The Quick and the Dead provides a useful lesson which Pharyngurl, to say nothing of many others, would do well to absorb:
Vox Day serves me crow
here,with a rich mole poblano, re my comments on Amanda Marcotte, late of the John Edwards campaign. As a blogger, I really should have known better than to take words at face value: Edwards is a politician, his lips were moving, therefore he was lying.
Too true. The Quick and the Dead goes on to offer some reasonable after-the-fact perspective on the debacle as well. Now look, there is nothing shameful with being wrong. Everyone screws up from time to time, there are certainly some particularly idiotic mistakes that I have made that I really don’t like to think about.
But one must face up to one’s mistakes if one is to avoid repeating them. Had Bush lost the election, had the Republicans gone from strength to strength instead of peaking and taking a dive like the 2000 NASDAQ, I would have cheerfully admitted that I was wrong. If the Lizard Queen is not elected President in 2008, (a prospect which is looking much more likely than it was when I first announced the inevitability of her victory), I will not only confess error but try to figure out where I went wrong.
It’s not that hard, really. For example, it is looking highly probable that my early surmise about Pataki serving as the 2008 fall guy was wrong. Now, I can pretend I never wrote that and blithely post future predictions two years prior to the next presidential nominations, or I can note my error, ascertain why I was wrong and attempt to use that information to do better next time.
Concealing error only increases the odds of future failure.