Hatchet Job

Politics makes strange bedfellows.  Maybe the recent article by Jeffrey Sachs will bring some otherwise disagreeing fellow bloggers into an all-inclusive love in.  Sachs is a bête noire of the radical left – are you listening, Troutsky? – because he’s confirmed neo-liberal, beloved of administering economic shock therapy to poorer nations.  He thinks global warming is an alarming crisis, so they should beg to differ (if they’re going to toe their political lines correctly.)  Ahh…but global warming is the crisis of the day for the liberals and the lefties – blame it all on those coal-burning corporations! 

All those right wing libertarian, Tea Party types hate the likes of Sachs (and Paul Krugman, another liberal economist on the AGW bandwagon) and think global warming is a hoax!  Conspiracy theories abound, almost as profusely as secret Tri-lateralist skullduggery and corporate oligarchical string-pulling does on the Left.    Can we all agree that this article by Sachs is a piece of trash, or that he is a piece of trash…either will do to gain entry to my bed today!

Like Krugman, whom I admire, while I’m a bit leary of Sachs, Jeff weighs in with the tired old saw that the people who “deny” the conclusions of “climate science” are the same ones who thought smoking cigarettes had no bad effects on your health, or wanted you to believe that, not to mention the fact that Big Oil is behind it.  Like Krugman, he makes no argument at all about the science – that’s settled, of course.  Nevermind that most major corporations of all kinds seem to have caught the AGW train – it’s good marketing to be green!  Sure, at first, the industry had a stupid knee-jerk propaganda fit to try and discredit the AGW hypothesis before it could gain traction.  Dumb, dumb, dumb, but they’re only money men – whaddaya expect?  To review the arguments of intellectuals who critique the IPCC and not notice that a whole lot has changed requires willful blindess or dishonesty.    Not to mention the fact that Sachs doesn’t seem to have any interest in the science at all.  Just pick your team, and root for them, is all it is…

Krug’s feet of clay…

More on the theme of Paul Krugman going off the deep end after serving the country so well.  In a recent blog post of his, he weighs in on the lastest kerfluffle about climate change.  The guys who wrote the best-seller, Freakonomics, have a new book out with a chapter that is somewhat critical of the so-called consenus on human civilization causing the planet to get warmer.  He delivers himself of this ghastly howler, emphasis mine:

…not only that they didn’t check out the global cooling stuff, the stuff about solar panels, and all the other errors people have been pointing out, but that they didn’t even look into the debate sufficiently to realize what company they were placing themselves in.

No, it’s not his placing of the preposition at the end of the sentence that has my blood boiling.  It’s the idea that the way science should be done is by checking out who’s on what side of the controversy, and then joining the right team.  That’s politics, and people who can’t tell the difference shouldn’t be writing about this issue.

And by the way, I am trying to still admire Krug a little, but it’s getting hard.

“Feet of Clay,” by the way, comes from the Old Testament (Dan.2:31-32).

O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!

Ophelia’s exclamation was about Hamlet, but it could have been about Paul Krugman’s latest column.  In it, he waxes positively hysterical about global warming, states that those who don’t accept the hypothesis are “deniers” committing treason against the future generations, and warns that civilization is in peril.  The reader who posted the first comment on the NYTimes website, remarked cogently, after quoting him:

“…What you saw [on the floor of the House], instead, were people who have no interest in the truth…“

Paul, the tragedy in all of this is that this applies to almost all of the folks on both sides of the debate – including you.

Amen to that.  Krug doesn’t present any evidence, any arguments – he just rants and raves as if the pillar of all-consuming fire is approaching on the horizon.  I share his opinion of most Republican congressmen, but just running a computer model doesn’t make you right.  Is he in thrall to the delusions of his fellow Princeton prof, Michael Oppenheimer?  I never thought I’d see him descend to the same puerile level as Thomas Friedman, but I guess he’s joined that club.  Drunk the Kool Aid, as some remarked.

He did a great service to the nation with his critiques of the Bush gang while so many others were swallowing their lies and looking the other way from their gross incompetence, so…sad, sad, sad.

Pointy-head…

Readers of my blog will recall that I have great admiration for Paul Krugman and the service he has done our body-politic with his commentaries in the NYTimes.  However, like all things, he is not perfect, and today’s column shows him in full form as an out-of-touch, intellectual crank with a tin ear for the realities of politics. 

Obama didn’t say everything he would have said, so he’s obviously got it all wrong.  He expects the new prez to deliver a policy-wonk speech to welcome us to his administration.  As for the remarks Obama made about how we Americans didn’t make the “hard choices” necessary, and how we all share some blame for our problems, how about interpreting that to mean that in the past we were content to vote for politicians who told us we could get everything without paying for it, especially if the we give a lot back to the rich…which is what all of us would be if we would just cut taxes.  Krug’s remarks are similar to his silliest columns during the primary race for the nomination.

Put a sock in it Paul, and wait a bit before weighing in with both guns blazing.

Valentines – Kiss & Make Up!

Krugman and Dowd – do these two read each other’s columns?  Certainly.  Do they talk to each other, I wonder?  Do they call each other on the phone for shouting matches?  I wonder if they talk to people who don’t make it their business to comment publicly on current politics, people at whom the nomination campaigns are directed?

First, Dowd lets loose with a, yes, vitriolic critique of Hillary Clinton, and speaks hysterically of the Clinton Attack Machine.  Whaaa?  Way over the top!  I haven’t heard anything outside the very wide bounds of the usual American campaign scurrilousness.  Check out Thomas Jefferson’s election fliers and the limericks written against him!  Dowd goes through periods of writing good, sharp columns, but I wonder why she thinks that we are interested in her buckets of bile.

Then, Krugman weighs in with his hissy-fit assessment of Obama as cult-icon, comparing him to Nixon and, get this, to GWB in a flight jacket on that aircraft carrier, USS Mission Accomplished!  Is he on this planet?  Yes, Obama’s wife was wrong to hem and haw about whether she  would work on a Hillary Clinton presidential campaign – she’s rooting for hubby.  But she’ll have plenty of time to smooth that over should her man not clinch the spot.

Krugman, for all his exceptional service to the nation as a tireless and generally spot-on critic of the Republicans, does have a tin ear at times when he ventures out of policy wonkdom.  For all his anger over Bush’s Iraq policy, he can’t seem to fathom that other voters feel the same way, and hold a grudge against Clinton.  Not just a grudge – they think it says something about her judgement and leadership.  He castigates the Obama campaign for making a mountain out of a molehill regarding Clinton’s remark that LBJ’s skills and courage were crucial to moving forward MLK’s agenda.  Her proposition may be true, but there’s that tin ear again, this time Clinton’s ear.  And he ignores Clinton’s radical distortion of Obama’s comments on Reagan, that Reagonzo successfully moved the country in a new direction in a way that Bill Clinton did not.  He was citing Reagonzo’s politicial skills – he didn’t say it was a good direction!