Catching up with New York Times columnist Paul Krugman: He is definitely on Team Hillary, and on his nytimes.com blog unleashes contempt usually reserved for Republicans upon a segment of supposedly angry, sexist, web-trolling Bernie Sanders supporters, who Hillary’s feminist fans have taken to calling “Bernie Bros," making for an interesting internecine fight on the Democratic side.
A January 27 post titled “Health Wonks and Bernie Bros” latched onto the insult to describe left-wing males who accuse Hillary Clinton supporters of knee-jerk corporatism:
So Charles Gaba, whose excellent site ACA Signups has been a huge secret resource for those of us covering health reform, is getting the Bernie Bro treatment. Never mind his long service to the cause of covering the uninsured (and his declaration that he’ll support either candidate in the general): his carefully laid-out explanation of his support for Hillary Clinton’s incremental approach means that he’s a corrupt tool of the oligarchy.
Krugman also defended Hillary Clinton’s well-compensated speeches in front of banking interests on February 2:
Certainly taking a harder line on the corruption of our politics by big money is important -- and no, giving some paid speeches doesn’t disqualify her from making that case. (Cue furious attack from the Bernie bros.)
Krugman predictably defended Hillary on her classified document controversy January 29.
Gah. Another Clinton email story, this time involving emails covering material that wasn’t classified when sent but is now deemed top-secret -- with the Clinton campaign demanding that they be released, presumably to show how innocuous they really were. Max Fisher at Vox suggests that it’s basically a story about the craziness and excesses of the classification system, and my own experience -- although deeply out of date -- suggests that he’s probably right.
Krugman took advantage of the topic to boast of his time in the Reagan White House (while clarifying that he was not a “Reaganite”):
Anyway, given the area I covered, I received a lot of classified reports from the CIA, the State Department, etc.. They had all sorts of warnings in capital letters on their covers: SECRET NOFORN NOCONTRACT PROPIN ORCON, I think, was the standard litany. And there was a security person who came through our offices at night, scooped up any classified documents we left out, put them in a safe, and issued citations. Between the number of classified documents I received and my continuing true identity as an absent-minded professor, I got a lot of citations -- second only to Marty.
But the reason I kept forgetting to lock the things up was that none of them -- literally not one, during a whole year -- contained anything actually sensitive. There was nothing in any of them you couldn’t have read in newspapers, or figured out for yourself given public information.
....
So my guess is that the only scandal here is how much anodyne stuff gets “Top secret” slapped on it.
Krugman’s intramural Democratic sniping was interspersed with the usual anti-GOP hostility, like comparing Ted Cruz to a violent Crusader in a February 5 post/headline one-two punch: “Friday Night Music: Crusaders on the Attack.”
Originally I was thinking of Ted Cruz -- and what I really wanted was the destruction of Pskov, but unfortunately the only version I could find didn’t have the Prokofiev.
There was also this January 31 scattershot hit at any Republican standing after the Iowa caucuses:
I don’t know what will happen in the caucuses tomorrow. Actually, I know what will happen on the Republican side: someone horrifying will come in first, and someone horrifying will come in second. The names are less clear.
Finally, Krugman’s column on Monday, “The Time-Loop Party,” lashed into the Republican Party on foreign policy (not the economist’s specialty, as if that’s ever stopped him before), claiming “The John Birch Society has won the war for the party’s soul.”
After mocking Rubio as robot, Krugman pivoted to foreign policy:
Meanwhile, on foreign policy the required G.O.P. position has become one of utter confidence in the effectiveness of military force. How did that work in Iraq? Never mind: The only reason anybody in the world fails to do exactly what America wants must be because our leadership is lily-livered if not treasonous. And diplomacy, no matter how successful, is denounced as appeasement.
Not incidentally, the shared Republican stance on foreign policy is basically the same view Richard Hofstadter famously described in his essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”: Whenever America fails to impose its will on the rest of the world, it must be because it has been betrayed. The John Birch Society has won the war for the party’s soul.
But don’t all politicians spout canned answers that bear little relationship to reality? No.
Like her or not, Hillary Clinton is a genuine policy wonk, who can think on her feet and clearly knows what she is talking about on many issues. Bernie Sanders is much more of a one-note candidate, but at least his signature issue -- rising inequality and the effects of money on politics -- reflects real concerns. When you revisit Democratic debates after what went down Saturday, it doesn’t feel as if you’re watching a different party, it feels as if you’ve entered a different intellectual and moral universe.
Krugman labored under the delusion that only conservatives live in a media bubble (MSNBC? Al Jazeera, for the time being?).
So how did this happen to the G.O.P.? In a direct sense, I suspect that it has a lot to do with Foxification, the way Republican primary voters live in a media bubble into which awkward facts can’t penetrate. But there must be deeper causes behind the creation of that bubble.
