You probably heard that Donald Rumsfeld has his knickers in a twist over Krugman’s 9/11 post:
After reading Krugman’s repugnant piece on 9/11, I cancelled my subscription to the New York Times this AM.
Normally, I don’t care much about pissing conservatives off, they’ll always find something to be pissed off about anyway, but in this case, yeah, it feels good.
Dave Weigel summarizes the anti-Krugman jihad well:
On a day when everyone else was flashing back to 9/11/2001, I was flashing back to the days and months later, when criticism of the Bush administration returned, and the practioners of it became, briefly, Emmanuel Goldsteins. Remember Susan Sontag? Remember the Dixie Chicks? Remember the campaign to “revoke the Oscar” from Michael Moore? There hasn’t been much criticism of the substance of Krugman’s remarks; denying that 9/11 and counterterrorism strategy became “wedge issues” is denying a few years of political history. The criticism is of Krugman for expressing it.
Paul in KY
The only reason the scumbag had a subscription in 1st place was to see if Judith Miller was lying the way they had paid her to lie.
Kudos to Krugman for telling the unvarnished truth.
Suffern ACE
My guess is he’ll be given the Halperin treatment. Which is too bad.
Watched Fox while once again waiting for my car to be repaired. Same old shit. Elites who aren’t “first responders” using supposed insults to them (note: None of the people who Krugman calls out are, let us say, working class Joes) to cover for the very bad decisions that were made.
America – home of the most blameless elites EVAH, unless they did something bad…then it was because they were thinking of (or afraid of) the voters.
John Weiss
Rum punch?! I like my rum straight.
trollhattan
Gosh, hard to imagine how much of a financial hit the NYT would take if all war criminals cancelled. Et tu Yoo?
Dennis SGMM
Dick Cheney is going farther than cancelling his NYT subscription: he’s threatened to streak the NYT’s editorial offices. Oh, the humanity!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I haven’t seen any political TeeVee today, but I’ll go out on a limb and guess that everyone to the right of Rachel Maddow (which is everybody but Maddow, Sharpton and Schultz) will give the moral high ground to the war-mongering torturers and liars (including the guy who’s currently serving time, IIANM) over the guy who said something true and unpleasant.
ItAintEazy
He left out Ashleigh Banfield and Phil Donahue.
Jennifer
I’m pleased to know Rumsfeld would be offended by my 9/11 post, since after I wrote it I read Krugman’s and determined that I might have been channeling him.
Except Krugman was more conciliatory than I was.
Davis X. Machina
The baying for Krugman’s scalp is equal parts nostalgia, and plain embarrassment. One rich and organized guy in a cave in Afghanistan — a Wahabi Koch brother — gave them thirty, hell three hundred, Reichstag fires on a silver platter.
They should have been able to shrink the Democratic party to post-Mulroney, Kim-Cambell-esque proportions in that climate. To rule unopposed for a generation. Hell, half the Democratic party was volunteering to participate in the process.
And they couldn’t even do that right. They screwed it up. Gone, like a puddle in the driveway. After two years, if you consider how close 2004 was. Certainly after four.
biff diggerence
Really, Rummy?
You’re nodding off for 4 to 5 hours of your day, anyway.
mk3872
And of course when Pres Perry invades Iran and helps Israel annihilate the Palestinians, anyone offering opinions other than those that favor the gov’t will be anti-American and railed against by the media.
The Tea Party will suddenly become the Republican Party again and no anti-Perry comments will be allowed by the media.
redshirt
“We make our own reality now…”
Jennifer
As Bill Maher said, 9/11 represented the greatest security failure in this nation’s history, and the only person who got fired was him.
Davis X. Machina
I like Bill Buckley’s form-letter response to angry letters demanding that he cancel their National Journal subscriptions: “Cancel your own damn subscription.”
trollhattan
@Dennis SGMM:
Can you imagine how long that would take?
“Mrrrr…I’m buck naked. Mrrr…I’m buck naked. Mrrr…take that, librules. Mrrrr, where’s Brooks? I have a fruitcake for him. Mrrr….”
singfoom
Oh, how I wish I could have just unsubscribed from the entire War on Terror this last decade.
