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Paul Krugman's repugant post in the NYT
Topic Started: Sep 12 2011, 07:41 AM (514 Views)
LTC8K6
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September 11, 2011, 8:41 am
The Years of Shame

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.


Michelle Malkin's response:

http://michellemalkin.com/2011/09/12/a-few-more-words-about-koward-krugman/
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LTC8K6
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http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/johnransom/2011/09/12/paul_krugman_is_insane
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kbp

I thought that was about the weakest work Krugman has ever put out. I sent a link to Bill, knowing he'd get a laugh.

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Baldo
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Baldo
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Apparently it wasn't the only repugnant piece published on the 10th anniversary.

Chris Hedges wrote this in a section called TruthDig

Published on Sunday, September 11, 2011 by TruthDig
A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe
by Chris Hedges

.....We could have gone another route. We could have built on the profound sympathy and empathy that swept through the world following the attacks. The revulsion over the crimes that took place 10 years ago, including in the Muslim world, where I was working in the weeks and months after 9/11, was nearly universal. The attacks, if we had turned them over to intelligence agencies and diplomats, might have opened possibilities not of war and death but ultimately reconciliation and communication, of redressing the wrongs that we commit in the Middle East and that are committed by Israel with our blessing. It was a moment we squandered. Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement. We became the radical Islamist movement’s most effective recruiting tool. We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists too. The sad legacy of 9/11 is that the assholes, on each side, won.


You can read the whole article here

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/11-7
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kbp

Baldo
Sep 12 2011, 10:24 AM
Apparently it wasn't the only repugnant piece published on the 10th anniversary.

Chris Hedges wrote this in a section called TruthDig

Published on Sunday, September 11, 2011 by TruthDig
A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe
by Chris Hedges

.....We could have gone another route. We could have built on the profound sympathy and empathy that swept through the world following the attacks. The revulsion over the crimes that took place 10 years ago, including in the Muslim world, where I was working in the weeks and months after 9/11, was nearly universal. The attacks, if we had turned them over to intelligence agencies and diplomats, might have opened possibilities not of war and death but ultimately reconciliation and communication, of redressing the wrongs that we commit in the Middle East and that are committed by Israel with our blessing. It was a moment we squandered. Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement. We became the radical Islamist movement’s most effective recruiting tool. We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists too. The sad legacy of 9/11 is that the assholes, on each side, won.


You can read the whole article here

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/11-7
This guy wants negotiations; a warm & fuzzy chat in an effort to help Islamic extremists re-define their religion.

More from his column...

"...The plague of nationalism began almost immediately. My son, who was 11, asked me what the difference was between cars flying small American flags and cars flying large American flags.

“The people with the really big flags are the really big assholes,” I told him."



My guess is he is one who hates the USA, lives here so someone will pay him to publish his hate and was just loving the leg tingles he got when Obama bowed to leaders in the Mideast.
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Duke parent 2004
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My dear LTC,

Because your posts are famously concise, I’m surprised you added needless words to the first three of this thread’s title.
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LTC8K6
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Duke parent 2004
Sep 12 2011, 03:41 PM
My dear LTC,

Because your posts are famously concise, I’m surprised you added needless words to the first three of this thread’s title.
I didn't. :think:

But I know who did. :)
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cks
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I find it interesting that there are no letters to the editor either regarding the Krugman column. Guess that none will be allowed.
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Joan Foster

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904265504576566582477052352.html?mod=djemBestOfTheWeb_h


At 8:41 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, most Americans were completely unaware of the world-changing terror that was about to unfold at the World Trade Center. One group that had some inkling had five minutes to live. Eighty-nine of the 92 passengers and crewmen on American Airlines Flight 11 were killed at 8:46, when Islamist terrorists crashed the Boeing 767 into the center's north tower (reportedly the hijackers had already stabbed or slashed the other three to death).

At 8:41 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2011, former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, star columnist of the New York Times, had something he wanted to say: "Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?" Krugman began his post on the Times website yesterday morning. "Actually, I don't think it's me, and it's not really that odd."

So far, so obvious. Of course the commemorations are subdued. Altogether, just under 3,000 people died in the coordinated attacks of 9/11: at the trade center, whose south tower was hit 17 minutes later; at the Pentagon, and in a field in Western Pennsylvania, where United Flight 93 crashed after passengers overpowered the hijackers, presumably saving the intended target on the ground.

Some of the victims of 9/11 were children, and most of the adults were in the prime of life. In the normal course of events, they would still be with their loved ones 10 years later. Thus yesterday's rituals mourned losses that were sudden and that remain immediate. Ecclesiastes teaches that "there is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens . . . a time to mourn and a time to dance." Americans danced in May, when Osama bin Laden was finally killed, but yesterday was a time to weep. So of course the 9/11 memorials were subdued.

That's not what Krugman had in mind, however. For him, it is never time to be silent and always time to hate:

What happened after 9/11--and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not--was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

Giuliani and Bush "raced to cash in on the horror"? How? Krugman doesn't say. (We'll concede his point regarding Kerik, currently in federal prison after pleading guilty to multiple charges including tax fraud. But dwelling on Kerik's malefactions seems awfully petty on 9/11.)

