Krugman Ponders The Right

My sister keeps sending me links to all liberal sites as if their musings and writings are faits-accompli. "See! I told you!"

Poor girl.  Liberals too can be, in all their progressive braggadocio, utterly myopic in their search for the big picture.

Paul Krugman wrote in the NYT Op-ed some stuff and here are couple of excerpts:

When Hofstadter wrote, the right wing felt dispossessed because it was rejected by both major parties. That changed with the rise of Ronald Reagan: Republican politicians began to win elections in part by catering to the passions of the angry right.

What about the "angry left," Paul? What about people like Montelle Willis (or whatever the fuck's his name) suggesting Sarah Palin kill herself? Look, I know there are some angry people out there period but to infer the left is not infested with mad cow anger is bizarre and outright insidious. But he gets points for waiting seven paragraph before inserting the requisite Reagan bashing.

In the short run, this may help Democrats, as it did in that New York race. But maybe not: elections aren’t necessarily won by the candidate with the most rational argument. They’re often determined, instead, by events and economic conditions.

Duh. Isn't that, like, usually the case, period? But I like the soft, subtle "only liberals are rational" swipe. Yes, all seats won by Democrats is thanks to national will and somistimificated ideas. Got it.

What helped the Democrats was that they ran against a third party candidate and barely beat that stiff. It's nice to claim victory with a "we never held that seat since 1871!" But, the truth is they won it by default. Their spinning of it reminds me of how the lines between victory and defeat; winners and losers have been deliberately blurred in society as a whole. In hockey, we grant a point to a losing team for "trying" and in an effort to "equalize" teams - commonly known as parity. Winning is increasingly being defined less by the final score or outcome and more by measuring what you did better than your opponent in parts of the game. It's like saying, "even though we lost, we actually won because we outshot them five on five."

See the 'L' I'm forming with my fingers over my forehead?

In fact, the party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

Really? You mean that stimulus you strenuously pushed so hard for to the point of insanity isn't working? For true? And now you push a $1.2 trillion dollar health reform something, something on the American people in dire economic times?  More points for waiting longer to insert Limbaugh and Beck.

Of all Prez's, it reminds me of Calvin "Cool is ice" Coolidge.

Hear me out. When the borderline mute Republican took over in the roaring and screaming 1920s, unemployment was near 12%. He stayed out of the way and unemployment magically dropped to 5%. In addition, GNP grew 1 1/2 times in just three years. Of course, we can debate the hows and whys, impact and consequences of all this but these were the facts.

Obama doesn't get out of the way. He harasses. When he took over, unemployment was 6.6%, with his plan, it soared past 10% and likely to stay there. Right. Bush's fault.

Which begs the question: Why and at what point did interventionism become a cornerstone of liberal economic orthodoxy?

For good measure, here's what the famed author and journalist (and may I add philosopher and astute observer of all things) H.L. Mencken said about Coolidge:

"He will be ranked among the vacuums." He later moderated it to: "Should the day ever dawn when we reduce government to its simplest terms, it may very well happen that Calvin's bones now resting inconspicuosly in the Vermont granite will come to be revered as those of a man who really did the nation some service."

Yeah, by leaving people alone.

There's a lesson here for Obama. Maybe FDR is not the model to follow. Coolidge is. Then again, some assert his laissez-faire policies led to the Depression of the 1930s.