Krugman sees a "major rhetorical shift" from Romney's campaign to Bobby Jindal's recent speech.

Krugman's column is titled "Makers, Taker, Fakers." Here's one thing that seemed off to me:

Mr. Jindal posed the problem in a way that would, I believe, have been unthinkable for a leading Republican even a year ago. “We must not,” he declared, “be the party that simply protects the well off so they can keep their toys. We have to be the party that shows all Americans how they can thrive.” After a campaign in which Mitt Romney denounced any attempt to talk about class divisions as an “attack on success,” this represents a major rhetorical shift.

There are 2 propositions: A. Those who are successful should be able to keep the fruits of their efforts, and B. All Americans should have the opportunity to work toward their own success.

Krugman comes close to saying Romney only said A and Jindal only says B.

But Romney continually said both things. His opponents worked constantly — and successfully — to make people feel that he was only saying A.  And Jindal is also saying both things. That's the function of the word "simply."

Jindal — in the quoted sentence — isn't saying Romney only said A. He's talking about the way people think about the Republican Party, which is in A terms, because that's the way Democrats have successfully framed them. Jindal is saying the B frame is better political rhetoric.

Krugman goes on to explain why B rhetoric doesn't properly apply to what Jindal and the rest of the GOP are really doing. That is, he's continuing the process that was used so successfully in the campaign to defeat Romney — pushing A, obscuring B.

There is no major rhetorical shift. Not from Jindal and not from Krugman. Everyone is doing, rhetorically, what they've been doing all along.

There are 2 propositions — A and B — that relate to GOP policy. GOP proponents portray them as 2 sides of the same thing: The reason why A makes sense is that it's part of how B works. Opponents of the GOP de-link A and B and portray B as a trick to get people to vote for the party that's only about A.

2 questions for the GOP: 1. How can you truly be about B, with A as a subordinate proposition? and 2. Can you get people to believe that's what you are?

"Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman caused an angry Twitter tirade last year from Estonia's president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves...."

"Now the electronic spat has been turned into a 16-minute vocal piece that will debut in April in a performance by the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra in Estonia."

In case you are wondering what they are singing about in Estonia.

Sample lyric: "But yes, what do we know? We're just dumb & silly East Europeans. Unenlightened. Someday we too will understand. Nostra culpa."

ADDED: "Where does 'Nostra Culpa' come down on Krugman vs. Ilves, on stimulus vs. austerity?"

"As the librettist I was conscious not to take sides," Mr. Diel, an American journalist living in Estonia.... "For my part there was no winner or loser chosen or intended."

"There is something intrinsically dramatic in this story," composer Eugene Birman said.... "As a composer, the words 'austerity' and 'stimulate' are particularly evocative musically. Arguments just make great listening sometimes." 

Hope and change... into a clown costume.

Paul Krugman responds to the pushback he's received on "the trillion-dollar-coin thing":

There seem to be two kinds of objections. One is that it would be undignified. Here’s how to think about that....

The professor is about to teach us how to think. Get ready!

... we have a situation in which a terrorist may be about to walk into a crowded room and threaten to blow up a bomb he’s holding. 

Okay. A hypothetical. I'm up for hypotheticals. And it's an analogy, because the trillion-dollar-coin thing isn't promoted as a solution to terrorism. But terrorism is something that you can picture quite concretely and you understand it as very real and scary — unlike the debt ceiling problem which is awfully abstract. (Even to say "ceiling" is to resort to metaphor.)

So, anyway:

It turns out, however, that the Secret Service has figured out a way to disarm this maniac — a way that for some reason will require that the Secretary of the Treasury briefly wear a clown suit. (My fictional plotting skills have let me down, but there has to be some way to work this in). 

In this hypothetical, you have to accept that the Secret Service has found "a way." It will work. The professor is telling you how to think, so you're going off track if you want an explanation for why that would work or if you — much more likely — would be thinking what the hell is going on in this country when the people in charge are figuring out solutions involving clown suits and believing that clown-suit solutions work? Krugman reveals that he knows his hypothetical is horribly flawed, and he tries to paper it over by confessing to second-rate "plotting skills." There has to be some way to work this it. The professor is teaching us how to think — use this analogy — but he can't piece together the hypothetical. How's that supposed to help us think?

He continues:

And the response of the nervous Nellies is, “My god, we can’t dress the secretary up as a clown!” Even when it will make him a hero who saves the day?

Wait. The normal people who go with the working theory that the government has gone mad are "nervous Nellies"? Yes, because Krugman's hypothetical locks it in that the solution works. So the people aren't supposed to be thinking that sounds crazy. It's posited that they know it will work, so all they can realistically be concerned with is that the secretary will look undignified dressed like a clown.

