"Nothing Short of Delusional"

What Mominem said.

Update: Of course, Stephanie Grace found the delusions "refreshing" While in this week's Gambit Clancy Dubos writes, "This is the Ray Nagin we elected in 2002-- Where has he been?"

I suppose Clancy's right about one thing. Ray Nagin is the same Ray Nagin he's always been; just as dishonest as he always was and still pushing ill-conceived crony projects that somehow get sold as "creative reform".

Unfortunately the local punditry is also the same local punditry that pushed Nagin's election in 2002; still willing to ignore much of the fact published in their own papers in favor of any opportunity that comes their way to slay the next dragon or, in this case, lead the proud parade of phony civic boosterism. In order to show I can be as lazy a pundit as any I'll just reprint some of what I said at Adrastos's place earlier.

It's all very lazy. I wonder if they do it on purpose, though. I get the feeling the local punditry believes it important to remind us all that they really really want stuff to get better too. That's how we get Norman Robinson's pining to talk about the "good news" or that Grace column or about 90% of everything Clancy writes.

The problem is that none of these pundits is running for anything. They aren't (or shouldn't) be trying to sell us anything. They're supposed to be reporting on what actually appears to be happening. Instead we get this stupid, self-satisfied cheerleading.

Why do they do this? It may be that it's simply easier... but I think that they're all just a little too image-conscious. They see themselves as "important community voices" or some such juvenillia. Either that or they're all just afraid of being cold-cocked.

Adding... Seriously, I suppose if we were to ask our local columnists to define the purpose of their regular print appearances, would we not get something along the lines of: Columnists provide an informed point-of-view synthesis of the week's news. The rest of the paper should tell you "what" while the columns should at least speculate on the "why".

If we accept this as a reasonable definition of the function of punditry, then shouldn't we expect it to be written from an informed perspective... or at least one that appears to be informed by the actual news these columns appear alongside?

Update: "Crony project" may be too strong a word to use as a descriptor for the nevertheless curious "Reinventing The Crescent" boondoggle. See David's comment here.