Fan Mail

Some fan mail makes me tingle. This one from Steve was one of them:

I’ve been reading your book, Generalissimo El Busho, a collections of old columns and cartoons.
I was struck by how right you were in your predictions about the eventual course of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Keep it up,

Pundits, after all, are paid for being right most of the time. It’s a sad statement about the failure of the capitalist system that the most well-paid pundits in the country–Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity, O’Reilly, Brooks, Friedman, Hitchens, etc.–are consistently wrong. If they were picking bum stocks the way they picked bum pols and wars, they’d get canned. Meanwhile, guys like me and Chomsky–who have been right 95% of the time (my big fuck-up was predicting that Howard Dean would be the 2004 Dem nominee) since 2000–get ignored by many media outlets.

There’s a lot less interest in having pundits get right than in having them parrot whatever happens to be the party line at the time. Fortunately, there are actual American readers, like Steve, who keep score.