Sometimes I amaze myself...

Sometimes I stand in awe of my powers of foresight. Most of the time, though, I'm just full of crap.

When "pundits"(defined as "a source of opinion; a critic" in the Free Dictionary...and I have to admit that I am one, albeit a small fry) get things wrong, they don't always admit it. Rush Limbaugh, for example, is famous for saying something then later (sometimes just a few days later) denying that he ever said that. When I was growing up, we used to call that lying.

Another approach is to double-down on your error, perhaps by claiming that you were actually right, that in a right-thinking world you would have been proven right, so it's everyone else's fault that you weren't right. Right?

Yet another approach is to totally ingore your error and hope no one notices. Or cares. Glenn Beck appears to be doing this; just before this past election he said, "I believe Mr. Romney prays on his knees every day...I believe that he's being guided...(a Romney victory would be) a sign from God." It would seem that God let him down...but Glenn isn't talking. At least I can find no evidence of him addressing this issue post-election. And I looked. Hard.

(Though I would have the election results on my side, I am not going to claim that God is a Democrat...but God certainly is no Republican.)

Me? Well, when I'm wrong, I'm wrong. No point in denying it. (All of my blog posts are archived, so what would be the point?) Maybe if I get as popular as Limbaugh and Beck, I can cast a Change Reality spell on the public and ignore my gaffs too (at what level do you get that spell?). But I'm not, so I really have no choice but to own my errors.

1. Sarah Palin, reconsidered: "McCain Chooses Palin (Who?)" 8-29-08

My first big error was back in 2004, when candidate John McCain chose Sarah Palin for his running mate. I said: "...I hadn’t even heard of Sarah Palin when I got up this morning, and have never formed much of an opinion on Alaskan internal politics. So I’m going to give myself, and the country, time to get into the matter before I jump in." Well enough, but I also said: "...it’s a good choice...McCain didn’t cave in to the conservative wing of his party... It’s good to have a woman involved in the race..."

It was good to have a woman in the race, but not that woman. Overall, opps.

My real mistake here was not learning more about Palin before I wrote that article. I didn't know, but could have learned, just how Conservative she was. If I had known more about her past, I would have known just how flaky she was (I take no comfort in the fact that McCain made the same oversight). McCain was pandering to the Conservative wing of his party, and having a woman in the race (from a Republican standpoint, and referring to this particular woman) didn't prove to be such a good thing. Sarah Palin proved to be one more link in the anchor chain that dragged McCain to the bottom.

Ain't hindsight wonderful?

2. Unconventional rethinking: "Conventional Wisdom part III" 9-2-08

Sometimes I make the mistake of ignoring what I write. That was the case with an article dealing with the upcoming Republican convention in 2004. I asked the question (I paraphrase), "Can I report on this fairly, and should I bother to try?" The answer I came up with was "don't worry about it" (paraphrasing again), but I made several observations about the nature of politics: "...we all know that the candidates seldom turn out to be the people they appear to be during the election. I know that campaign promises will be forgotten soon after the election, that a candidate who stands staunchly for or against an issue may stand somewhere else entirely when the confetti is all swept up, that the realities of doing the job may change a candidate’s mind in important, and often disappointing, ways. I’ve seen it happen often enough."

I might be a bit less disappointed today if I had kept that in mind.

My mistake here was in daring to hope that the political mistakes of the past were just that...a thing of the past. Today, I make no attempt to deny that, in many ways, Obama has been a dissapointment. Promises made have not been kept, goals set have not been reached, ideals put forth so boldly have been compromised. But that's just politics-as-usual; I should have seen it coming. I did see it coming, but I chose to ignore it.

3. Never drink and blog: "Faith of the Faithless" 9-6-08

And this all brings me to my biggest mistake...the article I published while I was drunk.

I didn't write the article while I was drunk, but if I hadn't gotten loaded later I never would have published it (sometimes I just need to write about something to work it out in my mind, but for various reasons choose not to publish). It was an article about Atheism, about the public's lack of acceptance for Atheists, and to this day I stand resolutely behind every word of that article.

Almost every word. I also said this: "But Atheists have no advocates; no support networks, no churches, no community centers (well, there is Madalyn Murray O’Hare’s organization but even Atheists seldom listen to them)." And I also said: "This isn’t a call for Atheists United; such an organization would be against our natures..."

Unkind. Untrue. Certainly the kind of thing I would never have published sober. And not the kind of thing I should even have written...but I did.

Someone from an organization called Atheists United (and wasn't I surprised that there was one!) called me on it: "Hello I work for an organization called...Atheists United. Check us out. I think you might find that such an organization does exactly what you describe and it’s not 'against our nature.'" 

I made an immediate and full apology, including an apology to the late Madalyn Murray O'Hare's organization for the unkind things I had written about her/them. Believe me, I would never have published that article had I been sober; this does not excuse me for writing it in the first place.

(Let me point out again that I believed, and still believe, the rest of that article and I defend those sentiments to this day. If I am ashamed to have written part of the article, and I am, it does not diminish my feelings with regard to its remainder.)

Conclusion

This is getting overly long, and I'm only up to September '08. So I'm going to have to revisit this topic in the future. Unfortunately, there's never likely to be a lack of material for such an article. Occasionally I say things that I later regret; we all do, but it does no good to deny our missteps. I made them, and I regret them, but I did say them and made them a part of my body of work, even if they're a blemish on that body.

(By the way: I pulled that title and first line from an article I publish recently, Mental Cleaning Day, in which I documented my process of getting rid of old fragments of articles that were hanging around in my Google account. I wrote the title and opening, then entirely forgot what I was going to write about. But it was too good a title/opening to leave alone, so when I decided to do an article on some of the mistakes in my past articles, it seemed like a good excuse to resurrect it.)

The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.