As all the media commentary about impeachment, and particularly Nancy Pelosi's curious move, rolls out and gets reposted on social media, the following thought has been at the forefront of my mind.
Media people are paid to write essays, to write them quickly in response to current events, and to sound authoritative and certain. Actually being right doesn't count for anything. Through random luck, any non-idiot and some idiots will turn out to be right occasionally. Like psychics, they can remind us of the times they're right and count on us to most likely not remember - or find ways to excuse - when they're wrong.
Nobody gets paid to be tentative, even though they often don't have time to ruminate on the issues long enough to have justified certainty in their arguments. This is especially true when we're all in new territory and struggling to figure out what it means.
In other words, punditry is an art of bullshitting about your level of knowledge, and as it becomes an accustomed act I suspect it becomes a comfortable one, so much so that the pundit loses awareness of bullshitting and comes to believe in their own bullshit, to think they really have particular insight.
But we have never had the withholding of impeachment articles before. It's an unmitigated issue, so nobody - literally nobody (notice my pretence at certainty there) - actually knows what it means. But honest intellectually tentative discussions don't sell clicks. Bullshit certainty does.
I've also seen claims that Nancy Pelosi has made a strategic mistake. Possibly she has, and if it turns out that way those authors can crow about their understanding of naked power politics. But notice this is rather a binary claim - she made a mistake or didn't - and random guessing at such events will allow the pundit to crow their expertise half the time, often enough to easily obscure the other half the time when they were wrong. But they won't have performed any better than if they tossed a coin.
Now ask how many of these pundits are experienced political operatives from a family of political operatives. How many have actually been in the trenches and won as many battles as she's won? And based on that answer who's likely to be right, the pundit or Pelosi?
I'm betting on Pelosi, even though I only have a guess at her thinking, simply because she's proved her strategic chops and the pundits haven't. But of course I could lose that bet. But again, nobody pays for realistic expressions of uncertainty.
So the takeaway from this is, take every damn thing you read about politics in general, and this impeachment process in particular, with enough salt to wreck your blood pressure forever.