Writing at the DailyKos, Hunter has articulated an insightful and inspiring essay about the embarrassingly inadequate pundit class in American media. It really needs to be read in full, but here are a few choice excerpts:

• “What, and pardon my French, the flying baguette is going on in our media when large swaths of the pundit class, lethargic and addled, can’t figure out that the manipulation of our very system of justice itself…is not merely a political concern, but one with rather substantial implications towards the very way American democracy is practiced?”
• “…there is a special place in hell for anyone who, at any point, figured that America should elect their President according to who they’d like to “have a beer” with, or opined in the national media that such reasoning was anything but a godforsaken sophistry.”
• “…we’ve got possibly the least intelligent, most buffoonish President we’ve had in a generation (elevating all others as paragons of comportment and adroitness in the comparison), a man whose daily struggles with English are a window into a mind untarnished with complex thought, a man whose lack of understanding of foreign policy issues has knocked the wind from even those brought in to educate him on the subjects, a man whose daily pronouncements give trembling comedians ice cream headaches as they try to ingest the glory of it all.”
• “…there is little evidence that the Washington pundit media ranks any higher on the competence scale than the fool-riddled government they purport to cover. Intelligence, is, shall we say, not held in high regard, in our national debate. Intellectualism is scorned: knowledge, such as the environmental knowledge that Gore was able to rattle off with little difficulty during the millennial American campaign, is seen as pushy, or snobbish, or gauche. It is decidedly unappreciated.”

The condensed version identifies a trio of pundit shortcomings: Heatherism, bias, and stupidity. But I don’t want to spoil it for you. Go read the whole thing.