Moron Alert: Beware Ben Stein

TW: Ben Stein is an actor of limited resume, author of limited talent and a vacuous pundit on investing, politics and "intelligent" design. Naturally he is a Republican. Naturally he most frequently appears on Fox. He is a prime example of one of those pundits who is so bad that if it were possible he would be charged with malpractice. Alas the standards of punditry are so low as to preclude successful prosecutions.

From Felix Salmon at Portfolio:

"...I don't think Stein actually has a policy in mind when he writes...things; he's just bullshitting, like he does on television, in the expectation that if he sounds authoritative, no one will notice that his words make no sense at all. The tactic seems to be working, too, at least when it comes to the readers who matter most: his editors at the New York Times. Maybe they were bludgeoned into insensibility by Stein's sequence of obnoxious observations:

High-end restaurants, like my favorite, Mr. Chow in Beverly Hills, are still almost impossible to get into... A friend in real estate in California has written to me that "the recession has destroyed our wealth," adding: "We are essentially bankrupt." ...The house across from ours in Beverly Hills was sold two years ago and leveled to build a house twice as big; the lot sits empty and is again for sale...My Cadillac dealer down here in the desert, near Palm Springs, is constrained by the credit crisis...

There is nothing here -- nothing -- of the remotest interest to Stein's readers. This is the business-page equivalent of Larry King's unlamented column in USA Today: a concatenation of insipid banalities, published for no reason other than the fact that the author has some kind of celebrity status..."