Paul Krugman's idiotic ideology could only have matured (over if you prefer, over-ripened) in the nurturing incubator of the New York Times and its coccoonish and ill-fated Times Select, that provided Krugman with more protective insulation from contrary ideas.
But now he has published a book and has exposed his ideas and his manufactured facts to the marketplace he so hates. The first review is in - from his own paper - and it's a thumbs down.
To get the flavor of Krugman's arrogance, condescension and immunity to penetrating thought, Times reviewer David Kennedy cites these sources of partisan blindness to that Krugman presents to explain why Americans do not unanimously for Democrats:
The ascendancy of modern conservatism is “an almost embarrassingly simple story,” he says, and race is the key. “Much of the whole phenomenon can be summed up in just five words: Southern whites started voting Republican. ... End of story.”
A fuller and more nuanced story might at least gesture toward the role that environmental and natural-resource issues have played in making red-state country out of the interior West, not to mention the unsettling effects of the “value issues” on voters well beyond Dixie.
And as for national security — well, as Krugman sees things, it was not Democratic bungling in the Iranian hostage crisis or humiliation in Somalia or feeble responses to the first bombing attack on the World Trade Center or the assault on the U.S.S. Cole, but the runaway popularity of the Rambo films (I’m not making this up) that hoodwinked the public into believing that the party of Carter and Clinton (not to mention McGovern and Kucinich) might not be the most steadfast guardian of the Republic’s safety.
Krugman's book might sell. There are enough people out there who will pay to have their prejudices reinforced. After all, 42% of the Democratic Party believes that George Bush either participated in the 9/11 conspiracy or knew about it and allowed it to happen so that he would have a pretext for a war he already planned. Surely enough of those people are literate to make Krugman's book a commercial success.
A "commercial success." My, isn't that ironic?
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