December 14, 2011
WEBCommentary
Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?
Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.
What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons….
The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.
["The Years of Shame," by Paul Krugman, New York Times, September 11, 2011.]
Weighing in at 181 words, this is the most succinct and eloquent column I’ve ever seen from Krugman. Granted, I happily go years at a time without reading the man. My criterion for judging one of his propagandistic productions is this: How much of my time has it wasted? He could easily make all of his columns this brief, but his communist publisher, "Pinch" Sulzberger, demands more wordage to fill the space between ads. And truth be told, leftists can’t get enough of this stuff, and wonder that anyone can dare to question this Nobel Laureate.
Conversely, neo-conservatives have expressed outrage over this column. Donald Rumsfeld reportedly said he cancelled his subscription to the Times. And at the Washington Post, blogger Jennifer Rubin is up in arms.
Lefty WP blogger Erik Wemple responded by mocking Rumsfeld not once, but on consecutive days.
In “Rumsfeld cancels New York Times subscription: Who cares?,” Wemple insists,
The Krugman stuff, after all, was neither over-the-top nor surprising nor unsubstantiated.
This is the mentality of the John Doe calling himself “Barack Obama” and his supporters.
Mixing her metaphors, Jennifer Rubin responded to Krugman,
One cannot begin to imagine what motivates such hatred and contempt for his countrymen, especially on a day when the overriding theme was unity….
One thing you can say for Krugman: The jewel of the liberal media is revealed to be an intellectual black hole and a spiritual wasteland. No wonder it is a dying enterprise. Its countrymen have better things to do than be insulted by the likes of Krugman.
I wouldn’t overstate the case for unity. If the John Doe calling himself “Barack Obama” avoided swinging rhetorical brickbats that day, it wasn’t out of a sense of national unity or decency, but out of cold political calculations. Krugman was simply saying what “Obama” wanted to say that day, but couldn’t, and so the latter likely farmed the job out to the former. “Obama” and his handlers have been doing this sort of thing since at least spring 2004, when supporters such as then-New York Times columnist Bob Herbert and the editors at the UK-based Economist magazine began sending out trial balloons for his presidential campaign. (Officially, “Obama” was running for the U.S. Senate for the first time but, unbeknownst to the public, his presidential campaign was already underway, under the direction of Svengali David Axelrod.)
I found Rubin’s sanctimony less impressive—especially her comparing Krugman to Joseph McCarthy, replete with the famous money shot from Judge Joseph Welch—than her recalling of an earlier outrage from Krugman when, following the Tucson Massacre, he “accus[ed] the Republicans of sparking mass murder.”
The most important line in Krugman’s screed was the last:
I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.
While publishing viciously dishonest letters from readers attacking its house “conservatives” (the late William Safire, David Brooks), the New York Times has protected its leftwing writers from criticism for at least 20 years through especially heavy-handed censorship on its letters page. Its editors even censor online comments, so that it will seem as if only a tiny minority of troglodytes disagreed with its leftist writers. (During the 1990s, the newspaper prominently placed several of my letters to the editor in the Sunday magazine and Week in Review sections, but whitelisted me sometime during or after 1997, and has more recently put me on its block list for online comments, as well. Thus, if I want to get a letter or comment published, I have to use an alias, via a different computer. One can only imagine how long the Times’ whitelist must be.)
But not even the virtual equivalent of a limousine armored and bullet-proofed against critics is safe enough for Krugman.
Then again, should anyone be surprised by this? I don’t mean “surprised” in the sense of an Erik Wemple. Krugman is both a tenured professor of economics at Princeton, and a “tenured” NYT columnist. He is ensconced in two professional worlds, each of which is dominated by people like himself, who believe that dissenters, no matter how well the latter can defend their positions with facts, logic, and principles, must be silenced, whether by censorship, whitelisting, imprisonment or execution. These people want their critics,’ and the latter’s children to starve.
Lies are every bit as important to the Left’s power as the above-cited forms of oppression. After all, do leftists not always remind us that they are the soul of tolerance, equality, non-discrimination, truth, justice, blah, blah, blah? And so, a commenter at Jennifer Rubin’s blog asserted, against a commenter who had noted that Rubin permitted comments, while Krugman did not,
KurtOvermeyer
TheGJ - you expletive deleted liar. Go straight to where you belong - under a rock. The comments were on for 2 days until creepy jerks like you started with the death threats. You folks are NOT Americans.
