Paul Krugman: The GOP isn't unlucky with its menu of candidates. They are what the party has become.
Early on in my tenure at the Times, I felt I had no choice but to point out the inconvenient truth that the official line of the commentariat was all wrong. George W. Bush was not a nice, blunt, honest guy who happened to be a conservative; he was a serial liar pursuing a hard-line agenda, who among other things deliberately misled America into war.
For this I was labeled “shrill”.
More than that: throughout these past ten-plus years, it has been considered ill-mannered and uncouth, not to mention unacceptably partisan, to suggest that the parties aren’t symmetric — that, for example, the reluctance of Democrats to cut Social Security and Medicare is not equivalent to the GOP’s consistent pursuit of huge unfunded tax cuts, that the occasional desire of Democrats to put evidence in a more favorable light is not equivalent to the constant, raw dishonesty emanating from the right. And pundits in good standing have been expected to make calls for bipartisanship that involve pretending that Republican politicians are actually the kind of statesmen the party used to contain, but no longer does.
So now we see a primary struggle in which the choice is between a series of not-Romneys whose political and policy views are stark raving mad, on one side, and the not-not-Romney who is, maybe, just pretending to share those views. How did that happen?
The answer, as Brad suggests, is that it happened a long time ago. The GOP isn’t just spectacularly unlucky in its menu of candidates; this is what the party has been for decades. Rick Santorum isn’t someone out of left field; he’s always been what you see now, and he was a central figure in his Senate days.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/looking-back-with-shrillness/
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It's been in the works for a long time. Thank god I am old. It is too depressing to see what is happening. I dream and hope for turning things around, but if it doesn't happen, at least it is not my entire future at stake. Some struggles in my waning years maybe, but I grew up with the now apocryphal American dream that life offered me a chance to improve myself. I could get a good education and not owe more than I would ever earn in my lifetime. I could afford to go to the doctor and the dentist and have good health care. I could be proud of my country.
To see the level we have sunk to is so distressful. We must fight back. We can't let this continue. We can't let hate and nastiness become our mantra.
Keep on being "shrill" Krugman until someone listens.
http://www.balloon-juice.com/balloon-juice-lexicon-q-z/
Shrill- Telling the unpopular truth. The polar opposite of a pundit whose slavish devotion to mainstream approval leads him or her to frequently wrong conclusions (see Serious person). Someone dubbed ‘shrill’ can be reliably accurate but nonetheless ignored for stepping outside the “acceptable” range of political opinion (see ‘Overton Window’). Particularly hated by Villagers, Beltway insiders, and ‘serious people’ because their example makes it impossible to claim that everyone believed a point that turned out to be wrong (e.g., WMDs in Iraq). Notable shrill people include Howard Dean, Al Gore, and Paul Krugman. The correct usage takes the form “Paul Krugman is shrill.” It should be noted, however, that Michael Moore is not shrill; rather, Michael Moore is fat.