Krugman turns to the second objection, as if it's unconnected to the first one:

The other objection is the apparently primordial fear that mocking the monetary gods will bring terrible retribution.

Why weren't the people who say it looks crazy credited with having some fear that it wouldn't work? Because in the clown-suit hypothetical it was posited that it would work? These "nervous Nellies" were mocked in Part I of Krugman's krushing of all adversaries. In Part II, we see troglodytes who imagine a "god" who will punish us for doing something wrong.

What the hysterics see is a terrible, outrageous attempt to pay the government’s bills out of thin air. This is utterly wrong, and in fact is wrong on two levels.

The first level is that in practice minting the coin would be nothing but an accounting fiction, enabling the government to continue doing exactly what it would have done if the debt limit were raised....

So it's a trick, but it's not that different from other tricks. It's just weirder looking. Like a clown suit. Which gets back to the point I made when I criticized Krugman a couple days ago:

It's strange that it's come to this, but I don't believe the President of the United States would choose to do something that will strike the people as so bizarre, even if he feels capable of articulating the legal theory with a straight face. The President must maintain the people's trust and confidence. He must be comprehensible as normal, sound, and sane to ordinary folks.

Krugman's response to these ordinary folks — the people upon whom the President's power depends — is: They're hysterical and ill-informed. Well, how did this President — how does any President — get elected in the first place? It was by generating confidence. He's a con man. Let's say the management of the national debt has been a lot of trickery for a long, long time. What then does it matter if we do something that is quite obviously a trick, that everyone will see as a trick?

Does the trick work if the magician points to the hand that's doing the sleight?

"Should President Obama be willing to print a $1 trillion platinum coin if Republicans try to force America into default?"

"Yes, absolutely. He will, after all, be faced with a choice between two alternatives: one that’s silly but benign, the other that’s equally silly but both vile and disastrous. The decision should be obvious."

Says Paul Krugman.

It's strange that it's come to this, but I don't believe the President of the United States would choose to do something that will strike the people as so bizarre, even if he feels capable of articulating the legal theory with a straight face. The President must maintain the people's trust and confidence. He must be comprehensible as normal, sound, and sane to ordinary folks.

ADDED:

Paul Krugman is "feeling so despondent."

Why? "Because of the way Obama negotiated" the fiscal cliff deal.

He gave every indication of being more or less desperate to cut a deal before the year ended....

He did? Funny, Rush Limbaugh kept saying Obama wanted to go over the cliff. It was his preference. The idea was to get rid of the hated Bush tax cuts and the cliff was there as a device to make it possible to blame the GOP. Back to Krugman:

The only thing that might save this situation is the fact that Obama has to be aware just how much is now riding on his willingness to finally stand up for his side; if he doesn’t, nobody will ever trust him again, and he will go down in history as the wimp who threw it all away.

The wimp?! Hey, remember when they were calling Romney a wimp?



That was back in July. Was Romney "just too insecure to be President"? Meade and I were just talking this morning about exactly that. There were 2 crucial points when Romney failed to stand his ground. He crumpled under intimidation. One was when the 47% video leaked out. Romney went beta, instead of doubling down, getting hardcore. The other was during the second debate, when he was going big on Benghazi, and Obama and Candy Crowley performed their check-the-transcript routine, and Romney deflated into oh, am I wrong?

So, anyway... is Obama just too insecure to be President?

Evidence that Romney is winning.

Paul Krugman has gone desperately juvenile.

A NYT headline: "Mitt Romney Says, 'I Am The Confidence Fairy!''"

But Romney never said "I Am The Confidence Fairy!" There's some other Romney quote — some dull thing about economics — and then Paul Krugman says: "In effect, Romney was saying, 'I am the confidence fairy!'"

Krugman really, really wants Romney to lose. So, presumably, does the NYT. I don't have a problem with an opinion writer paraphrasing somebody's quote like that. It's the use of quotation marks in the headline that's wrong.


And the use of the word "fairy" demands some attention. I understand that Krugman is using the word in the sense of the tooth fairy — a magical creature. But the word is also a homophobic epithet. If a Republican had used equivalent language against a Democrat, we would hear criticism, so let me provide the criticism in this turnabout.

And by the way, creating confidence isn't like changing a tooth into money. The supposedly fairy-like power Romney claimed was to inspire optimism about the economy. Compare that to Obama's "this was the moment" speech, given at the point of accepting his party's nomination in 2008. At that moment, he proclaimed, "the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal... we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth... we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals."

If we're going to ridicule presidential candidates asserting magical — godlike — powers, that was the ultimate.

And that was 4 years ago. Many moments ago. How are we doing with "our highest ideals"? How did Obama do remaking this great nation? Is this the reflection of our very best selves? These are the real questions, not some inconsequential remark Romney made about optimism at a fundraiser.