Not surprising they’re going nuts on Krugman. The emotional cudgel remains quite alive 10 years after the event. It might not be used often, but the wielders know how to use it to best effect.
The Dangerman
@Suffern ACE:
There was an interesting program last night relating to the long term health problems of first responders; as the program indicated, it was stated by several levels of officials that the air near ground zero was safe.
Given the amount of nasty shit (think computers, printers, monitors, etc) that was pulverized, the claims the air was safe was clearly bogus; I wouldn’t have gone near the place without a respirator even with their claims. Nonetheless, the list of things that were fucked up post-9/11 is simply astounding.
As for fucking up pre-9/11, not so much; I don’t think they knew what was coming, but they were surely willing to be “negligent”, take the hit (presumably expected to be nowhere near as bad as it turned out to be), and use the resulting madness for their ends. No, this isn’t a conspiracy theory, they weren’t in cohoots and they sure as shit didn’t bring down the towers as the Truthers claim, but they just really didn’t give much of a shit, ergo, mission accomplished.
redshirt
To self promote, 9/11 cake here.
Culture of Truth
You go with the columnists you have, not necessarily the columnists you want.
Elizabelle
I’m guessing the right will say Krugman’s column is an attack on our military and their families.
Which it’s not.
On KCET (independent LA public TV channel), Judy Muller (former network correspondent now with the Annenberg School, not Scooter Libby’s pal) said you could trace a straight line from our current troubles, economy, polarization, dysfunction, right back to 9/11.
Rumsfeld and Cheney and Krauthammar and Kristol and all their apolgists and revisionist historians can scream all they want, but Krugman and Muller are telling the truth.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Jennifer: I was not, in the end, a Clinton supporter, but it still boggles my mind that she was the only politician who paid any kind of price for the Iraq War. In a similar vein, Brad DeLong (and Matt Yglesias) coined a great idea, or I guess a great should-be concept: the credibility bankrupt pundit who is “reputationally underwater”. The notion that Tom Friedman (among god knows how many others) hasn’t lost an iota of his standing (or his self-righteous pomposity) is at once absolutely astounding and utterly predictable.
Morzer
I hear The Other Donald plans to invade the NYT offices and pull down their statue of Saddam Krugman. He anticipates being welcomed with flowers, apparently.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
I want to be surprised by this, especially since it feels like Krugman didn’t really say anything that should’ve warranted this kind of fucking backlash, but I can’t say I am.
Hell, we’re still in a place where all you need to do is invoke the name ‘Al Gore’ and voila, you’ve completely shut down and disproven every single Climate Change argument ever. We’re in a place where even Bush’s several minute blank stare has been rehabilitated into ‘projecting calm and showing poise’. We’re still fucking boogeymaning every swarthy, dusky skinned motherfucker on the street because hey, he could be fucking Al Qaida.
We’re still a country of piss scared greedy fucks and it seems we’re determined to stay that way at all costs.
Zifnab
Wait, is Rumsfeld going to cancel his subscription right away? Or is he going to wait a few days, a few weeks, but not more than a few months?
Mike G
The NYT will be heartbroken at this shrinkage in their War Criminal demographic. But I’m sure Kissinger and Cheney still read it. Bush only reads comic books.
Chris
I second this.
Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out, Donny. I can’t imagine how the New York Times will survive without you, but somehow I suspect they’ll manage.
Villago Delenda Est
Aww, the war criminal shitstain’s fee fees have been hurt by that nasty Nobel laureate. How terrible.
Poor baby von Rumsfailed.
pete
And you have to love Krugman’s, um, clarification:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/12/more-about-the-911-anniversary/
Well played, sir.
Kyle
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
I’m going to try that line on my wingnut boss next time a server crashes.
Boss: “A server is down, why aren’t you working on it?”
Me: “It’s more important for me to sit here surfing the web, projecting calm and showing poise, like your political hero Bush did on 9/11.”
