear brinksmanship resulted from Kim Jung Il's
fears that he would be targeted for "regime change." Conceding that "Saddam
remains a terrible threat to those within his reach," Chomsky continued by
correctly assessing where Coulter and Friedman failed: "Today, his reach
does not extend beyond his own domains."

Chomsky's finest post-9/11 moment took place just one day later. "In short,"
Chomsky wrote in an online essay, "the [9/11] crime is a gift to the hard
jingoist right, those who hope to use force to control their domains. That
is even putting aside the likely U.S. actions, and what they will
trigger--possibly more attacks like this one, or worse. The prospects ahead
are even more ominous than they appeared to be before the latest atrocities.
As to how to react, we have a choice. We can express justified horror; we
can seek to understand what may have led to the crimes, which means making
an effort to enter the minds of the likely perpetrators...We may try to
understand, or refuse to do so, contributing to the likelihood that much
worse lies ahead."

Chomsky's analyses are consistently literate, humane and, more often than
not, dead on target. So where does his latest book "Failed States" appear on
the bestsellers list? It doesn't. Seven months after publication, it's the
1856th bestselling title on Amazon.

Maybe he should look for a job on Wall Street.
_______

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson