Howard Kurtz - Specter Skates - washingtonpost.com

Howard Kurtz writes: "There was, of course, no way to predict that Bush's second term would be sunk by Katrina, bloody chaos in Iraq and a financial meltdown that would require a massive bank bailout."

Oh really? I admit that back in 2000 there was no way that anyone could have predicted that Bush's second term would have been sunk by bloody chaos in Iraq. But the failure of the war was already apparent by the 2004 election. That is why Howard Dean was a serious contender for the nomination. If anything the situation in Iraq improved after 2004. What folk reacted against was the fact that their original support for the war had been obtained through lies.

Katrina, being a natural disaster was genuinely unpredictable. But the indifference, incompetence and cronyism it exposed were visible to anyone who bothered to look from day one of the Bush administration.

The extent of the financial meltdown was mostly a surprise, but plenty of bloggers had been warning of the CDO issue for years and Warren Buffet had dubbed them 'Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction'.

What Kurtz really means is that nobody Howard Kurtz knows and talks to predicted any of this stuff and he cannot imagine a world in which his circle of beltway cronies might not know what is really going on.