NonyNony
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Two thoughts on this:
First the snark – yes she paid the greatest price of all. She has to serve as Secretary of State. Oh the horror of it all to see her entire political career in tatters like that.
Now the not-snark – I’m not surprised at all by this. The only politicians who will pay any kind of price for Iraq are on the Democratic side of the aisle because the only voters who cared about how stupid Iraq was are all on the Democratic side of the aisle. That’s just how democracy works in this country. If you play for the war team your failed wars get you a pass. If you play for the team that contains war and anti-war factions, sometimes you’ll get burned no matter what choice you make.
jl
Thanks to mistermix for noticing Ron Paul’s statement and pairing it with Krugman’s post.
Will Ron Paul be banned from appearing at future debates?
I’m sure they have been looking for an excuse, and his (by their standards) callous outrageous statement will provide it.
I agree with both posts, BTW. The invasion of Iraq, just to name the most obvious issue, complicates the memory of the 9/11 tragedy.
Whether the day itself is the most appropriate time to discuss it might be an issue. But a minor one, I think.
I heard a 9/11 interview of a rescue/recovery worker, and during part of it, he criticized the dishonesty in information given out about safety risks, even to the emergency workers, and the lack of adequate medical care insurance. He even voiced concerns about ‘publicity’ distorting rescue/recovery workers efforts: his team saved well over 1000 lives during Katrina, but that is never remembered because the effort was widely reported and perceived as a a failure.
Well, for the sake of consistency, let’s smear that guy too.
Paul in KY
@The Dangerman: How can that cocktail of stuff not be dangerous to inhale? Benzene is bad, cyanide is bad, etc. It’s not like you combine them & it makes it OK to breathe.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
Fortunately, I do not intend to cancel my subscription to balloon-juice.com, even though it is filled with the vilest narcissism, stupidity, racism, death threats toward me, Pepsi worship, and plain old thomasfoolery.
.
.
danimal
Rumsfield and the Right ought to be careful. If they were smart, they would let 9/11 sleeping dogs lie. The evil that they unleashed has never been dealt with at the national level. The furies they unleash may just overwhelm them. Krugman is right and Rumsfeld is a cynical, manipulative, ass-covering failed politician.
The misuse of that 9/11 moment of unity is a tremendous shame for the conservative movement, and like Krugman states, deep down they know it.
jl
I suggest we need a mascot for GOP and reactionary foreign policy and national security issues.
Is there an animal called the ‘jingo’? Guess we’ll have to make one up.
The Dangerman
THIS. As I posted previously (FYWP, can’t edit), it was feature, not bug.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
Poutrageous!!!!11!
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Elizabelle:
I get why one would want to say this from a rhetorical point of view (i.e. don’t give the SOBs any quarter), but from a historical standpoint it rings hollow to me. By the turn of the century our civilization was heavily based on leveraged bets of one sort or the other, in a system whose interconnections vastly exceeded in both number and speed the capacity of various remaining firewalls (those that had not already been torn down so somebody could make a quick buck) to contain damage and prevent it from spreading if something broke (c.f. the architecture of the globalized financial system for an extreme example, but the same principles were at work elsewhere). That is a recipe for disaster and something was bound to trigger a collapse. I look at the Twin Towers as being the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of our era; 9-11 was a triggering event, but the power and speed with which our subsequent disasters (many of them self-inflicted) unfolded suggests that it was a proximate cause of them at best.
danimal
@Zifnab: He’s cancelling the subscription as soon as he finds the cancellation form.
The form is somewhere to the north, south, east or west of Tikrit and Baghdad.
Dennis SGMM
To be fair, Rumsfeld’s statement reads better in the original German.
Paula
@NonyNony:
Do you really think Clinton lost because of her vote on Iraq? I don’t remember people caring a whit that John Edwards made the same vote.
EDIT: Krugman was being polite. I went to Sunday mass the weekend after we started invading Baghdad in 2003 and the priest made everyone bow their heads and ask for forgiveness for the act being performed in our name. And the Catholic church is probably more conservative than Rumsfeld, all thing considered.