9/12/2011 8:44:29 PM EDT
A two-fer, at that: Overmeyer lied both about Krugman permitting comments, and in manufacturing right-wing death threats. In leftwing fantasyland, the threats and murders always come from the Right, but in the real world, they are overwhelmingly the work of Democrats.
But it gets better. Apparently, there is a good chance that Krugman didn’t even write the 9/11 screed that appeared under his name.
Alexis Zarkov, a reader at Larry Auster’s blog writes,
I was long puzzled my [sic] Paul Krugman. Sometimes he would come across in his columns, articles, and books as a rational, intelligent and sensible person. At other times, he comes across as petulant, immature, bilious, and irrational. He contradicts himself…. Who is the real Krugman? What accounts for this Jekyll-Hyde behavior? After reading a New Yorker article about Krugman, I think Mr. Hyde is actually Mrs. Krugman--an angry black woman, Robin Wells. According to the New Yorker, Paul has Robin edit his copy.
From the New Yorker article:
When he has a draft, he gives it to Wells to edit. Early on, she edited a lot--she had, they felt, a better sense than he did of how to communicate economics to the layperson. (She is also an economist--they met when she was a postdoc at M.I.T. and he was teaching there.) But he's much better at that now, and these days she focusses on making him less dry, less abstract, angrier. Recently, he gave her a draft of an article he'd done for Rolling Stone. He had written, "As Obama tries to deal with the crisis, he will get no help from Republican leaders," and after this she inserted the sentence "Worse yet, he'll get obstruction and lies."
Zarkov:
If this article is accurate, then Wells could be the source of the extreme partisanship and anger we find in many of Krugman's publications. I know the angry-black-woman personality type. While intelligent and academically successful (often through affirmative action), she has a chip on her shoulder, and thinks of Republicans and conservatives as racist. In my opinion, Robin is hurting Paul's reputation. If she's behind the 9/11 blog, then this time she's gone too far. I also suspect that Paul can't say no because like many Jewish men, Paul is henpecked. Too bad because I think he's [sic] is basically a sane and intelligent man.
Larry Auster:
This is funny. On a day on which I had posted items about two angry and anti-socially self-assertive black women, Michelle Obama and Serena Williams, who were in the news, a third item I posted, about the insanely angry and hate-filled New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, turns out to be in reality about an insanely angry and hate-filled black woman.
But if this is true, if he has turned over the key writing of his NYT op-eds to another person, isn't that a serious scandal? It would, however, help explain how he writes so many op-eds. It seems to me that almost every time I pick up a Times, there is a Krugman op-ed in it, all of them over-the-top angry in the same Krugman way, which now turns out not to be the Krugman way, if this revelation is correct.
Given that whites turned out to have ghostwritten the pearls of wisdom of black Nobel Prize winners Martin Luther King and “Barack Obama,” there would be no lack of irony, if it turned out that the work of a white Nobel Prize winner had secretly been ghosted by a black woman. And to those leftists who insist that Krugman got his Nobel for his contributions to economics, as opposed to his shrill shilling for the left wing of the Democratic Party, I say, I’ve got a great deal for you on a slightly used bridge.
I have a question for my liar, er, lawyer-readers: If the Krugmans ever have a falling out, would Mrs. Krugman have a legal claim to the family Nobel?
If we were talking about a legitimate newspaper—humor me, here—with any sense of journalistic integrity, there would be an investigation, and should the worst prove true, Krugman would be fired in disgrace, and be finished as a columnist. Granted, the scandal might well furnish his wife with a well-paid, new, second career. But this is the New York Times we’re talking about, a leftwing rag that serves as a punchline, and as the inspiration for journalistic booby prizes. This is the same newspaper whose publisher, after determining that there could be no doubt that it had won a Pulitzer Prize for fraudulent dispatches by reporter Walter Duranty, refused to return the award.
Come to think of it, the best outcome for lovers of real newspapers would be if Krugman is exposed as a fraud, but Sulzberger refuses to fire him. Then we can say, “The New York Times? You mean the Walter Duranty-Jayson Blair-Paul Krugman Times?”
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