Forgiveness

You blunder. Maybe you said the wrong thing at the worst time, or locked yourself out of the house, or ate donuts instead of hot oatmeal. Or perhaps you blundered onto the front page of every newspaper in the country by writing a best selling true story that turned out to be fake. Maybe you made worldwide news when you secretly leaked confidential government information and were subsequently forced to resign.

If you are Karl Rove, after being forced out of the White House, you simply re-launch yourself as a journalist. Rove is now a Fox News analyst, and a contributor to Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal. Last week he was named the number one most influential pundit in the United States by the London Telegraph.

If you are James Frey, author of the bestselling and disgraced novel “A Million Little Pieces”, you simply write another brilliant book. Which is now on bookshelves everywhere, titled “Bright Shiny Morning”.

Rove and Frey did not become different people, they just kept doing the kind of work they were best at. It may not be the path they set out on, but an unwavering belief in their own talent keeps pushing them toward the same finish line.

There is something eerily similar about the top pundits on the Telegraph’s list. Following Rove is Chris Matthews, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh. Three out of the top four rated pundits are all college drop-out’s who have a brilliant knack for surviving scandal. Like Rove, Limbaugh not only survived his prescription drug abuse scandal, he avoided both jail and obscurity. His voice is as influential today as during the conservative revolution he helped launch while Bill Clinton was President.

Sean Hannity started his career in scandal when he was fired from his first radio volunteer job at UC Santa Barbara for allegations of gay bashing. Hannity came under fire for hosting two shows featuring a book by conservative Gene Antonio, who argued that AIDS could be spread by casual contact like coughing and spitting. Hannity subsequently promoted himself as “the most talked about college radio host in America” and got hired at a much more prominent radio station that ultimately led to his Fox News career.

Hannity has ambition that is nothing less than making “Hannity’s World” a reality. In fact, Hannity has even launched his own dating service called “Hannidate”, so that conservatives can find each other and make new families. Perhaps as a result of his early gay scandal, Hannidate includes same sex love arrangements. It was hard for me to believe that Hannity was interested in matchmaking for lesbians, so I did a quick lesbian search on the site. My match was a woman who enjoys watching roller derby as well as listening to talk radio, “especially Sean Hannity whose voice encouraged me to embrace my sexuality”. I don’t know how to respond to that, except maybe to forward it to a lesbian comic like Kate Clinton to see if she might find it useful.

The one sure thing is that we will all blunder, big or small, on or off the airwaves. In the end it’s not always the blunder that matters, it’s where we allow the blunder to take us that is, perhaps, the true revelation.

Coming up tomorrow: I write about the top women pundits.