OMG, OMFG, OMG.
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Nixon: “We are all Keynsians now.” No wonder Krugman misses him.
BTW, there was that fine little rhyme in the 1960s “Hey, hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today.” Such a polite, peaceful time.
Krugman’s actually not the first Timesman to figure out that Nixon governed far more liberally than their original distorted funhouse mirror projections of him.
It’s actually not that surprising. As Nick Gillespie of Reason points out, Krugman’s nostalgia for Nixon is completely wrong-headed. He yearns for Nixon’s economically disastrous policies and deplores today’s political conditions, supposedly characterized by the rise of corporate power and the takeover of the right by its extremists. He laments at the end of the our-tickle: “Actually turning this country around is going to take years of siege warfare against deeply entrenched interests.”
Krugman has been elevated to prominence by liberal institutions — the Nobel prize committee, the New York Times, the Ivy League where he teaches. As long as they champion analysts like Krugman, liberals will continue to founder.
(Janus, I see you coming. And yes, I say, liberals are foundering — for the very reason that they’ve now got control of the ship of state. That’s precisely how they’re running it into the shoals.)
Makes sense to me. It’s the same impulse we saw last week with Teddy K: Democrats will forgive any brutalization of the wrong people by somebody who also makes sure to brutalize the right people.
Thank you arhooley, and since you asked…
1) Reading the commentator (Nick G, editor of “libertarian” magazine) makes less sense than reading the source (Paul K, Nobel prize economist):
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/opinion/31krugman.html?bl&ex=1251864000&en=6beb5bb840527bb7&ei=5087
“Nixon was surely the worst person other than Dick Cheney ever to control the executive branch.”
Nick calls it love. I want to meet Nick’s girlfriend.
2) Yes, liberals are always foundering; we need people who seek liberal goals (functional government, balance of powers, equal opportunity, public safety, etc.) with a clear recognition of the costs and trade offs. We might call them progressives; I still call us conservatives. Stubborn? Yes.
3) The US plowed “into the shoals” long before Democrats started winning. Ignoring the repeated warnings of 911 and of Katrina and of torture and of economic collapse, and so on, did that. The reality based community (as Republicans call us) felt like Cassandras on the Titanic from the day Bush got in. Here’s a decent list of why.
4) For the record, economists who got our economy right, were not particularly liberal or conservative; they were just paying attention, as Krugman(?) put it.
5) Thanks, everyone, for not trying to defend Nixon or Cheney. Let’s emphasize our agreements.
Janus, your second point is entirely incoherent. Your third is at least recognizable as boilerplate leftist lies. As to your fifth, I won’t defend a progressive Republican like Nixon, but a small-government classical liberal like Cheney? Great guy.
“Ignoring the repeated warnings of 911 and of Katrina…”
Ya know who mainly ignored the warnings about Katrina, Janus?
The residents of New Orleans when told, 4 days before the storm arrived, that they should leave the below-sea-level city.
What was the rest of that crap you wrote?
bgates:
My points require reading arhooley’s kind invocation of me to make sense. If you feel I’ve mistaken any of them, feel free to correct me by citing your sources, as I did.
Also, thanks for the Cheney chuckle. Please forgive me the risk of criticizing humor? Your “small-government Cheney? Great guy.” is even funnier than “small government Republican” because more specific (after all, small-government Ron Paul never left the Republican Party). Granted, “small government” followed by any politician’s name almost has to get a smile. Adding “classical liberal” seemed over the top to me. What do you think?
Greybeard:
Katrina questions seem off topic in this thread, and I question any “blame the victim” story, but if you could find an account that supports it, I’d read it; by contrast, even Republicans agree that Republicans repeatedly ignored multiple warnings of the national disasters that proliferated during the Bush years.
You can read the rest that I wrote here, and on a few other threads; thank you for asking.
Alternately, perhaps you wanted to know about Katrina:
Katrina timeline and analysis
video of federal disaster officials warning Bush that Katrina could breach levees; note similarity to video of Bush on 911.