Now, Krugman thinks he has a very funny point about economics, which is that the stock market is up, even though Romney's looking less likely to win according to Intrade. And what Romney said — what that "quote" in the headline paraphrased —was:

If it looks like I’m going to win, the markets will be happy. If it looks like the president’s going to win, the markets should not be terribly happy. It depends of course which markets you’re talking about, which types of commodities and so forth, but my own view is that if we win on November 6th, there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We’ll see capital come back and we’ll see — without actually doing anything — we’ll actually get a boost in the economy.

We're deprived of the text of the question he's responding to. But we can see that Romney inserts a qualification about "which markets you’re talking about, which types of commodities," before moving on to a generic statement about "optimism about the future" and "a boost in the economy." I'm not a Nobel-prize winning economist, but I can see that Romney is making a decision not to get into saying something complicated, and that there are different types of markets and some go up when others go down. But if you want to talk about the stock market, isn't that where people put extra money that they aren't investing in expanding their own businesses in a way that might produce more commodities and increase employment?

Fairy forbid that the economics expert would actually explain some economics now and then. Why bother when there's one more thing about Romney that's supposedly soooo hilarious? It seems we've all turned into idiots.... here in this remade great nation that reflects our very best selves.

Is this your very best self, Mr. Krugman? Is this your very best newspaper, New York Times?

"Romney Offends the Pundits: Doesn't he know he's not supposed to debate foreign policy?"

The Wall Street Journal editorial.

His political faux pax was to offend a pundit class that wants to cede the foreign policy debate to Mr. Obama without thinking seriously about the trouble for America that is building in the world.

Faux pax? False peace? Once you get started with the silent x, it's hard to stop, isn't it? Anyway, what was Mitt's misstep — faux pas — in making a prominent statement on a day of foreign policy crisis?

Was it "awesomely awful"? — as Paul Krugman put it, sounding as if he'd like to write titles for Judith Viorst kid's books. Was it exactly normal, another day on the campaign, chewing through whatever comes up in the news, letting people see how the challenger would differ from the incumbent, who's stuck handling whatever happens as part of his job? Or was this a specific and important occasion for drawing attention to Obama's instinctive apologizing for America?

Yesterday was a key day — perhaps the day — in the campaign. Convention bounce and the Chicago teachers strike were instantly overshadowed. There was an opportunity to go for the win, and Romney took it. The media noticed, of course, and sprang into such intense, concerted action that it was obvious that they knew it was a day to be won and if the other side was going to go for the win, they had to act quickly and ensure that their guy won the day. Shock and awe, baby. Awesomely awful, indeed.

"Is Niall Ferguson's Newsweek attack on Obama 'embarrassing' and 'unethical'?"

"Paul Krugman is among the intellectual heavyweights tearing apart the British historian for a 'careless and unconvincing' article."

In a forthright cover story for Newsweek magazine entitled Hit the Road, Barack, Ferguson argues that Obama has broken almost all of his campaign promises of four years ago, and attacks the US president's foreign policy, healthcare reforms and economic and fiscal policy.

To say that commentators in the US have criticised the piece would be an understatement....

"Hollande’s victory means the end of 'Merkozy,' the Franco-German axis that has enforced the austerity regime of the past two years."

"This would be a 'dangerous' development if that strategy were working, or even had a reasonable chance of working. But it isn’t and doesn’t; it’s time to move on. Europe’s voters, it turns out, are wiser than the Continent’s best and brightest."

Writes Paul Krugman, opining on the French election. Move on... I understand the impulse, but to what?

One answer — an answer that makes more sense than almost anyone in Europe is willing to admit — would be to break up the euro, Europe’s common currency. Europe wouldn’t be in this fix if Greece still had its drachma, Spain its peseta, Ireland its punt, and so on, because Greece and Spain would have what they now lack: a quick way to restore cost-competitiveness and boost exports, namely devaluation....

But that's not the right answer, per Krugman. That would be "highly disruptive" and "a huge defeat for the 'European project.'" (Can you remember what that is?) Krugman's solution is to abandon "fantasies of prosperity through pain" — "the confidence fairy doesn’t exist" — and grow the economy.

The "Lie of the Year" isn't a lie!

Translation: The "Lie of the Year" came from Democrats.

"The Republican ideology is one of FOOLS and CLOWNS."

Don't miss Crack Skull Bob's rendition of last Sunday's talk show heads.

Krugman's swipe at Bloomberg's rhetoric about Occupy Wall Street.

Paul Krugman has a column about how various "plutocrats" are "panicking" about the Occupy Wall Street movement, and I want to focus on the 4th paragraph:

Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.

So the "actual goals" — presumably, something along the lines of a better world for everyone — should divert us from noticing the actual effects people are actually causing? Imagine that as a general principle: We should to back off from criticizing people who have good intentions, even when they adopt means that cause collateral damage, even when those means aren't likely to get us to the pretty goals they have in mind.

