O'Connor said she was going to retire at the end of the session.
The odds were about 99.9 to 0.01 that Rehnquist was not going to resign. When Kristal made the prediction the Chief Justice had been diagnosed for some time and he had not resigned. If a person diagnosed with terminal cancer does not resign at diagnosis, that person is not going to resign until death. People who have hopes of survival quit to devote all their faculties to survival. Those that accept death try to live and work as normally as possible until the day they die or become comatose.
A call to any oncologist or radiologist could have informed anyone what Rehnquist was going to do and how long he was very likely going to live. It was as predictable as the sun comes up in the morning and goes down at night.
Any analyst with a brain knows to call doctors to learn what a very sick person will likely do. To find out what an indicted person will do, call a good lawyer. To predict what a politician will do in any circumstance, call a good politician. To predict how a judge will rule call lawyers who have practiced before his bench. It ain't rocket science.
Anyone who wanted to know what was going to happen, could have easily did what Kristal did. The fact that few if any reporters did, only proves that most reporters are not very skilled or bright.
Kristol has a very bad track record. He is wrong a very large percentage of the time. If you plot what Kristal predicts you will find he just tends to take positions opposite to whatever most of the press is saying at the time he predicts. If he is right he makes a big deal of it. If he is wrong few, if any, remember and he never mentions it.
Most of the media are wrong about half the time. Kristol is wrong the other half.
The last time I heard Kristol get it wrong was when he said Bush blew it in the Presidential debates, including the last one where Bush cleaned Kerry's clock. Kristol sided with Mara Liasson, of all people.
Most of the media are wrong about half the time. Kristol is wrong the other half.
That's funny. I take it you don't like Kristol much. I'm neutral about him. Sometimes he has good inside sources, sometimes he guesses rights, sometimes he doesn't. Like most of us do. But he has political savvy and thus often guesses right. Politics is an art, not a science.