In any case, was shame really the reason the 9/11 ceremonies were subdued? Tom Maguire says no:

I watched a bit of the memorial service at Ground Zero. Two strangers would go through about six names from the alphabetized list; then they would read off the name of their father, mother, brother, sister, niece, or whatever, say a few words, and move off-stage. Some of the readers were totally composed, but most got a bit choked up when they got to their loved one. Watching twenty year-olds say good-bye to a mother they lost when they were ten isn't easy, but watching a forty year old cop lose it when saluting his father is not so easy even for a cold-hearted, insensitive right-wing troglodyte like me.

Now, I suppose it is possible that the family members were choking up because they were reflecting on the Iraq War and the grim reality that Gitmo remains open. Or perhaps they were subdued by concerns over the Patriot Act and warrantlesss wiretapping. I am not smart or sensitive enough to be a lib like Krugman, but I didn't see it that way.

It's also hard, at this late date, to credit Krugman's argument that the Bush administration and "neocons" are solely to blame for the breakdown of national unity in the years after 9/11. Immediately after the attacks, support for Bush policies was overwhelming: The Patriot Act, for instance, passed the House 357-66 and the Senate 98-1. A year later, the authorization to use military force in Iraq drew strong (though far from unanimous) bipartisan support. It was backed by 81 House Democrats and 29 Senate Democrats.

To the extent that terror policy ended up polarizing the parties, then, it was because Democrats changed their minds. Arguably they eventually profited politically from doing so. At the very least, it did not prevent them from winning big victories in the elections of 2006 and 2008.

Yet as we noted in our Weekend Interview with Michael Mukasey, Barack Obama--who as a state senator, a U.S. senator and a presidential candidate was a harsh critic of Bush administration terror policies--as president has proved unable or unwilling to make any major changes in those policies, with the exception of interrogation. (The Bush administration had already ended the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" program; its successor cut the CIA out of interrogation altogether.)

In some cases, notably Guantanamo and civilian trials for terrorists, Obama has continued the Bush policies in spite of his own inclinations, under pressure from Congress. Yet that pressure began in 2009-10, when Obama's own party had huge majorities in both houses--suggesting that the country is after all fairly unified, that Obama is out of step, and that the Democrats' move to the left between about 2003 and 2008 was merely opportunistic and ideological.

Krugman goes on to observe that beside Bush, Giuliani and Kerik, "a lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits--people who should have understood very well what was happening--took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?"
[botwt0912] Associated Press

The man who loves to hate.

He has half a point here. We remember one professional pundit who behaved quite badly, writing on Sept. 14, 2001: "It seems almost in bad taste to talk about dollars and cents after an act of mass murder," he observed, then went ahead and did so: "If people rush out to buy bottled water and canned goods, that will actually boost the economy. . . . The driving force behind the economic slowdown has been a plunge in business investment. Now, all of a sudden, we need some new office buildings."

That was former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, who added that "the attack opens the door to some sensible recession-fighting measures," by which he meant "the classic Keynesian response to economic slowdown, a temporary burst of public spending. . . . Now it seems that we will indeed get a quick burst of public spending, however tragic the reasons." He went on to denounce the "disgraceful opportunism" of those who "would try to exploit the horror to push their usual partisan agendas"--i.e., conservatives who he said were doing exactly what he was doing.

Krugman concludes his 10th-anniversary objurgation as follows:

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I'm not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

As the Village Voice's Nick Greene sums it up: "I need to get something off my chest today, but you can't." Blogger Ed Morrissey adds:

After reading this, you seriously have to remind yourself that the New York Times pays Krugman to write it; this wouldn't even pass muster for a Letter to the Editor at most newspapers. It's so trite, sad, and cliched that it's hardly worth the effort to rebut. He's mailing this in from 2003.

snip

That may explain why, even a decade later, someone like Krugman sees 9/11 as an occasion to lash out at his domestic political opponents. "Everybody's angry, to judge from my email, about Paul Krugman's typo-burdened 9/11 screed," writes Glenn Reynolds. (For at least 15 hours after Krugman posted it, the screed referred to "te atrocity.")

Reynolds offers some advice: "Don't be angry. Understand it for what it is, an admission of impotence from a sad and irrelevant little man." Indeed. That post was monstrous, but it was trivial in equal measure. Paul Krugman is history's smallest monster.
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cks
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Well written and so true.
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chatham
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cks
Sep 12 2011, 05:25 PM
I find it interesting that there are no letters to the editor either regarding the Krugman column. Guess that none will be allowed.
The best letter to the editor would have been to cancel ones subscription. Even the pooch and parakeet do not like poopin on it anymore.
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cks
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While I think that Krugman is a pompous a*%wipe, he has as much right to express his opinion as does anyone else. I think that had he really possessed the courage of his convictions, he would have allowed comments on his piece - the NY Times is at fault for granting him the right to not allow any comments. It will be interesting to see if this decision is taken up by the public editor this coming Sunday. I notice that not a single letter to the editor (and there have been precious few printed as opposed to what I am certain were the many that were sent) has been in support of Krugman - either people were furious with his POV or they agreed with him somewhat but excoriated him for not allowing comments.
Krugman's real money comes from his econ textbook which is the go to textbook for highschool econ.
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