POST HOC, NEC ERGO PROPTER HOC. Most economists understand this, the general populace does not, notes Econo Pundit. The post may be half in jest. Perhaps Stanley Fish's Road Map to the White House also is, although the Chicago Sun-Times treated it as straight news in its Thursday print edition. Get this, it's Dean Fish on the adverts the Donks should have run more aggressively (one of the local Donk court intellectuals was circulating something like it among the faculty at Northern Illinois University): "The ads on the economy could be a version of the ads the party should have run a thousand times a day in 2000. Uncluttered, black and white, with good production values and someone like James Earl Jones or James Garner or Sam Elliott saying, "The last time someone named George Bush was president, the nation's deficit was ___, the unemployment numbers were ___, and the stock market stood at ___. Now, after eight years of a Democratic administration the corresponding figures are ___." Yes, and how much of that tax revenue was capital gains taxes on stocks trading at 30-300 times earnings, reflected in the major market indices, and totally unsustainable (even Paul Krugman noted that.) Postmodern accounting, I love it. Fish goes on: "The ad on the environment could be largely visual (and in color): pictures of land before and after it was drilled for oil or strip-mined, wetlands disappearing in the wake of developers' bulldozers, water with arsenic levels marked in red, forests detimbered, public lands given to private special interests, children forlornly playing on concrete slabs, and then the slogan (delivered by Steven Segal) 'This land used to be your land; don't you want it back?'

To be sure, this would be crude hit-and-run, no details, no nuance, relentlessly negative, no positive proposals. But that's what's good about it. The message is so simple no one could mistake it; and after a short while no one will forget it. And not only does it do the defining-the-party job, it does the unifying job
." Leaving aside the obvious point that if it's your land, you ought to be able to drain the swamp, clear the brush, build a house, or extract the minerals thereunder, it also has the effect of defining the Donks as "I've got mine" elitists happy to stop any further development along their lakeshores or in their suburbs.

Perhaps Dean Fish has provided an explanation for why there are so many unemployed or underemployed humanities Ph.D.s: anyone can write an essay that gives bulls*** a bad name, and a few can prosper by it. Thus, many try. It's the same delusion that grasps a lot of kids with a good jump shot.