Morzer
@danimal:
No, no. The NYT sneaked it over the Syrian border as soon as the war broke out.
jl
@danimal: Sooner or later, the implications of Bush Jr’s ‘now you’ve covered your ass, and can go back to Washington’, and Rummy’s ‘Post invasion plan, we don’t need no stinkin’ post invasion plan’, their breathless hall way war planning to use the tragedy as an excuse to ‘take out’ sundry countries they did not like, Cheney’s effective usurpation of Constitutional authority to do whatever authoritarian and counterproductive nonsense he felt like, will become acceptable to discuss in a serious way.
So, yeah, they should let sleeping dogs lie. The dog won’t sleep forever, and I think they would want it to wake up later rather than sooner.
Calouste
@Suffern ACE:
I’m sure I can find a line of medieval monarchs going around the block who would like to have a short word with you about their infallability before sending you for an appointment with the hangman.
Poopyman
More bullshit from Rummy. Bill Keller has surely given Donny a lifetime subscription for free. How are you going to cancel that?
Dennis SGMM
@danimal:
How long will it take Rummy to cancel his subscription?
“It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”
FlipYrWhig
@Paula: Conventional wisdom is that she never came close enough to saying that she had made a mistake, which kept the Anyone But Clinton vote large, which in turn enabled Obama to gain traction.
FlipYrWhig
@Dennis SGMM: Cancellation accomplished!
Samara Morgan
No one expects the
Spanish InquisitionDemographic Singularity™ DougJ.And it is just rude and unpatriotic to talk about it.
William Hurley
I for one would like to thank Rummy for this latest performance in his long running public psycho-drama – carrying the working titled, “Thin-skinned, tough guy”.
Additionally, I’d like to thank him for providing us with a qualitative case-study that comports with the quantitative analysis of psychopaths ascending to position of corporate and political leadership as detailed in “The Psychopath Test”.
Even as a delusional war-criminal awaiting trial, Rummy provides us with an object lesson establishing the verities in Krugman’s critique.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Paula: (you weren’t talking to me but…) I don’t think she lost solely because of that vote, an incredibly inept campaign made a bigger difference, but I think it was the difference between the inevitability she and her team thought she had and the opening Obama exploited.
And I agree with Nony that she landed pretty well on her feet, that’s what I meant by “any kind of price”
(Bobby Jindal is gonna endorse Perry)
Xecky Gilchrist
@mk3872: Yup, this. Krugman and Weigel are right but don’t go far enough in calling these bastards out. Not only did they exploit the tragedy like Krugman says, not only did they demonize everyone who disagrees like Weigel says, they’ll do it again in a heartbeat once they get the chance. That’s what they should be ashamed of.
wasabi gasp
Knowns gonna known.
Hoodie
The truth hurts. Watching the 9/11 show yesterday, I kept thinking “this so needs to be over.” Not in the sense that those directly touched will or should ever forget, but in the sense that the opportunists and loss-junkies who had little to do with the actual event used it as an excuse to go on a 10-year bender and now need to sober the fuck up. Instead, Dick and Don are out peddling fucking books, trying to come back from the dead. It’s Zombieland.
20,000 Japanese died in the tsunami. Isn’t 9/11 in many ways an arbitrary fate like that? Who thinks 19 guys with plane tickets managing to knock off 3000 doesn’t have a large dimension of chance?
Culture of Truth
There are known subscriptions, unknown subscriptions, and unknown unsubscriptions.
pete
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I agree, on a couple of levels. Partly, of course, because the attacks were intricately connected with the conduct of US policy in the Middle East over the previous 50 years and especially since 1990, and even more because the economic merry-go-round was (and is) partly camouflaging the relative decline of the US economy as a proportion of the global economy. Anyone who claims that “everything changed” on that particular date for that particular reason is either dissembling or revealing their own previous ignorance. In the case of Rummy, dissembling is too mild, bless his evil little heart.
wrb
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I think maybe you are seeing more inevitability than was really there. Things could be quite different if
-The treasury wasn’t depleted by war
-The myth of our military invulnerability hadn’t been shattered.
