Within hours of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, lunatic “economist” Paul Krugman raced to put up a blog post blaming Sarah Palin and the Tea Party for the attack. “For those wondering why a Blue Dog Democrat, the kind Republicans might be able to work with, might be a target,” said Krugman, “the answer is that she’s a Democrat who survived what was otherwise a GOP sweep in Arizona, precisely because the Republicans nominated a Tea Party activist. (Her father says that ‘the whole Tea Party’ was her enemy.) And yes, she was on Sarah Palin’s infamous ‘crosshairs’ list.”
Somehow the New York Times left Krugman on the payroll after this disgusting example of mindless idiocy, and he’s decided to double down, expanding on his deep thoughts at greater length in an op-ed called “Climate of Hate.” With the publication of this editorial, the New York Times hits absolute rock bottom. Not only is it slanderous, and easily fisked by a six-year-old with a dial-up connection to Google, but it’s a perfect example of someone very deliberately trying to create a “climate of hate.”
“When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised?” Krugman begins. “Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?” After he approvingly cites Bill Clinton’s disgusting attempt to pin the Oklahoma City bombings on Rush Limbaugh, he says “you could see, just by watching the crowds at the McCain-Palin rallies, that it was ready to happen again.”
Ah, so this whole “democracy” thing is just too dangerous for us benighted rubes, eh? Political opposition to the sainted Left is inherently illegitimate, and should be swept away. Let us pause to note that this is one of many times in his essay that Krugman demonstrates his near-complete ignorance of actual news, and conveys the sense he can’t be bothered with Google searches. If he had tried one before humiliating the Times with this op-ed, he would know that Jared Loughner, the Tucscon shooter, has been obsessed with Giffords since at least 2007, long before there were any McCain-Palin rallies.
Krugman throws out some vague allegations about “a rising tide of threats and vandalism aimed at elected officials.” Then he concedes “the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled,” BUT “that doesn’t mean his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.” Actually, yes, that’s exactly what it does mean.
“Something about the current state of America has been causing far more disturbed people than before to act out their illness by threatening, or actually engaging in, political violence,” pontificates Krugman. Oh, and the Left bears no responsibility for that? They’re the ones who drop titanic mandates and mountains of regulation on American citizens. Their President has given us 20 months of crushing unemployment. They stole over $800 billion from us for “stimulus” pork and slush funds, and Krugman has gone on record saying he thinks they need two or three trillion dollars more.
The Democrats cranked up class-warfare rhetoric to a fever pitch during the lame-duck session of Congress, denouncing anyone who resists higher tax rates as greedy and unpatriotic. They bent over backwards to get miserable crooks like Charlie Rangel out of trouble with the lightest slap upon the wrist, flaunting their corruption in the face of a population boiling with impotent rage. When the president of Mexico denounced America on the floor of Congress last year, the Democrats rose to give him a thunderous standing ovation. But all this “climate of hatred” is coming from the guys on conservative talk radio?
“Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right,” Krugman asserts. Oh, really? How about the Democrat President? At various times during his Administration, Barack Obama has said the following:
If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun. – June 2008.
I want you to go out and talk to your neighbors… I want you to argue with them, get in their faces. – September 2008.
I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry. I’m angry. – March 2009.
If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, “We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,” if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s gonna be harder, and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on November 2. – October 2010.
So none of that rhetoric contributes to the “climate of hate?” How about Florida Democrat Alan Grayson condemning his opponent as a “religious fanatic” and calling him “Taliban Dan Webster?” What about when Democrat James Clyburn of South Carolina falsely accused Tea Party members of hurling racial epithets at him? Do you suppose the heavily deployed Democrat meme of insinuating voters were stupid for acting against them in the midterm elections might have generated some anger?
Shall we step into the minor leagues, and talk about New Hampshire state house candidate Keith Halloran, who responded to the plane crash that killed Alaska Senator Ted Stevens by wishing Sarah Palin was on board? Another New Hampshire Democrat, Timothy Horrigan, was forced to quit the state legislature for saying “A dead Palin would be more dangerous than a live one” and “if she was dead, she couldn’t commit any more gaffes.” If that’s not good enough, we could take a step back into the fetid swamps of Bush hatred, when liberals actually made movies about assassinating him.
Hilariously, Krugman explicitly tries to give MSNBC hosts like Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann a pass for pumping greenhouse gas into the Climate of Hate… even though Olbermann criticized himself on this very topic in a Sunday night broadcast. (Dear New York Times: when you’re publishing a clown who looks unreasonable next to Keith Olbermann, it’s time for an emergency editorial board meeting.) Presumably Krugman missed the November MSNBC broadcast in which host Dylan Ratigan spoke approvingly of violent revolution with deranged cartoonist Ted Rall. “Are things in our country so bad that it might actually be time for a revolution? The answer is obviously yes. The only question is how to do it.” That quote comes from the host, not Ted Rall.
Krugman wraps up his piece by asking, “Will the Arizona massacre make our discourse less toxic? It’s really up to G.O.P. leaders. Will they accept the reality of what’s happening to America, and take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric? Or will they try to dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual, and go on as before?” I wouldn’t pretend to be a big fan of the Times under the best of circumstances, but this kind of irresponsible, degenerate slander is simply beneath the standards that should be expected of a major media outlet, liberal or conservative. The insinuation that GOP leaders are somehow responsible for the murderous insanity of Jared Loughner is an unforgivable insult, and expresses a philosophy best described as totalitarianism.
The New York Times website editors made absolute fools of themselves by allowing Krugman’s piece to run. Readers who are content to be insulted by his absurd and dishonest brand of “economics” should look within themselves and ask if they can stomach this affront to the very liberty and humanity of their fellow citizens on the Right. You can disagree with someone’s politics, and even express personal dislike for them, without blaming them for murder. If you agree with Krugman’s idea that every lunatic with a gun is an agent of whatever ideology he endorses, you are starting down a very dark road, which invariably ends with the use of force to suppress unacceptable dissent.
Even someone as senseless and ignorant as Paul Krugman shouldn’t want to take a single step down that road. After all, we’ve learned over the weekend that every kid who knew Jared Loughner described him as a far-left liberal. Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, who recently published a hate screed that damned the entire conservative movement as the “American Taliban,” declared Gabrielle Giffords was “dead to him” after she voted against Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House, and that was just a couple of days ago. We have learned that Loughner was a 9/11 conspiracy theorist – a liberal movement that claimed something like 40% support from Democrats in opinion polls, at its high-water mark. Maybe we should be taking a closer look at that “climate of hate” on the Left.
