QandO

September 02, 2004

Krugman: VRWC lives
Posted by McQ

Well it looks like Paul Krugman has finally stepped off into the deep part of the pool.

Per Byron York Krugman was at an event last night where he mapped out how all of this business with Bush is just the result of .... are you ready?

A Vast Right Wing Conspiracy:

"We probably make a mistake when we place too much emphasis on Bush the individual," said Krugman, who received a standing ovation when he was introduced. "This really isn't about Bush. Bush is the guy that the movement found to take them over the top. But it didn't start with him, and it won't end with him. What's going on in this country is that a radical movement...that had been building for several decades, finally found their moment and their man in Bush."

Well of course it is Paul ... its called conservatism. But in Krugman's world anything to the right of Marx is a "radical movement".

Of course the lefty crowd waited breathlessly for their hero to expound on it but this was a book event and, well, Krugman wanted to sell books.

Krugman said he and other liberals had been "asleep" and unaware of the true dimensions of the danger during the years in which President Bill Clinton found himself facing a variety of scandal allegations. But Krugman said there is a "complete continuity" between today's politics and the "campaign of slander and innuendo" against Clinton. "There's complete continuity going back, really, I think — but this is my next book — you really need to go back to Goldwater. A lot of this has to do with civil rights, and the people who don't like them."

Right. While Krugman may have some bona fides in the field of economics, in the case of who is politically responsible for what in the history civil rights he seems "historically challenged".

Finally relenting just a bit, Mr. Krugman let out a little of the secret:

Krugman described the conspiracy as "the coalition between the malefactors of great wealth and the religious right." He offered no further details about who, precisely, is in the conspiracy but said that "substantial chunks of the media are part of this same movement."

Sigh. The old billionaire CEOs and fundy Christian canard with a twist ... "substantial chunks of the media" are now lumped in there. Must mean that dastardly Fox News, loud mouth talk show hosts and those nasty blogger who continually shred Krugman's columns.

"It's a movement that has been building," Krugman told the audience. "The one thing I think that you really have to say is that people on the left — the position formerly known as the center — people like myself have been asleep for a long time. We just didn't take it seriously. We sat through all the Clinton scandals and said oh, you know, there's probably some funny stuff going on there [and] didn't understand the extent to which this movement was being built."

Shhhh ... don't wake the righties, but we lefties have our work cut out for us destroying the VRWC.

The gall of that guy trying to sell the present left as what was once known as the center. Catch a clue Krugman, the reason "conservatism" is growing is because the left abandoned the center and let the right fill the void.

But, its so much easier to blame the VRWC than do a little internal polling and figuring out that maybe the left is the blame.

That wouldn't sell books though. And the left wouldn't accept that thesis anyway. Why? Because they'd have to actually do something and change, and that's a hell of a lot harder to do that blame the other side and whisper about conspiracies.

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