These are exactly the people we need to expose and criticize!

Now, Bloomberg did kind of ask for it, because of his use of the word "trying":

"What [the protesters are] trying to do is take the jobs away from people working in this city... They're trying to take away the tax base we have because none of this is good for tourism....

"If the jobs they are trying to get rid of in this city — the people that work in finance, which is a big part of our economy — we're not going to have any money to pay our municipal employees or clean the blocks or anything else."

Bloomberg's rhetoric assigns to the protesters the intent to achieve the natural consequences of their actions. Obviously, this rhetoric invites the Krugman response. But I think it's a good rhetorical device. It rips away the vanity of dreamers and demands that we look at real, concrete facts.

"Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?"

Asks Paul Krugman.

Is it odd to be subdued?

Having observed that we are subdued and that it is odd, Krugman applies the label: shame. We are ashamed of ourselves for what we did after the attacks.

Te atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue.

Te atrocity. Fix the typo, Mr. Krugman. People will think you haven't given enough weight to the atrocity. As long as we're looking for symptoms and making diagnoses, I might as well do it too.

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

You don't want to see what you don't want to see, which is oddly at odds with your belief that Americans have a shameful way of blinding ourselves to the full range of what is happening and what we are doing.

"If Mitt Romney doesn't 'know' global warming is mostly caused by humans, is he 'against science'?"

John Althouse Cohen challenges Krugman... and quotes Richard Feynman, who wrote:

It is necessary and true that all of the things we say in science, all of the conclusions, are uncertain, because they are only conclusions. They are guesses as to what is going to happen, and you cannot know what will happen, because you have not made the most complete experiments....

Scientists, therefore, are used to dealing with doubt and uncertainty. All scientific knowledge is uncertain....

So what we call scientific knowledge today is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty....

John says:

If Krugman is terrified at the idea of not 'knowing,' maybe he's the one who's against science.

I was going to challenge that "maybe," but that would be unscientific.

There are way too many political speakers embarrassing themselves these days by preening about how scientific they are, when all they mean is that they defer to authority. And there are way too many scientists who step up and pose as authorities to be deferred to (and given grants to).

"As a practicing psychologist with more than 25 years of experience, I will resist the temptation to diagnose at a distance, but..."

Psyche prof diagnoses says something long about Obama.

Excerpt:

When he wants to be, the president is a brilliant and moving speaker, but his stories virtually always lack one element: the villain who caused the problem, who is always left out, described in impersonal terms, or described in passive voice, as if the cause of others’ misery has no agency and hence no culpability.

ADDED: Paul Krugman comments on the linked piece:

[W]e shouldn’t really wonder what happened to Obama — he is who he always was. If you paid attention to what he actually said during the primary and the election, he was always a very conventional centrist. Progressives who flocked to his campaign basically deluded themselves, mistaking style for substance. I got huge flack for saying that at the time, but it was true, and events have borne it out.

Of course, I wasn't deluded. That's not to say I'm happy.

Paul Krugman denounces "the cult of balance, of centrism."

It's "a true moral failure," he says:

We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent...

Etc. etc. You know the argument. It's quite familiar really. I remember it from 1964:

"'Republican Candidate' Extends Lead vs. Obama to 47% to 39%."

Gallup.

ADDED: "Obama, Moderate Republican."

Paul Krugman says "So, let’s try another shot to the head."

I realize he's talking about a misconception, and he has designated the misconception a "zombie," and according to zombie lore, zombies are destroyed by shooting them in the head. But still. That's quite a violent way to talk about the thoughts in the minds of the people you want to correct.

And it was just last January that Kruman, responding to a terrible shooting, wrote:

So will the Arizona massacre make our discourse less toxic? It’s really up to G.O.P. leaders. Will they accept the reality of what’s happening to America, and take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric? Or will they try to dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual, and go on as before?

If Arizona promotes some real soul-searching, it could prove a turning point. If it doesn’t, Saturday’s atrocity will be just the beginning.

"It's Now Patriotic to Call Paul Krugman a !@%$#%@ Hypocrite."

Snipes William A. Jacobson after digesting Krugman's new column. But what Krugman said was: "So let’s not be civil. Instead, let’s have a frank discussion of our differences."

It seems that Krugman is associating civility with affecting agreement when there is and should be none. What's wrong with that? Rush Limbaugh says the same thing on practically every show. Let's speak clearly about the different ideologies and policies so people can see what they are and judge. Don't obfuscate with the pretense of agreement and friendliness.

Do we the people really give a damn whether our representatives in Congress and the state legislatures like each other and get along socially?

ADDED: Here's the link to Krugman's column.