Arrogant predictions are 'caws' for a feast
That's not a red wave, that's a red face
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Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above.
Just one steaming platter of crow? How about a corvid banquet followed by a huge slice of humble pie?
“I certainly thought a Red Wave was coming. The issues were right–crime, inflation, open border etc.– but I was wrong. So please pass me that steaming platter of roasted crow.” — John Kass, Nov. 10
I’m the last guy to mock anyone for making a bum prediction. Not only do I offer wrongheaded forecasts each year when I match wits with readers in my prediction survey, but also I, too, predicted a Red Wave last Tuesday.
Historical trends strongly suggested a Republican romp. But history has so often made fools of us recently that it’s wise to temper all forecasts with humility and shrug. But when a failed prediction comes off like a taunt, mockery is in order.
Here’s from Kass’ chesty essay from Nov. 6, the Sunday before the election, headlined “Red Wave Coming.”
The American people are fed up with (Democrats) and their media bullies that crush dissent. And the fed up Americans will hold them accountable. … the moans of the jesters as they are about to feel the wrath of the North Americans is comforting. … The American people have seen enough. They’re tired of being pushed around by jesters who shriek for their heads and their jobs. They’re fed up. That Red Wave gathers force. And the time of the jesters honoring themselves will soon be at an end.
In fact, it seems the American people are rather more fed up with the crazed jesters in the Republican party. They have seen enough election denialism and heard enough pious blather from cynical culture warriors with their crabbed, narrow definition of freedom.
Who’s the fool now?
Notes and comments from readers —lightly edited —- along with my responses
Some of these messages are in reference to items in last week’s issues of the Picayune Sentinel.
Laurence S. — The Tribune’s lead editorial Monday, “Why we shouldn’t shame U.S. oil companies for making money,” noted that, yes, oil companies are making record profits, but sympathetically quoted Exxon Mobil Corp. boss Darren Woods saying that the company is returning funds “directly” to the people “in the form of our quarterly dividend.”
The editorial then proceeded to second this, writing “Actually, American families can invest in a share of Exxon Mobil for a little over $110.”
I was stunned! First, $110 can be quite a drain for many Americans whose budgets are already stretched by, among other things, the price of fuel. Second, how would a few bucks in dividends make up for the increased price of filling a tank? Someone would need to put some real money into stock to make anything on the deal.
Most importantly, why should anyone need to purchase stock to be treated fairly by Big Oil? It is a well known axiom of business that crises in the world are an opportunity for someone to make a quick buck. So how about Big Oil sharing the pain rather than benefiting from the pain of ordinary people?
The per-share dividend from Exxon-Mobil was $3.55 total this year, making that perhaps the most tone-deaf editorial advice in Tribune history.
Marc. M — Predictions based on the “wrong track” polls were based on the simplistic assumption that it favored Republicans. “Wrong track” people included Democrats and independents and may have reflected the Dobbs decision on abortion and concerns about election deniers.
That’s true. I’ve never been polled on right-track/wrong-track but my answer might be based on a sense that many things are not headed in the right directions, but that I don’t, in general, blame the Democrats for that.
Al P. — Your leftist bias hurts your credibility. There are election deniers on both sides, like Hillary Clinton and Stacy Abrams.
Clinton conceded defeat on the night of the presidential election in 2016. Abrams is a slightly different story. Here’s The Washington Post:
Abrams at various times has said the election was “stolen” and even, in a New York Times interview, that “I won.” She suggested that election laws were “rigged” and that it was “not a free or fair election.” She also claimed that voter suppression was to blame for her loss, even though she admitted she could not “empirically” prove that. While she did acknowledge (Brian) Kemp was the governor, she refused to say he was the “legitimate” governor.
Abrams made these claims while often leaving herself a rhetorical exit. When she said the election was stolen, she often hastened to add it was “stolen from the people of Georgia.” Moreover, unlike Trump, Abrams has not attempted to rile supporters to violence or call into question the outcome of the election before it takes place. Instead, she has encouraged more people to register to vote and filed successful lawsuits that made voting easier and many experts believe helped Democrats win in 2020.
Abrams got 48.8% of the vote for governor in 2018, and after four years of complaining that the election was unfair, she got 45.8% of the vote. So there may be a lesson there.
But it’s beyond misleading to compare the riotous, clamorous and piteous claims of rank cheating from rafts of furious, ignorant, deluded Republicans to the complaints about election integrity from a few Democrats. From Poynter:
Roughly 70% of Republicans don’t see Biden as the legitimate winner. Surveys by different pollsters show virtually the same results, with the exception of a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll that dropped it to 61%.
So those of us on the left will not be lectured to about credibility.
