Who are the tea leaf readers?

The former CIA chief tells the President that WMD’s in Iraq are a slam dunk.
Investigative reporters tell us to ignore the government and listen to them.
Pundits who write mostly to each other (and their bosses) pontificate and even predict.
Many in the media decide who should be the next President, and push their candidate. Often it means assassinating with words their candidate’s opponents.
Politicians too often use focus groups and polls to tell us how to be led, and how they will vote accordingly.
Professional spin masters don’t care. They just hire out their services.
The 24/7 news cycle has reduced the standards of reporting, and watching for those who use TV as a news source. As David Brinkley once said, “The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.”

Just how is a country to rule itself? To the cynical, it is a depressing picture.

To the average American, it is a little simpler. We don’t expect a perfect world. The world as it is will do. We will dance with who we came with.

Americans are practical. On matters on national security that affects our families, we tend to ignore the tea leaf readers and use our own common sense. On matters of domestic security, we are more aggressive in our opinions and voting. Immigration and populist issues float to the top these days.

So what are the qualities of the tea leaf readers these days? Are they knowledgeable, experienced, and full of common sense? Or are they just hired by some business boss for their writing skills and political opinion? In the latter case, is the profit line more important than our access to the news? In the case of TV, does being pretty trump all? In the case of the CIA and now the merged intelligence community, do political pressures influence the output?

Most people think this way. That is, being suspicious about what we read, listen to, and see on TV. But in all this suspicion there is one constant. It is our elected government. No one wakes up in the morning wanting to do a bad job. I suggest the best people trying to read the tea leaves are our fellow citizens serving in our government. And then we can vote on how they did. Some are better than others.