Free Republic

An Academic Question By PAUL KRUGMAN It's a fact, documented by two recent studies, that registered Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives make up only a small minority of professors at elite universities. But what should we conclude from that? Conservatives see it as compelling evidence of liberal bias in university hiring and promotion. And they say that new "academic freedom" laws will simply mitigate the effects of that bias, promoting a diversity of views. But a closer look both at the universities and at the motives of those who would police them suggests a quite different story. Claims that liberal bias...

On Election Day, Paul Krugman was all choked up. Now, he’s just choking. And I won’t kid you — I’m loving it. Here’s what America’s most dangerous liberal pundit had to say in his New York Times column Tuesday morning, when he expected John Kerry to win the presidency: I always get a little choked up when I go to the local school to cast my vote. The humbleness of the surroundings only emphasizes the majesty of the process: this is democracy, America’s great gift to the world, in action. But over the last few days I’ve been seeing...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version September 30, 2004, 10:10 a.m. Lie During, Blame AfterKrugman has a strategy for Kerry-the-debater. Paul Krugman — America’s most dangerous liberal pundit — has two pieces of advice for John Kerry on tonight’s debate with President Bush. First, lie. Second, when you lose the debate, blame the media. In a New York Times column earlier this week, Krugman suggested that Kerry should take President Bush to task for supposedly having no strategy for handling North Korea’s nuclear menace. Here’s the lie Krugman recommends that Kerry...

The Economist’s ‘Face Value’ column profiles Paul Krugman and pretty well sums up my own view of him: But, increasingly, people are asking whether Mr Krugman's success as a journalist is now coming at the expense of, rather than as the result of, his economics…perhaps the most striking thing about his writing these days is not its economic rigour but its political partisanship. I saw a copy of Krugman’s latest book in one of the local bookstores yesterday and was struck by its cover art. The cover art for the non-US or Commonwealth version of the book is very different...

Paul Krugman's Malaysia connections are frightening “Anti-Semitism with a purpose." Sounds like a sick play on a Madison Avenue advertising slogan. But it's no joke. It was a subhead attached to Paul Krugman's Tuesday column for the New York Times. In it he rationalized the violently anti-Semitic remarks by Malaysia's prime minister Mahathir Mohamad as being symptoms of the failure of the Bush administration's foreign policy. The column has already generated a storm of protest on the letters page of the Times, on the website of the Anti-Defamation League, and on the websites of Krugman Truth Squad members, new and...

As we’ve said before, Paul Krugman is the country’s most embarrassing columnist. His hatred for President Bush has so blinded him that he is no longer a rational person. Today’s column in the New York Times is one of his most over-the-top. Krugman takes up the subject of Mahathir Mohamad’s “Jews rule the world” speech at the Islamic summit meeting last week. He begins, of course, with a denunciation of Mahathir’s anti-Semitism—“Indeed, those remarks were inexcusable”—and continues, inevitably, with a fatal “But.” The point of Krugman’s column is that Mahathir’s anti-Semitism is President Bush’s fault: “[T]o understand why he made...

My teacher, Joel Feinberg, once wrote that, "Every philosophical paper must begin with an unproved assumption." Argument, in other words, must start somewhere, preferably with a proposition that is widely accepted. The unproved assumption of this column is that hatred is bad. The Oxford English Dictionary (2d ed.) defines "hatred" as "The condition or state of relations in which one person hates another, the emotion or feeling of hate; active dislike, detestation, enmity, ill-will, malevolence." To hate is "To hold in very strong dislike; to detest; to bear malice to. The opposite of to love." Each of us knows firsthand whether,...

<p>We'd have said no, but then we read - today's column.</p> <p>Krugman weighs in on last week's anti-Jewish tirade by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, and the results boggle the mind.</p> <p>Most of it is criticism directed at other Muslims, clerics in particular. Mr. Mahathir castigates "interpreters of Islam who taught that acquisition of knowledge by Muslims meant only the study of Islamic theology." Thanks to these interpreters, "the study of science, medicine, etc. was discouraged. Intellectually the Muslims began to regress." A lot of the speech sounds as if it had been written by Bernard Lewis, author of "What Went Wrong," the best-selling book about the Islamic decline.</p>

September 16, 2003 AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL KRUGMAN....You probably think you know Paul Krugman, the liberal New York Times columnist with never a kind word for George Bush. Think again. Is Krugman merely someone who dislikes Bush and thinks his policies are horribly misguided? Oh no. In fact, in his most recent book, The Great Unraveling, he makes it clear that he thinks it's much, much worse than that. Here's a set of excerpts from the introduction in which he spells out exactly how he feels. Be sure not to skip past this if you want the interview that follows...

