Fox News watchers may be wondering where frequent conservative commentators Karl Rove and Dick Morris have been lately. The two have vanished from the airwaves after they predicted for months and months that Mitt Romney would defeat Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election.

Now, Rove and Morris reportedly can no longer appear on the conservative news channel without the approval of the network’s top management. According to New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman, that edict came from none other than Fox News President Roger Ailes himself.

That the two were not accurate election forecasters like The New York Times’ Nate Silver is perhaps the main reason they’ve been benched by Fox News’ top brass.

The Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz:

Rove drew national ridicule for challenging Fox’s own projection that Obama had won Ohio, and with it a second term. In that moment, he became a symbol of a partisan operative not willing to accept an uncomfortable reality.

Morris got so carried away in his cheerleading for the GOP ticket that he predicted Mitt Romney would win in an electoral landslide.

(The other all-star Fox pundit, Sarah Palin, seems to be making only infrequent appearances now that her political star has dimmed.)

Perhaps this is just a cooling-off period—Rove and Morris did pop up a few times after Election Day—until we plunge off the fiscal cliff or something and both men can be brought back as the memories of 2012 recede. Or perhaps, contrary to conventional wisdom, some pundits do pay a penalty for being spectacularly wrong.

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— Posted by Tracy Bloom.

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#2012 election#dick morris#fox news#karl rove#roger ailes