KRUGMAN on Right Wing Response to virus "last time the crazy talk wasn't coming directly from POTUS"
www.nytimes.com/…
Trump Can’t Handle the Truth
When you look back at the record, however, you discover that as the financial crisis developed right-wingers were also deeply in denial, inclined to dismiss bad news or attribute it to liberal and/or media conspiracies. It was only in the final stages of financial collapse that top officials got real, and right-wing pundits never did.
The 2008 financial crisis was brought on by the collapse of an immense housing bubble. But many on the right denied that there was anything amiss. Larry Kudlow, now Trump’s chief economist, ridiculed “bubbleheads” who suggested that housing prices were out of line.
And I can tell you from personal experience that when I began writing about the housing bubble I was relentlessly accused of playing politics: “You only say there’s a bubble because you hate President Bush.”
When the economy began to slide, mainstream Republicans remained deeply in denial. Phil Gramm, John McCain’s senior economic adviser during the 2008 presidential campaign, declared that America was only suffering a “mental recession” and had become a “nation of whiners.”
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The point is that Trump’s luridly delusional response to the coronavirus and his conspiracy theorizing about Democrats and the news media aren’t really that different from the way the right dealt with the financial crisis a dozen years ago. True, last time the crazy talk wasn’t coming directly from the president of the United States. But that’s not the important distinction between then and now.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/12/1926870/-Krugman-on-the-Right-wing-Response-to-the-Virus?utm_campaign=trending