On the latest edition of The Mark Steyn Show, I begin with The New York Times' and other media's lack of self-awareness about how they got everything wrong these last eighteen months. If I were in their position, I think I'd pause before charging straight ahead and getting the post-election period as wrong as the pre-election. But apparently not.
By way of contrast, here's me on Tuesday August 18th 2015 - or just two months after Donald Trump announced his candidacy, back when everyone was saying don't worry, he's got a ceiling of 15 per cent, he'll be gone long before Iowa, etc:
The takeaway, courtesy of this Fox News headline:
Steyn: Trump Has as Good a Shot as Anybody at Winning the General Election
That was 15 months before Election Day.
"The Republican establishment needs to consider the fact that this guy is a serious leading candidate. He could well win the nomination and he has as good a shot as anybody else at actually winning the general election," Steyn said.
Did I get everything right? No. Me on Hillary:
I don't think she'll be the candidate either, Sean. I think that is the way to bet...
Well, if I had bet, I'd have lost. In mitigation, if the Democrat nominating process were not rigged, Bernie would have won. Likewise, if instead of bleating "I'm sick of your damn emails" he'd had have had the killer instinct to do to Hill what Trump did to Jeb, Bernie would have won.
But I'm always aware of what I called right and what I got wrong. And, if I'd been as wrong as The New York Times et al were about this race until approximately 10.30pm Eastern on election night, I'd be very wary of blundering through Trump's first hundred days with the same indestructible tunnel vision.
~Also on the most recent Mark Steyn Show, and also on the subject of media dereliction, I talked to Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer about their brilliant and shaming new book on mass murderer Kermit Gosnell. Here's what I had to say about him a few years back:
During the trial of "Dr" Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia reproductive-rights provider, the blogger Pundette compiled a list of questions she hoped that prosecuting counsel might ask him:
'Why did you routinely suction out the brains and crush the skulls of babies after they were fully delivered?'
Indeed. Usually the suctioning of the brains and crushing of the skull has to occur when the "calvarium" is still in the uterus. If you do it on the table, people might get the icky idea that it's infanticide or something. So the trick is to get to the head before it's cleared the cervix...
But Kermit Gosnell wasn't that good a doctor. So he preferred just to snip the spinal column. Which certainly kills the fetus. But then he additionally suctioned out the brain and crushed the skull.
Why? To make sure the dead baby was really, truly dead? Or just because he could? Or, like "Dr" Nucatola, once you've de-humanized what you do to get through the day, and you've decided that killing a healthy gurgling newborn isn't really killing at all, why restrict yourself to merely killing her once when you can kill her thrice? The Pundette posed another question of "Dr" Gosnell:
'Why did you chop off and preserve baby hands and feet and display them in jars?'
Which he did, like pickled eggs by the cash register of an English pub. There's no compelling medical reason for "Dr" Gosnell's extensive collection, but bottled baby feet certainly make a novelty paperweight or doorstop.
In the end he never took the stand, and the Pundette was obliged to provide her own response. "I think we already know the answer," she wrote. "He enjoyed it."
Kermit Gosnell was the most successful mass murderer in American history, but because he was a "women's health care provider" nobody knows that. The case barely made the papers. The enterprising and indefatigable Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney are crowdfunding a feature film about Gosnell mainly because no Hollywood studio or TV network ever will.
Ann and Phelim's new book is terrific, and the film will be well worth the wait.
~Stay tuned for more TV later this week, and more radio tomorrow, Thursday, when I'll be back behind the Golden EIB Microphone of a certain Number One radio show...
