It has been an irony-filled couple days for the pundit class.
First, we had David Brooks bemoaning the dismantling of government entities and public institutions designed to combat big problems. This, from a guy who has made it his business for years to tout the heroic qualities of Ronald Reagan and those who followed in Ronnie's footsteps, the very people who hate government, hate unions and hate any organization that looks out for the general welfare of the citizenry.
Brooks has spent years as a voice for those who sought to, as Grover Norquist famously put it, shrink government enough that it can be "drown in the bathtub."
The fact that Brooks could pen such a lament without the least bit of self-awareness of his role in the destruction of these government agencies and public institutions was hilarious, as the comment section at the Times proved. (Well worth reading for the laughs.)
Today delivers a second punch of pundit irony in David Gregory's lashing of Beltway media as "lazy." This, from a guy who couldn't be bothered to acquaint himself with facts before interviews, preferring to spout tired, disproven talking points on everything from Obamacare to foreign policy. Arguably the laziest host/pundit of the Sunday morning talk circuit, Gregory provided some unintended comic relief with this description of himself summation of Beltway political media:
“In Washington political journalism the narrative gets set, and it gets set early and built on. And things that fight the narrative get harder to report out, I think, often because of laziness in media,” Gregory said. “I think that the media…has gotten very attached to the idea that Washington is so dysfunctional and that the country is so frustrated with it. There is a self-fulfilling part of that.”
Good lord, could he really
not see himself in these remarks? The ever-sleazy Dylan Byers of
Politico recounts Gregory's remarks to a roomful of self-important Beltway types at the -- wait for it --
No Labels National Strategic Agenda meeting (
cough!) without noting whether there were guffaws from the crowd.
It's been a great couple of days for irony.
Since these things always come in threes, I am going to predict that in the next couple of days, Bill Kristol will confidently predict that if we go back into Iraq with ground troops, we will be greeted with showers of rose petals from grateful throngs of Iraqis.