A 2006 report compiled by House Republicans slammed what it called “a failure of leadership,” saying that… “blinding lack of situational awareness and disjointed decision making needlessly compounded and prolonged Katrina’s horror.” The report specifically blamed Bush…
… the levees had cracked. For crucial hours, the White House knew, but withheld the information…
Katrina’s Hidden Race War
New Orleans will never be the same. Neither will Americans’ view of government’s role in disasters.
Let that be a lesson to you, arhooley.
Timeline here Janus:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Hurricane_Katrina
Looks like I was mistaken… they only had 3 days warning.
I can see how with only three days notice, all those school buses ended up submerged!
we need people who seek liberal goals (functional government, balance of powers, equal opportunity, public safety, etc.)
Wow, taking a bold stance on functional government. How about puppies – pro or con? Which part of the government is functioning best these days under Democratic control, the money-borrowing part or the job-destroying part?
We might call them progressives; I still call us conservatives. Stubborn? Yes.
Incoherent? Sure.
You say you had “cites” in that nonsense?
Thank you for your replies. I do feel concerned how this became Katrina thread. At the same time, it seems important to inform everyone, worthwhile to draw attention to ongoing tragedies, and valuable for more evidence of the need for more functional US health care and emergency management systems.
9. McGehee:
; )
10. Greabeard:
Thanks for the link, though I’d already posted a timeline.
“3 days warning… all those school buses ended up submerged!”
As Snopes but it,“Opportunities like the one posited here may or may not have been missed in New Orleans, but coping with the uncertainty and confusion of natural disasters as they unfold is rarely as simple as it might seem in retrospect.”
When the warning came seems moot since, of course, the victims had no place to go. The people who had a place to go, and could leave, left. But, in New Orleans, a city [before Katrina] of about 484,000 people, 23.2 percent of residents [were] people with disabilities. Virtually everyone black and poor either had a disability, or had to take care of someone with a disability, and had no place to go (unless you count the hellhole that Chertoff’s FEMA made of the Superdome).
On August 31, 2005, Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said, “We are extremely pleased with the response that every element of the federal government, all of our federal partners, have made to this terrible tragedy.”
Then, the second installment of the tragedy began, with white racists (see link in previous post) taking pot shots at blacks, and the profiteering by Halliburton and other Republican companies with no bid contracts as disastrous as their crimes against our troops. Even some Republicans were a bit embarrassed by it.
11: bgates:
As a conservative, I insist that we can and must have good government. By that, I mean in part, functional government. That includes good functional health care and emergency management. Bold? It only seems bold after years of hearing every Republican on the news claim that good government is impossible, while delivering the worst governance ever. In 2004, only 12 percent of historians were ready to place Bush dead last. 61 percent of the historians concluded that the current [2008] presidency is the worst in the nation’s history..
By “cite” I mean “to quote (a passage, book, author, etc.), esp. as an authority…” Since this is a webpage, we can most conveniently do this by using a URL, or using a link, as I do. I hope I’ve made all this clear for you.
0. SG: Strangely, this began with a link to comments that IMO distorted an article by Krugman. Oh well.
Again, I thank all of you for responding.
Twenty three point two percent were people with disabilities?
If that fact was known, why in the world weren’t those school buses lined up for those three days to at least get those poor folks to Baton Rouge?
Lefties pretty quickly want to point a finger at FEMA, but ignore whole cities that disappeared in Mississippi, (Repub. Governor), that didn’t have submerged, unused school buses when Katrina receded.
Janus, you are a waste of my time.
Janus is, as usual, going off the deep end so far no normal adult can take him very seriously.
I will say this: I have met Nick Gillespie’s wife -who is a professor a well-known “public Ivy” University- and can say she is not only intelligent and charming, but quite attractive as well.
Janus, on the other hand, is quickly falling from “principled opponent” to “clueless idiot.”
When was Janus ever a ‘principled opponent’? The guy has repeatedly demonstrated an inability to keep his comments relevant to the post.