[Nicholas Stix: Weighing in at 181 words, this is the most succinct and eloquent column I’ve ever seen from Krugman. Of course, I happily go years at a time without reading the man. My critierion for judging his propagandistic productions is this: How much of his readers’ time has he wasted? He could easily make all of his columns this brief, but his communist publisher, Pinch Sulzberger, demands more “wordage.”]
September 11, 2011, 8:41 am
The Years of Shame
By Paul Krugman
The Conscience of a Liberal
New York Times
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.
A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?
The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.
I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.
[N.S.: That's Krugman talking, not me!]
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