Krugman's Cockroaches

In the wake of the Dem victory of November, Paul Krugman isn't merely doing a victory dance. He reminds me more of one of those ardent football fans up in the stands after his team scores the winning touchdown. Stripped to the waist, painted in team colors, getting up in the face of an opposing fan to taunt "na-na-na-na, goodbye" followed by a rousing chorus of "start the bus."

In his pay-per-view opus of this morning, "A Failed Revolution," Krugman proclaims that not merely has the Republican revolution of 1994 failed, but that it "was always based on a lie."

Just what is that lie? According to Krugman it was the belief expressed by Dick Armey at the time that: "most government programs don’t do anything 'to help American families with the needs of everyday life . . . and very few American families would notice their disappearance."

And how does Krugman prove that Armey was lying? By noting that "more than a few families would notice the disappearance of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid." No doubt. There's only one problem. Republicans never called for the abolition of any of those programs. So who's lying now?

After hurling some more invective Republicans' way - "utter failure," "failed revolutionary" movement, "web of corruption," "adversaries . . . harassed with smear campaigns and witch hunts," Krugman closes with this charming little analogy:

More pertinent to your post is this excerpt from the Wikipedia.org article on neoconservativism:

Neoconservatism, American Jews, and "Dual Loyalty"

Some opponents of neoconservatives have sought to emphasize their interest in Israel and the relatively large proportion of Jewish neoconservatives, and have raised the question of "dual loyalty". A number of critics, such as Pat Buchanan and Juan Cole, have accused them of putting Israeli interests above those of America. In turn these critics have been labeled as anti-Semites by many neoconservatives.

David Duke and some other white nationalists attack neoconservatism as advancing Jewish interests. They say a "Jewish supremacist" movement exists in the United States. Critics conclude that some of their claims, such as that Jews achieve influence through the intellectual domination of national leaders, are anti-Semitic [citation needed]. Similarly, during the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the politically left-wing magazine AdBusters published a list of the "50 most influential neocons in the United States", noting that half of these were Jewish, and insinuating that the preponderance of Jews in neoconservatism leads them to "not distinguish enough between American and Israeli interests". The article asks "For example, whose interests were they protecting in pushing for war in Iraq?", and ends with the statement "And half of the them are Jewish."

Neoconservatives say that they were much less interested in Israel before the June 1967 Six Day War. It was only after this conflict, which raised the specter of unopposed Soviet influence in the Middle East, that the neoconservatives became interested in Israel's security interests. They promote the view that Israel is the United States' strongest ally in the Middle East as the sole Western-style democracy in the region, aside from Turkey (George W. Bush has also supported Turkey in its efforts to join the European Union).

Commenting on the alleged overtones of this view in more mainstream discourse, David Brooks, in his January 6, 2004 New York Times column wrote, "To hear these people describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles".

In a similar vein, Michael Lind, a self-described 'former neoconservative,' wrote in 2004, "It is true, and unfortunate, that some journalists tend to use 'neoconservative' to refer only to Jewish neoconservatives, a practice that forces them to invent categories like nationalist conservative or Western conservative for Rumsfeld and Cheney. But neoconservatism is an ideology, like paleoconservatism and libertarianism, and Rumsfeld and Dick and Lynne Cheney are full-fledged neocons, as distinct from paleocons or libertarians, even though they are not Jewish and were never liberals or leftists."

Lind argues that, while "there were, and are, very few Northeastern WASP mandarins in the neoconservative movement", its origins are not specifically Jewish. "...[N]eoconservatism recruited from diverse 'farm teams' including Roman Catholics (William Bennett and Michael Novak) and populists, socialists and New Deal liberals in the South and Southwest (the pool from which Jeane Kirkpatrick, James Woolsey and I [that is, Lind himself] were drawn)".

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