Pessimists vindicated! Bwahahaha!

James Wolcott observes that the Chicken Littles are turning out to be, you know, right. Excerpt (and I'm sorry to tell you that the new, improved Movable Type apparently doesn't accept blockquote HTML):

Rooster-crowing optimists contend the media have a sullen disposition to make things look grimmer than they are, harping on the negative while downplaying the underlying positives. The problem with this argument is that in recent years the reality has often proved to be worse than anticipated. Wall Street's idea of a passing storm ended up being a tsunami of pandemic proportion. It was the sunshine salesmen such as Gramm, Steve Forbes, the Fox business-news claque, CNBC host Larry Kudlow, and the editorialists at Investor's Business Daily who helped suck us into this economic mess with their happy talk of "the Goldilocks economy" and the Bush boom as "the greatest story never told," while the forecasts of the naysayers, gloomy prophets, storm-cloud watchers, and motorcycle wraiths from hell went unheeded until it was too late and the subprime contagion took down Bear Stearns, threatening to tumble the entire lending system off the ledge. The alarmists may not have gotten every particular right, but they nailed the big picture with Paul Revere gusto. Among those vindicated: Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor and market observer who earned the title "Dr. Doom" (formerly held by Henry Kaufman) for dire predictions of the credit crisis that panned out with a vengeance. "Over the past year, whenever optimists have declared the worst of the economic crisis behind us," Stephen Mihm wrote in a New York Times Magazine profile, "Roubini has countered with steadfast pessimism. In February, when the conventional wisdom held that the venerable investment firms of Wall Street would weather the crisis, Roubini warned that one or more of them would go 'belly up'--and six weeks later, Bear Stearns collapsed."

Similarly, it was the "Peak Oil" theorists who warned of spiking oil prices and strains on the refinery system, only to be dismissed as amateur nerds and tinfoil-hat chiliasts--until $4-a-gallon gas and winter heating bills brought the new reality home. It was James Howard Kunstler, the author of The End of Suburbia and The Long Emergency, who warned with scourging wit and rococo imagery in his weekly online column that high gas prices, suburban sprawl, decaying infrastructure, the machinations of hedge-fund greedheads, and Wall Street necromancy were converging into a Hurricane Katrina-size "clusterf**k" that would deform the social and political landscape. In his August 25 column, Kunstler wrote, "I'm rather convinced that the carnage on the money scene will be so extreme this fall that the nation will seem to have been transformed from a superpower to a basketcase before November 4th, and that the blame for this state of affairs will be blindingly obvious: the people in charge for the past eight years looted the treasury, destroyed the currency, and left the machinery of capital a smoking wreckage."

Within a month, the carnage Kunstler envisioned not only got worse but gained velocity as mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae required an emergency federal bailout, fabled Merrill Lynch disappeared into the maw of Bank of America, Lehman Brothers went belly-up, A.I.G. was rescued, and the Dow lost 500 points in one day, the worst loss since 2001. Billions of dollars of bad loans devoured by boll weevils, thousands of well-paying jobs liquidated in a single stroke, stock portfolios turning into scarecrows before one's eyes, and who knew what awaited over the next hill?