The 2012 election was a learning experience for a lot of people. Some learned that you can’t “unskew” polls without, you know, actually conducting polls. Others learned that, while corporations may indeed meet some of the basic conditions of being people,* they still only get one vote, no matter how the CEO pays to get in on the action.
And then there’s Fox News, which finally learned that, unless you’re the weatherman, the news shouldn’t try to predict the future … Or at least that they shouldn’t pay Karl Rove and Dick Morris to try their hands at it anymore.
But, that’s because Karl and Dick are just so bad at it. Even if both knew their calls for a Romney landslide victory were just a stalling tactic while their Super PAC checks cleared, only the most ardent gold-stashing doomsday prepper thought Vice President Paul Ryan was statistically sound.
This doesn’t mean election prognostication is as dead to news networks as sports alchemy — an arcane art that sportscasters practiced as recently as the 1990s, weaving worthless, dense phonemes into catchphrase gold.
It just means that Karl Rove, who consciously decided that dressing like Gordon Gekko is a great way to disguise your past as a Far Side character, and Dick Morris, who sounds like Harvey Fierstein if Harvey was fellating Ayn Rand’s ashes, won’t be able to sell their spectacular brand of bullshit until America forgets about them all over again.
This is a new experience for Rove, who pretty much just transferred lockers over to Fox after Bush’s second term. For Morris, however, this is at least his third rodeo at the Obscurity Dude Ranch** following setbacks with Republicans pre-Clinton and then Democrats post-Clinton.
Nate Silver, however, will remain on call, provided he can give Fox News the stats they want to report. Otherwise, he will continue to mysteriously appear on every other news network that isn’t called “fair and balanced.” No, if there’s one thing for everyone to learn from the 2012 election aftermath, it’s that there is no fairness to facts, nor have two opposing facts ever existed that could be balanced.
*Like people, corporations have names, consume water through ostentatious lobby fountains and have trouble looking women in the eye when they’re talking.
**Geraldo Rivera had a revolving door installed there back in the ’90s.
The self-acclaimed job creators are primarily fact creators, because they don’t like the ones used by others.