I
t’s as if the last eight years never happened. There was no George W. Bush. There were no deranged liberals making all sorts of hysterical claims about what was happening or would happen under W’s watch. We just went from Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America to today’s tea parties.
At least that’s the fantasy Paul Krugman is promoting this morning as he takes a look at the tea party movement. He professes that he doesn’t want to “make fun of crazy people,” but then goes on to say of anyone who doesn’t skip and sing merrily under the smile of the Great Obama is “the subject of considerable mockery, and rightly so,” that they represent “standard practice” in the GOP, which is wont to make “bizarre claims about what liberals are up to.”
The rallys themselves are not spontaneous, grassroots campaigns in Krugman’s eyes, but rather, “AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects,” in this case, Dick Armey and “the usual group of rightwing billionaires.”
It must be wonderful to live Krugman’s life, blind to the excesses of his own and hypercritical of anyone who has the timerity to think thoughts that are not his.
How nice to be able to ignore George Soros and Peter Lewis, leftwing billionaires who funded human waves of crazed anti-Bushies who relentlessly attacked the GOP while the Dems were out of power. But they do exist, they have names, they have track records, they leave bodies in their wake – more so than any “rightwing billionaires” Krugman can conjure but not name.
How nice to be able to ignore current events, like how citizens like Keli Carender and Amanda Grosserode spontaneously organized tea parties following Rick Santelli’s unscripted rant, and how TCOT and Twitter and Craig’s List and Facebook are the tools of this movement – yes, new media used by gasp! conservatives – and how Armey’s tagging along, not leading.
How nice to be able to ignore the wrongs of your own party, with its ad hominem attacks and crazed policies, by just poking fun at the sincere and concerned opposition. Here, for example, is Krugman explaining how silly it is to call Obama a socialist:
Thus, President Obama is being called a “socialist” who seeks to destroy capitalism. Why? Because he wants to raise the tax rate on the highest-income Americans back to, um, about 10 percentage points less than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Bizarre.
Bizarre is reducing the now-rich Obama record to the tired canard about tax rates on the wealthy. Krugman’s coddled world will not allow him to mention massive government intervention into the private sector, like Obama’s firing of GM’s CEO, or the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, or cap and trade, or the Omnibus Public Land bill’s stripping of property rights, or the planting of the seeds of nationalized health care, or the massive new national debt or the power grabs by every branch of the federal government that have been going on since Obama took office.
How nice to live in a world where living, and writing, the lie gives one the fame of a New York Times column and the adoration of leagues of liberals who share Krugman’s psychotic fear of the real world that surrounds them.
If you’re not sure you’re going to attend a tea party this Wednesday, do it for Krugman. Make us impossible to ignore.