Paul Krugman: Left Has 'Nothing Comparable' To Conservative Media

Mark Finklestein of Newsbusters takes one for the team, reading the former Enron advisor so you don’t have to, and spots this howler:

Someone check the cider bowl at the New York Times Christmas party. Looks like it was spiked with some wacky wassail weed, and that Paul Krugman drank deep—very deep—from it.

In his Humbug Express column today, the honoree of a fringe Scandinavian leftist group claimed—apparently lost in the throes of cider-induced delusions—that the left’s ability to promulgate its propaganda is dwarfed by the right’s. In the world according to Krugman, the culprit is a conservative “media infrastructure” that the lefties can’t match.

The specific issue at hand was whether government employment has increased under Pres. Obama. Krugman claims that the right has managed to propagate the urban legend that indeed it has, whereas Krugman claims it hasn’t.

But the bigger point is Krugman’s fact-defying assertion [emphasis added]:
“[T]here’s a well-developed right-wing media infrastructure in place to catapult the propaganda, as former President George W. Bush put it, to rapidly disseminate bogus analysis to a wide audience where it becomes part of what “everyone knows.” (There’s nothing comparable on the left, which has fallen far behind in the humbug race.)”

Do we really need, yet again, to compare the left vs. right media array?

If only Krugman were affiliated with a publication that has openly admitted its ideology, and concluded it’s somewhere on the left. It must be out there somewhere!

I wonder how many more times we’ll see this Al Gore-approved meme from nearly a decade ago dusted off again in the next few weeks?

Or to put it another way, as a certain Mr. Eric Blair once said rather Orwellianly, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

Speaking of which, the New York Times is certainly willing to employ a little doublethink from time to time. Krugman seems to continually call for all this and World War II to jump-start the economy, but Bill Kristol spots the Gray Lady finally conceding “decades of overspending:”

You know conservatives are winning when the most dogmatic and obdurate liberals (inadvertently) throw in the towel.

In the midst of an otherwise predictable editorial today on “The Looming Crisis in the States,” in which the New York Times calls for state tax hikes and more aid from Washington, we find this sentence: “Starved for revenue and accustomed to decades of overspending, many states have been overwhelmed.”

“Decades of overspending.” I must have missed the many Times editorials over recent decades condemning such overspending. But no matter. What a concession! Not just a few years of overspending—decades! For surely if there have been decades of overspending, there need to be serious cuts in or elimination of many programs that have ballooned in recent decades—not just some spending trims, or returns to (say) 2009 or 2008 levels.

So, Govs. Christie and Daniels and Kasich—and Cuomo—and all the rest, go for it. Cut the size and scope of state government. Make up for decades of liberal big government welfare state overspending. And when criticized, cite the New York Times.