Idiot Savants

It turns out that the word pundit has a Hindi origin and means a learned person or expert. And a synonym for pundit is savant. I was watching the Super Tuesday results last night and was struck by the stupidity of the pundits on CNN. I will concede that many pundits on both sides of the political spectrum qualify as idiots but wow, Hilary Rosen on CNN was the poster girl last night.

I spent most of my time watching on FoxNews but was enjoying the race between them and CNN to see who could update Ohio results faster. CNN had their pundits in-house to analyze the results.   As CNN dissected Ohio county be county it became obvious that Rick Santorum was cleaning up in rural counties and Mitt Romney won the major, urban counties.

This fact led Hilary Rosen to deduce that this will be a problem for the Republicans in the general election, if Romney is the candidate, because the urban counties are where Obama is strong. She is absolutely entitled to her opinion but she, as all pundits today do, states this as a indisputable fact and no one else on the CNN panel even questions it! (speak up Ari Fleischer)

How about this scenario? Those rural counties in Ohio trend pretty strongly Republican. They are not at all likely to vote for Obama no matter who is opponent is. So Mitt Romney will get their votes plus a fair share from the urban counties. This would actually be a good thing for Republicans. And not a peep out of the other pundits at the table.

Democratic pundits like Hilary Rosen are trying to frame the election by making suspect analysis like this seem like absolute fact and all of the other pundits just fall in line. We should just start calling them savants instead of pundits. That way the term idiot will just roll off the tongue.