Posted on 06/05/2003 5:42:28 AM PDT by frithguild
IS HE EXAGGERATING? There are some great blogs on Paul Krugman's most recent New York Times column. It's the one in which Krugman asks the rhetorical question,
"Am I exaggerating?"
Here's my non-rhetorical answer: Yes! Ja! Da! Oui! Si! Hai! I always knows exactly when Krugman is exaggerating (that's easy: Tuesdays and Fridays).
This time the exaggerations (and the lies and the distortions and the out-of-context quotes and the bogus statistics and all the rest) are in service of the Times' latest "flood the zone" attack on the President Bush -- trying to make it seem that Bush lied about non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Krugman states,
"The public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat. If that claim was fraudulent, the selling of the war is arguably the worst scandal in American political history — worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-contra."
Was Bush lying when he told the public that Saddam was an imminent threat? David Hogberg says "no" on his blog, Cornfield Commentary -- because Bush never said it!
"I did some checking and found the text of the President's most recent State of the Union address. Here's the exact quote regarding the 'imminent' threat:
"'Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike?'
"...I did find news articles claiming Bush was saying the Iraqi threat was imminent. For example, one article referred to the State of the Union speech, while another referred to an October 7th address. But... Bush didn’t say the Iraqi threat was imminent in the State of the Union. And Bush never used the term in the October 7th address. The same held true for Bush’s speech last year to the United Nations, his speech/press conference of March 6th, and his speech as the war was beginning. Either Bush didn’t use the word 'imminent,' or he used the word to argue that we should not wait until the threat is imminent."
Robert Musil goes further on his blog, Man Without Qualities:
"...during the entire United Nations dust-up it was always quite clear that the United States was not arguing that Iraq needed to pose 'an imminent threat' in the meaning of that term in international law for its invasion to be justified. ...In fact, much of the public debate over the emerging 'Bush Doctrine' concerned whether the United States was constrained by arguably out-of-date notions of 'imminent threat'... the Administration and Secretary Powell did not argue that Iraq was imminently threatening to use those weapons. That's what the Administration's opponents claimed the Administration had to show. Had Herr Doktorprofessor ...perhaps drunk too much iced tea and left the room while all this was going on?"
James Taranto, on his blog Best of the Web Today, calls this Krugman op-ed "an unusually deranged column even by his standards." And he gets right to the heart of darkness in the Times' -- and the left's -- flood-the-zone strategies to discredit the president:
"...President Bush would have to be judged one of the more honest politicians of our time. He's untouched by scandal, and he keeps his promises. He said he'd cut taxes, and he did. He vowed to liberate Iraq, and he did. But now an argument is developing on the Democratic left that somehow the policies themselves are corrupt--that because Bush doesn't agree with liberal ideas, he is a liar."
Krugman despairs that the media -- which he frequently says is generally conservatively biased (here's an example, and the my refutation of it) -- is siding with Bush:
"Each time the administration comes up with another whopper, partisan supporters — a group that includes a large segment of the news media — obediently insist that black is white and up is down. Meanwhile the 'liberal' media report only that some people say that black is black and up is up. And some Democratic politicians offer the administration invaluable cover by making excuses and playing down the extent of the lies."
Musil read that statement deeply, and concludes that it's a remarkable confession -- an accidental confession, but a confession nevertheless -- that the New York Times is liberally biased:
"Where does the New York Times fall in this peculiar taxonomy? Surely Herr Doktorprofessor doesn't think that the Times 'obediently insist[s] that black is white and up is down'! But is he admitting that the Times is liberal -- or is his employer only 'liberal?' If the Times is only 'liberal' -- but not actually liberal -- then Herr Doktorprofessor says it 'report[s] only that some people say that black is black and up is up.' But the Times does more than that! Why, Herr Doktorprofessor himself is proof! So he must be admitting that the Times is actually liberal - not just 'liberal.'
"My goodness! Who would have thought it would be Paul Krugman, of all people, who would break ranks and admit that the New York Times has a liberal bias?! How will that go down with embattled Times management?"
Krugman continues to present the British press as exemplars of honest political analysis (that is, views that agree with his own). In his May 30 column he quoted a Financial Times Bush-bashing editorial as though it were especially authoritative -- and now he's quoting the Telegraph.
"If this same lack of accountability extends to matters of war and peace, we're in very deep trouble. The British seem to understand this: Max Hastings, the veteran war correspondent — who supported Britain's participation in the war — writes that 'the Prime Minister committed British troops and sacrificed British lives on the basis of a deceit, and it stinks.'"
William Sjostrom notes on his AtlanticBlog, that the Telegraph article containing this quote was posted Monday on the web site of a Brad DeLong (an ultra-liberal UC Berkeley Professor and Krugman wannabe who briefly had a column in the Times several years ago -- Krugman and DeLong are a liberal, Bush-bashing folie a deux, with DeLong linking to Krugman frequently, and always adoringly, and Krugman returning the favor). DeLong introduces the Hastings column by saying it comes from the "genuinely conservative" Telegraph (much as last week Krugman positioned the FT as "normally staid") --
"But he does not bother to mention that Hastings has been opposed to the war from the beginning... So DeLong wants to pass off a column by a war opponent as an 'even the conservatives are now critical of Bush on the war' line. Hastings was hostile from day one... Krugman has pulled the same scam. Is he cribbing from DeLong?"
Cribbing? It's worse than that -- in DeLong's hands, positioning Hastings as "genuinely conservative" is a bit of a flim-flam -- but Krugman turns it into an outright lie: that Hastings "supported Britain's participation in the war." Musil warns of a "Krugman/DeLong rhetorical inflationary cycle" in which,
"Herr Doktorprofessor's rhetoric has already reached Weimarian dimensions, comparable to the benighted German era in which one routinely brought a wheelbarrow of currency to market just to buy a loaf of bread. ...Surely, given the current credibility crisis at the Times, draconian inflation fighting solutions are appropriate. Yes, yes, one could bring in a new columnist and impose some harsh rhetorical conversion ratio (say, 100,000-to-one) between the new rhetorical currency and the outgoing, debased Krugmark, much the way Argentina and those banana republics which Herr Doktorprofessor adores comparing to the United States do repeatedly."
Posted by Donald Luskin at 5:26 AM | link
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It is easier to babble about WMD than do a serious research on economics.
The same reason Frank Rich -- a theater critic -- is commenting on anything that bothers him, regardless of whether he knows a durn thing about them. Because he's a mad dog leftist, and that's what the Times likes in its columnists.
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