David O. — I tried, but have finally hit the breaking point. I will miss the funny tweets and Tune of the Week. I know you write from the heart and wish you the best, but both sides of our political debate are divisive and I feel that I too rarely see a balanced view of that in the Picayune Sentinel.
Sorry to see you go. I obviously have a perspective on the news and a position on the political spectrum, but I do try to give a fair airing to other points of view and you will every so often catch me breaking with lefty orthodoxy. I really do value other perspectives and I don’t feel that those who offer them are treated unkindly.
Ted M. —Concerning the controversy at The Hideout, you seem to minimize the claims made on Instagram by former employee Mykele Deville that he was subjected to racism. You’re skeptical because his complaints were not neatly laid out like a legal brief, filled with specific details, times and dates. But people do not go about their daily lives wearing recording devices or taking note of when and exactly how they are insulted or humiliated. So it’s natural that his reports lack detail.
The experience of having one's dignity, self-respect and/or manhood insulted can combine to diminish one's ability to structure a complaint that bears up under journalistic scrutiny.
Questioning — interrogating — a claim is not the same as minimizing. I do not claim to know the truth here. Instead, again, I claim that Deville’s allegations lack the completeness and specificity that a fair-minded person ought to demand before taking action against those whom he has accused of malign conduct
He declines to give interviews during which he would answer the sort of logical follow-up questions that any fact finder might ask. And it seems that no one — including the owners of the Hideout — is talking on the record. The assumptions people make from all this silence clearly follow their preconceptions. But the assumption that asking for more information before coming to a conclusion is somehow racist or a denial of Deville’s lived experiences is shocking.
Jake H. — I think you won that debate, yelling match, whatever it was, about the Hideout on Ben Joravsky’s podcast by a mile. I'm tempted to say that the Hideout meltdown is unbelievable, but it's all too believable these days. See the recent controversy at Victory Gardens Theater. Progressives can't have nice things anymore. They're too busy eating their own. I want to go back to when "allies" meant the good guys in WWII.
I didn’t get as much mail as I thought I would about that raucous podcast and I’m more than eager to hear from people who thought Ben got the better of me. Just not on Twitter. I will not engage with critics on Twitter, which may not be a hard promise to keep, as the next letter suggests.
Cassidy K. — What will happen to the Tweet of the Week poll if Twitter goes under, as some are predicting?
If Twitter goes under or if so many users desert that I have an even harder time than I’m now having curating worthy finalists, I’ll likely end up abandoning the poll and looking for other ways to highlight online humor. The idea for the poll began nearly 10 years ago with the “Fine Lines” feature in my old Tribune blog in which I highlighted verbal cleverness that was often simply wonderful turns of phrase. So many of those lines were from Twitter that I turned it into a click poll.
Reverting to Fine Lines would be an option. Another would be to revisit, for a time at least, the best of the best entries from over the years.
Steven K. — I hope Word Court becomes a regular feature in PS. Misuse and mispronunciation of various words and phrases are one of my pet peeves, and exposure of such ghastly abominations out into the sunlight provides for a kind of catharsis.
I will take that under advisement. It’s a fun feature to write. I’ll take nominations for prosecutions in comments or via email.
Ya gotta see these tweets!
I often run across tweets that rely on visual humor and so can’t be included in the Tweet of the Week contest (the template I use for that poll does not allow me to include images). Here are a few good ones I’ve come across recently:
Vote for your favorite. I’ll share the winner in Thursday’s main edition.
There’s still time to vote in the conventional Tweet of the Week poll!
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Why do you frequently chide John Kass? It seems that you single him out as the target of your one-up-manship.
I think that it’s misleading to suggest that Democratic election denial was limited merely to the voices of Clinton and Abrams. Denial of the the legitimacies of both Trump and W’s presidencies was and continues to be gospel among all the Democrats that I know, Trump because of supposed Russian meddling in ‘16, Bush because the Supreme Court halted the Florida recount in 2000. Sometimes they diverge from this path long enough to blame Jill Stein and Ralph Nader for swinging the ‘16 and ‘00 elections to Trump and Bush, but for the most part, they just insist that those elections were stolen outright by the Republicans. And while it’s true that the Democrats never did anything as extreme as siccing a zombie horde on the Capitol to overturn an election, I do recall that there was a lot of chatter within progressive echo chambers in the weeks following November 8th, 2016 in which it was being urged for electors to refuse to pledge their votes for Trump for certification. Not to resort to what about-ism, but it’s clear that election denial is not the exclusive domain of the MAGA bunch, and consistent refusal to acknowledge election results will only expedite our democracy’s demise. I didn’t want either Trump or Bush to become president, but I didn’t see the benefit of denying that they were once they were elected.