Paul Krugman's "The Tax-Cut Con," which ran in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, is the centerpiece of an all-Krugman, all-the-time blitzkrieg media tour to promote the pundit's new book, The Great Unraveling. The article offers Krugman's revisionist history of 25 years of "a crusade against taxes" — which he argued has "more or less deliberately, set the United States up for a fiscal crisis." The goal of this deliberate crisis, according to Krugman, is to allow "conservatives" to, in the name of fiscal necessity ... dismantle immensely popular government programs that would otherwise have been untouchable. ... America a...

Paul Krugman's book, The Great Unraveling, hits bookstores today. Are you surprised that Krugman's publisher, W.W. Norton, has repeatedly refused my requests for a review copy of the book? Despite this inexplicable omission, America's most dangerous liberal pundit is in full book-promo mode. He's dropped his teaching duties at Princeton for the quarter. His personal website lists 14 speaking engagements around the country, with more to come (a helpful reader suggested that coconut cream pie works best for such occasions). And the inevitable media interviews are already starting, kicking off with a whole hour this past Saturday with Tim Russert...

Paul Krugman began his Tuesday column for the New York Times — inevitably, about the blackout — with one of the few truthful statements I can ever recall him uttering: "We still don't know what started the chain reaction on Thursday." But after that admission, he proceeded to spend the next 649 words of his column telling us exactly what caused the blackout. Can you guess? On Monday, Krugman explained it to the German magazine Der Spiegel: According to American economics professor Paul Krugman, public services have been cut back in many areas to the benefit of "tax breaks for...

Krugman blamed the Bush administration's alleged penny-pinching as the reason "why U.S. troops in Iraq are suffering such a high rate of noncombat deaths." Krugman Truth Squad member David Hogberg noted on Cornfield Commentary, First of all, let’s look at the numbers. There have been 256 military deaths in Iraq. Excluding helicopter crashes, which I consider to be death in action, there have been 67 noncombat deaths so far. That’s about 26% of the total deaths. I have no clue if that is high relative to other wars. I’ll bet Krugman has no clue either. Of those 67, more than...

Prove It or Correct It. It’s time for the Times to weigh in on its error-prone economist. I hereby issue a public challenge to the New York Times. When is the "newspaper of record" going to run a correction of Paul Krugman's egregious mathematical error in which he claimed, in his August 1 column, that growth in real per capita California state spending from $1,950 in 1990 to $2,211 in 2003 was "only 10%," when anyone with a pocket calculator can tell that it is really 13.4 percent? And when will it correct Krugman's flatly deceptive claim that this growth...

I smell another New York Times retraction coming up. And a big one. Paul Krugman has made a statement in his Times column today which -- if it had been directed against a private individual rather than public officials -- would almost certainly trigger a libel suit. It's an extraordinarily serious allegation, tantamount to accusing Bush administration officials of treason. "...Bush administration officials have exposed the identity of a covert operative. That happens to be a criminal act..." Krugman has been raking President Bush over the coals for his "16 words" in the State of the Union address -- so...

June 9, 2003 Mr. Joseph Lelyveld Interim Executive EditorNew York Times 229 W. 43rd Street New York NY 10036 Dear Mr. Lelyveld, I would like to draw your attention to a matter of journalistic ethics at the New York Times. There is a need for the newspaper to assure that facts, statistics, sources, and quotations presented in editorials and op-eds be just as accurate as those presented in news stories. If a Jayson Blair were writing an editorial or op-ed, there would be no ethical requirement that it be balanced or neutral with respect to its political point of...

A LOT OF THINGS MORE IMPORTANT THAN TRUTH A new econoblogger, Paul Antler (known as "Dr. A" around the economics department of Roosevelt University) thinks that Paul Krugman "pulls a Maureen Dowd" in his op-ed in today's New York Times. Krugman wrote, "Most media attention has focused on the child tax credit that wasn't. As in 2001, the administration softened the profile of a tax cut mainly aimed at the wealthy by including a credit for families with children. But at the last minute, a change in wording deprived 12 million children of some or all of that tax credit....

According to The New Republic, Senator Zell Miller — one of a dwindling band of Democrats who still think they can make deals with the Bush administration and its allies — got shafted in the recent tax bill. He supported the bill in part because it contained his personal contribution: a measure requiring chief executives to take personal responsibility for corporate tax declarations. But when the bill emerged from conference, his measure had been stripped out. Will "moderates" — the people formerly known as "conservatives" — ever learn? Today's "conservatives" — the people formerly known as the "radical right" —...

KRUGMAN REPEATS A LIE THAT THE POST HAD ALREADY CORRECTED Paul Krugman's op-ed in today's New York Times contains an out-of-context and misleading quotation lifted from the Denver Post-- a quotation so out of context and misleading that that when a Washington Post columnist lifted the same quote two weeks ago, he issued a correction in his next column. So much for fact-checking. Here's Krugman, talking about Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform (whom Krugman identifies instead as "the right-wing ideologue who has become one of the most powerful men in Washington"): "Which brings us back to Senator...

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...