OUR SOURCE WAS THE NEW YORK TIMES: Real Time magazine headline: “Charles Koch Says U.S. Can Bomb Its Way To $100k Salaries,” as spotted by Mary Katharine Ham at Hot Air:

You won’t be surprised to learn that the libertarian Koch said…exactly the opposite. What he was pointing out as a “monstrous measure” was the amount of spending, particularly government spending on among other things military endeavors, that goes into the GDP that might not be a great representation of the growth of our economy.

The body of the story makes clear what Koch was saying, but the headline is horrendous.

To their credit, MKH adds that Time has since toned down their headline, but I’m not sure why they would have complained if Charles Koch had said what their original version implied. As James Taranto noted at the Wall Street Journal in 2010, Paul Krugman of the New York Times was praising the “miracle of the 1940s” for saving the reputation of FDR’s New Deal. In response, Taranto wrote:

What Krugman calls “the miracle of the 1940s” is more commonly known as World War II, a ruinous conflict that cost some 60 million lives, including more than 400,000 American ones, and that entailed the near-extermination of Europe’s Jewish population.

World War II is sometimes called a “good war,” meaning that few dispute American intervention was necessary or that we fought on the right side. But this easy moral clarity is possible only because the Axis actions that started the war were unambiguously evil.

In April 2009 we noted that David Leonhardt, a Krugman colleague at the Times, had praised the economic policies of Germany’s National Socialist Party. Now Krugman calls World War II itself a “miracle.” The Old Gray Lady is in the grips of utter madness.

Far from the only ones — but then, it’s hard out here for a Democratic operative with a byline.