Lying in Ponds

Since I’m so far behind, these will have to be a little brief:

1. Mark Steyn was so certain that Republicans would hold both the House and Senate this year that he predicted it three times (in October 2005, in June 2006, and again in September 2006). The Democratic Party actually gained 30 House and 6 Senate seats, taking control of both chambers. We’ll mark all three predictions as “Very Wrong” in our list.
2. Another Mark Steyn prediction suffered a similar fate — he said in October 2005 that “Baby Assad’s fall will not be long now”. Since Bashar al-Assad is still the president of Syria as far as we know, that’s another “Very Wrong” for Mr. Steyn.
3. Frank Rich boldly predicted that the movie Brokeback Mountain would be a “runaway phenomenon“. The results were somewhat mixed. The movie made lots of money, and won critical acclaim and tons of awards. But the box office results were good but not great. It finished as the 22nd highest-grossing movie released in 2005, between Saw II and Monster-In-Law (Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith was #1). Brokeback Mountain was shown in fewer theaters than any of the films with higher grosses, but even on a per-theater basis, it earned about 30% less money than King Kong, the movie that Mr. Rich explicitly used for comparison. So let’s just call the outcome of the prediction “Mixed”.
4. I put Molly Ivins‘ statement that “Then whom do we blame when we lose the republic?” on the prediction list, but upon further reflection, it’s probably not fair to call it an actual prediction. I guess it’s just a rhetorical question, based on the kind of exaggeration one would expect from Ms. Ivins, ranked as the most partisan Democratic pundit this year. So let’s just designate that one “Not Really a Prediction” and forget about it.
5. Frank Rich is building a record of impressively bad predictions concerning the Bush administration — he was certain in July 2005 that Karl Rove was about to resign because of the Plame case. Then in June of this year, he made one-and-a-half election predictions, neither of which have panned out. The first was: “While the Democrats dither about Iraq, you can bet that the White House will ambush them with its own election-year facsimile of an exit strategy, dangling nominal troop withdrawals as bait for voters.” But the number of U.S. troops in Iraq actually increased by about 10% (PDF file) from June to the election. Discussions of future troop levels before the election were mostly put on hold while waiting for the Iraq Study Group report. He also speculated that Karl Rove might push Donald Rumsfeld out of office in time to influence the election (the change was actually announced the day after the election). So we’ll give him another “Very Wrong” rating.

To summarize, I wouldn’t recommend betting the ranch on any Mark Steyn or Frank Rich predictions. I don’t think we should be surprised that pundits often tend to make mistakes when predicting the worst for their political opponents — partisanship and wishful thinking are significant barriers to accurate analysis. The prediction list is in the right sidebar; eventually I’ll try to organize and present it in a better way.