Is this more blantant stupidity, or distortions/lies, from Don Luskin? I think so. What do you think?
Paul Krugman's "The Tax-Cut Con," which ran in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, is the centerpiece of an all-Krugman, all-the-time blitzkrieg media tour to promote the pundit's new book, The Great Unraveling. The article offers Krugman's revisionist history of 25 years of "a crusade against taxes" — which he argued has "more or less deliberately, set the United States up for a fiscal crisis."
The goal of this deliberate crisis, according to Krugman, is to allow "conservatives" to,
in the name of fiscal necessity ... dismantle immensely popular government programs that would otherwise have been untouchable. ... America a couple of decades from now will be a place in which elderly people make up a disproportionate share of the poor, as they did before Social Security. It will also be a country in which even middle-class elderly Americans are, in many cases, unable to afford expensive medical procedures or prescription drugs and in which poor Americans generally go without even basic health care. And it may well be a place in which only those who can afford expensive private schools can give their children a decent education.
Is it more than a bit of a reach to claim that the real objectives of conservatives and their tax cuts are poverty, illness, and ignorance? That's nothing compared to what Krugman wrote in his new book. There he stated that the Bush administration is part of the rise of a "revolutionary power" comparable to the rise of "totalitarian regimes in the 1930's"
. To the objectives of poverty, illness, and injury Krugman predicted "a country ... possibly — in which elections are only a formality" .
Whew! Pretty strong words from someone who has often complained that the Bush administration attacks its critics for being unpatriotic. But believe it or not, Krugman took it even further in his interview last week with Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air" (see "Lying About Lying," National Review Online, September 15, 2003). There he updated the book's old-fashioned Nazi metaphor with the post-9/11 version of the same vicious cliché:
The real threat isn't some terrorists who can kill a few people now and then but are not fundamentally a threat to the continuation of America as I know it, but the internal challenge from very powerful domestic political forces who want to do away with America as I know it.
Krugman told Gross that President Bush is only one of the "front men" for this "revolutionary power." According to Krugman, the criminal mastermind behind these "powerful domestic political forces" is Grover Norquist. He's the worse-than-a-terrorist who, Krugman told Gross, sits at the "center of the web." In Sunday's Times Magazine, Krugman described American's coming poverty, illness, and ignorance as "Norquist's vision."
http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_luskin/truthsquad091603.asp
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