Paul Krugman, Hater

Paul Krugman's latest NY Times column, Fear Strikes Out, celebrates the passage of the National Socialist Health Care Act, parsing it in terms of "our better angels" on the Obama side, and the "callous cynicism" of the opposition. Krugman all but outright calls the opposition racists - always the mark of a subtle mind at work.

Instead, the emotional core of opposition to reform was blatant fear-mongering, unconstrained either by the facts or by any sense of decency.

It wasn’t just the death panel smear. It was racial hate-mongering, like a piece in Investor’s Business Daily declaring that health reform is “affirmative action on steroids, deciding everything from who becomes a doctor to who gets treatment on the basis of skin color.” It was wild claims about abortion funding. It was the insistence that there is something tyrannical about giving young working Americans the assurance that health care will be available when they need it, an assurance that older Americans have enjoyed ever since Lyndon Johnson — whom Mr. Gingrich considers a failed president — pushed Medicare through over the howls of conservatives.

And let’s be clear: the campaign of fear hasn’t been carried out by a radical fringe, unconnected to the Republican establishment. On the contrary, that establishment has been involved and approving all the way. Politicians like Sarah Palin — who was, let us remember, the G.O.P.’s vice-presidential candidate — eagerly spread the death panel lie, and supposedly reasonable, moderate politicians like Senator Chuck Grassley refused to say that it was untrue. On the eve of the big vote, Republican members of Congress warned that “freedom dies a little bit today” and accused Democrats of “totalitarian tactics,” which I believe means the process known as “voting.”

Earlier in the column, Krugman repeats the story that protesters "hurled racial epithets at Democratic members of Congress on the eve of the vote." He also says that Newt Gingrich claimed that the health care bill would be as damaging to the Democrats as "civil rights legislation."

For one who so harshly derides the opposition for getting their facts wrong, Krugman plays pretty loose with them himself. An "editors' note" has been appended to the column that states that Gingrich did not say that about civil rights legislation, and furthermore, I've seen the video of the Black Caucus members getting razzed and I heard no racial epithets. But even if there were, Krugman is correct in his assumption that racism - defined by liberals as anything they don't like - is a far more damaging accusation than that of legislating Soviet-like policies or rationing access to doctors - so far down has the level of public discourse gone.

Krugman, Nobel laureate and star NY Times columnist, clearly demonstrates that he's just a hater, a hater of American liberties and, since he calls his opponents racists, a hater of whites - since they are the only group which it's acceptable to condemn as racists, and any political movement that's majority white and even slightly to the right qualifies as racist in the eyes of Krugman and his ilk.

PS: Doesn't the existence of Democratic and Republican economists cast some doubt on the validity of economics as a science? It would be as if physicists were divided into Unitarians and Trinitarians.