The excellent Kathleen Geier — give this woman a bigger job! — has a terrific piece on pundit sins in the runup to the Iraq war, which has applicability to lots of other issues too.

I say “sins”, not just “mistakes”, advisedly. People have a right to be wrong (although they don’t have a right to be taken seriously, or employed in the opinion-giving business, thereafter); they don’t have a right to be wrong, at the expense of other peoples’ lives or livelihoods, for petty, personal reasons. Yet that’s exactly what happened among the war-mongers. As Geier says,

The inability of these pundits to think straight may simply be a symptom of narcissism poisoning. For them, invasion and war were all about presenting their preferred face to the world — and to themselves.

If you’re in the pundit business, you have a moral obligation always to second-guess your own motives, to ask yourself “Am I saying this because I’ve really thought it through? Or am I just feeding my ego?” And let’s be clear: ego-feeding happens on the left as well as the right, on matters economic and social as well as on questions of war and piece.

Do I fall into the sin of self-centered opinionating? No doubt; I am very much a fallible human being. But I try not to, which includes admitting when I was wrong. Can you say the same of any of the pundits Geier mentions — including those who later changed their tune?