Krugman Goes Around the Bend

I never read left-wing columnist Paul Krugman, mostly because he is a bore. His obsessive hatred of President Bush has driven out all other topics from his columns. His logic is so twisted and his grasp of the facts so tenuous that it just isn’t worth my time to read him.
Now, however, Krugman’s anti-Bush mania and conspiracy-theory bent seem to have pushed him beyond partisanship and into the realm of mental disturbance. Charles Johnson’s Little Green Footballs points out a remarkable example of Krugman’s mental imbalance. His most recent column, published in today’s New York Times, began as follows:
“By and large, recent pro-war rallies haven’t drawn nearly as many people as antiwar rallies, but they have certainly been vehement. One of the most striking took place after Natalie Maines, lead singer for the Dixie Chicks, criticized President Bush: a crowd gathered in Louisiana to watch a 33,000-pound tractor smash a collection of Dixie Chicks CD’s, tapes and other paraphernalia. To those familiar with 20th-century European history it seemed eerily reminiscent of Kristallnacht. . . . But as Sinclair Lewis said, it can’t happen here.”
This is simply crazy. To compare people expressing their opinion by voluntarily destroying their own CDs to Kristallnacht, when Jews were viciously beaten by roving gangs of thugs, and their shops were systematically looted and destroyed–is not the act of a mentally well person. Someone at the Times must have realized that Krugman had embarrassed himself and the newspaper, because when Johnson returned to the Times’s web site, he found that the word “Kristallnacht” had been deleted. Which rendered the sentence meaningless, but less patently offensive.
The Kristallnacht reference is not the only sign in today’s column that Krugman has gone off the deep end. The point of his column is to allege that the recent pro-war rallies were organized by radio conglomerate Clear Channel Communications. This claim would, I think, be innocuous even if true, but Krugman offers no support for it.
Most of the “Rallies for America” were organized by talk radio host Glenn Beck, who appears on over 100 Clear Channel stations. Other rallies were organized by local radio stations, while still others (like the one last weekend in St. Paul) had no connection to any radio station at all. Krugman’s belief that, notwithstanding appearances, Clear Channel was behind the demonstrations is supported only by his assertion that “the company is notorious

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