What bothers me more than that kind of thing (which doesn't really happen to a large extent, anyway) is the reversals on *issues*. When I found the WR, right-wingers were all convinced that monetary policy was too loose. Sounds crazy now, but it was a really commonly expressed view that hyperinflation was just around the corner. I remember trying to explain the standard view, which was that the purpose of monetary policy is to regulate demand--we need it looser when we have a lot of unused capacity and tighter when we're at capacity and additional demand just drives prices up. Got called a "Bernanke shill" and variations of that for it (
@Wingslaught can attest to that). Then as soon as the election happened, the professional right totally reversed on it, and even with very low unemployment, they were calling for *lower* rates, indicating that the concern was fake all along, and their position really just boils down to, "we should try to hurt the economy when a Democrat is in the WH and help it when a Republican is." The exact same thing happened with fiscal policy, when we were seeing people screech that high deficits caused by the GFC were an existential threat to the country that we needed to address immediately even though unemployment was high and most economists were calling for higher deficits. And then, with no rational justification for a switch, deficits suddenly stopped mattering in November 2016, and the Trump tax cut met almost no opposition from the "deficits are a catastrophe" people.
I really thought that people were just honestly getting things wrong, and that presenting the issues rationally would cause a change. But the immediate 180 that everyone took after the election suggests that at the level of professional pundit, they never bought it, and at the level of the typical WR poster, they just blindly trusted the pundits.
