Didn't we learn ANYTHING in 2000?

In a journalism career that spanned parts of four decades, I had plenty of opportunities for embarrassment, and took advantage of many of them.
Nearly every blush, to be honest, was self-inflicted. I cringe now when I read some of the stuff I wrote Back Then, though for the record I'm still pretty proud of my forecast in 1988 that George Bush The First would be a reviled one-termer.
The No. 1 grovel-inducer of my professional life, though, as well as the second-place finisher, both were committed by big-J Journalism as an entity, and I think it's about to step on its crank again.
Just to get them out of the way:
No. 1, hands down, was the way the national media kowtowed to Bush II after the World Trade Center attacks. For a couple of years, the administration got no criticism. Subvert the Constitution, invade the wrong country, lose track of its primary target and then declare that Osama bin Missing wasn't so important after all--the "liberal" national media bought it all, faithfully passed along the party line and covered up more holes than a barrel of Spackle. Things got so bad that when journalists finally started doing their jobs again, a lot of people cited it as evidence of a liberal media conspiracy. Even now, some portray dissent as a form of treason.
No. 2 was the coverage of the 2000 presidential election, the early prediction of victory for Al Gore (who did, lest we forget, actually win), then the cack-handed failure to explain the mechanism of the forecast. There was a national epidemic of self-flagellation, mass donning of hair shirts and a blizzard of solemn vowing: We've learned our lesson, the media swore. We'll never do that again.
Yet here we are in 2008, and those same media have it figured out: It's over for Hillary Clinton and John McCain; Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee will fight it out for the White House. . . .
Oh, no, wait: That was last week. This week it's over for Obama and Huckabee; clearly, the battle will be between Clinton (whose one-loss campaign supposedly was "resurrected" by its current one-straight win streak) and McCain. And next week . . . who knows? But it will change again, and the experts will realign.
To be honest, I'm trying not to pay much attention to this yet. I know I'm going to vote for the Democrat no matter who it is because they're all palatable and all the Republicans are nuts except Romney the Robot, who's likely to get a boost in Michigan but then figures to sink slowly, slowly in the West. I mean, Mike Huckabee?
The fluttering fancies of the media, though, ought to disturb us all. Judgment, patience and reason seem to have gone the way of grammar, vocabulary and syntax: When they crop up here and there, you're never sure if it happened on purpose or if there were just enough monkeys banging on enough keyboards to get it right.