Of Course!!! I always wondered where they got these “experts”

Now I know how they’re able to get through an hour-long news-yelling show without uttering a single, collective, verifiable fact:

 

Meet the make-believe strategists of TV

Jane Fleming Kleeb went on “The O’Reilly Factor” two weeks ago to talk about global warming, a topic on which, by her own admission, she’s hardly an expert. So who, then, is Jane Fleming Kleeb? Well, according to the Chyron that flashed across the screen after Bill O’Reilly introduced her, she is a “Democratic strategist.” But she’s hardly that, either.

“The first time they called me a strategist,” Fleming Kleeb recalls, “I literally laughed on TV.”

She kept a straight face this time, however, because she has grown accustomed to the misbegotten label. It all started in 2006, when Fleming Kleeb, the deputy director of Young Voter PAC, was asked to appear on MSNBC and Fox to talk about young voters. She did well enough in those early forays that she was soon brought back on the air to discuss a wider range of political matters.

Among the things that the proliferation of TV cable news has wrought is slackened standards for what constitutes a political strategist. Now used as a catchall tag for a whole host of people with varied — and often peripheral — backgrounds in electoral politics, the term has all but lost its meaning.

As Fleming Kleeb tells it, this group of make-believe strategists has become something of a pundits club, with participants working together to compensate for each other’s experiential or informational deficiencies.

“There is a small group of us that rely on one another to help each other with talking points,” she says. “Then I have a small group of friends who make sure it’s on message with the Democratic talking points.”

“It truly is about availability,” says the cable news executive. “Everyone is always interested in having a wide spectrum of guests, whether that’s a woman or people of color, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that’s the reason. The principal reason is the amount of hours to fill.”

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Good Lord!