The Republican Party's Long Decline Leads to Irrationality
Tuesday 13 March 2012
by: Paul Krugman, Krugman & Co. | Op-Ed
Truthout
The economist Brad DeLong notes that the Republican Party we now see in the primaries has been building for a couple of decades: “I went to Washington in 1993 to work for what we called Lloyd Bentsen's Treasury as part of the sane technocratic bipartisan center,” Mr. DeLong wrote in a blog post on Feb 28. “And it took me only two months — two months! — to conclude that America's best hope for sane technocratic governance required the elimination of the Republican Party from our political system as rapidly as possible … Nothing since has led me to question or change that belief — only to strengthen it.”
I can’t help thinking of my own decade-plus in the journalistic trenches. Early on in my tenure at The New York 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 the United States into war.
For this I was labeled “shrill.”
More than that: throughout these past 10-plus years, it has been considered ill-mannered and uncouth, not to mention unacceptably partisan, to suggest that the political parties aren’t symmetric — that, for example, the reluctance of Democrats to cut Social Security and Medicare is not equivalent to the G.O.P.’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.
(More here.)
by: Paul Krugman, Krugman & Co. | Op-Ed
Truthout
The economist Brad DeLong notes that the Republican Party we now see in the primaries has been building for a couple of decades: “I went to Washington in 1993 to work for what we called Lloyd Bentsen's Treasury as part of the sane technocratic bipartisan center,” Mr. DeLong wrote in a blog post on Feb 28. “And it took me only two months — two months! — to conclude that America's best hope for sane technocratic governance required the elimination of the Republican Party from our political system as rapidly as possible … Nothing since has led me to question or change that belief — only to strengthen it.”
I can’t help thinking of my own decade-plus in the journalistic trenches. Early on in my tenure at The New York 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 the United States into war.
For this I was labeled “shrill.”
More than that: throughout these past 10-plus years, it has been considered ill-mannered and uncouth, not to mention unacceptably partisan, to suggest that the political parties aren’t symmetric — that, for example, the reluctance of Democrats to cut Social Security and Medicare is not equivalent to the G.O.P.’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.
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home