Noboru Wataya

In the novel I'm currently reading, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, I came across a passage that stuck out at me. The narrator is describing his brother-in-law, and it seemed to describe in perfect detail what annoys me most about politicians and political commentators you constantly come across on the cable news channels:

Consistency and an established worldview were excess baggage in the
intellectual mobile warfare that flared up in the mass media's tiny time
segments, and it was his great advantage to be free of such things. He had
nothing to protect, which meant that he could concentrate all his attention on
pure acts of combat. He needed only to attack, to knock his enemy down. Noboru
Wataya was an intellectual chameleon, changing his color in accordance with his
opponent's, ad-libbing his logic for maximum effectiveness, mobilizing all the
rhetoric at his command.Trotting out the technical jargon was another forte of
his. No one knew what it meant, of course, but he was able to present it in such
a way that you knew it was your fault if you didn't get it. And he was always
citing statistics, but if you stopped to think about it afterward, you realized
that no one had questioned his sources or their reliability.

And so Noboru Wataya came to be seen as one of the most intelligent
figures of the day. Nobody seems to care about consistency anymore. All they
look for on the tube were the bouts of intellectual gladiators; the redder the
blood they drew, the better. It didn't matter if the same person said one thing
on Monday and the opposite on Thursday.

I can't stand how hypocritical these people can be. They just love to hear the sound of their own voice and the paycheck that comes with their myriad of appearances. Go get a brain for once or better yet a life. Stop wasting my time spouting out your inane statements and idiotic "beliefs."