– If we’d started a serious response to climate change
I know this depression feels like something apocalyptic and inevitable, but it is a depression of choice: if we had responded to Lehman’s collapse by borrowing $3T of free money and investing it in education, green infrastructure and technology we would have been back booming within a year.
Hell, the country rode for decades on the investment in (aka the deficit spending on) education, infrastructure and technology made in response to WWII. What if we’d responded to 9-11 with that sort of investment?
We’d have been a hyper-power for another half-century, at least.
j_h_r
Briefly?
jayjaybear
@Dennis SGMM:
Are we sure about that?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Uncle Clarence Thomas: You get what you pay for.
Zach
It still blows my mind that people who were bamboozled running up to the Iraq war won’t admit that any reasonable analysis of the information publicly available at the time couldn’t have justified thinking that Iraq had any modern WMDs, let alone an active nuclear or biological program or the capacity to strike America. The only logically consistent position in support of the war on the basis of WMDs was, “Bush (or the CIA, or Powell, or whomever) says they have solid evidence, so they probably are there.”
Anyone who made this case at the time was kicked out of polite conversation; the only acceptable anti-war position was to concede that Saddam had WMDs (because even France said so, except when they didn’t) before arguing against invasion. The two or three months before March ’03 comprise the most disgusting political period in my lifetime… the worst of what Krugman’s talking about.
MikeBoyScout
Rummy can read? Who knew?
Shinobi
Great clip today on Mediate where a media man goes off on the media coverage of 9/11. But they aren’t the only ones using that event for ratings. I agree with Krugman, and I agree with that guy.
Jennifer
Poor Rummy.
Veiled threats and slanders of treason don’t work all that well when you no longer control the levers of power, do they?
Chris
@Zach:
What blows my mind is the number of people who still believe that shit. I think I posted this here a couple days ago, but it bears repeating – friend of mine who graduated with excellent grades and lots of national security classes, firmly believes that Saddam had WMDs. Actually, she hadn’t even HEARD that we hadn’t found WMDs until I informed her of it… this was, like, 2009. On the spot, she made up the theory that “well, he must’ve moved them to Syria then,” and still sticks to it.
The depths of stupidity supposedly educated people will stoop to in the name of ideology is mind-blowing.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Zach: Hell, there are plenty of people that think the war in Vietnam was justified and that we had it won till the pussies in congress betrayed us and the ARVN. Why would you think people wouldn’t, some weak shit like “evidence”?
Kane
It’s interesting that officials from an administration who so often rejected questions and avoided responsibility with their mantra of “let history decide,” are now so concerned about what history is deciding.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Chris: I’d be interested, but probably depressed, to see a poll of how many people still believe that Saddam sponsored the 9/11 attacks. Even worse, though, are the people who are fully cognizant of how and why we stumbled into this war, but consider it to be something that just kind of happened. Spilled milk, let’s not play the partisan blame game of pointing fingers. And I would guess that covers a good two-thirds of those employed by our national news media.
some guy
so does this mean Krugman is no longer on the BJ Center Right Two Minute Hate list?
what a relief, I thought he’s never get off that list.
drkrick
@Paula:
Edwards never attracted enough support to make this a factor.
Hilary! and Obama were so close that any one of a laundry list of items could be fingered as the deciding factor: the Iraq vote, the incompetence of her advisors, the dynasty argument in general, Clinton fatigue in particular, and sexism all probably depressed her vote by more than the margin of victory for Obama.
My sense at the time was that a lot of people did not want to vote for someone who supported the AUMF if they didn’t have to. I know I felt that way.
Big Baby DougJ
@some guy:
I love Krugman, always have. I don’t think he always understands politics that well and I don’t always agree with him, but he’s the only pundit that matters, IMHO.
Steve M.
I read the Krugman post and thought, why this one? Liberals have been saying essentially the same thing for years and years. I’ve said it. TBogg has said it. Roy Edroso said it in the last sentences of his 9/11 rightblogger wrap-up for The Village Voice.
Do they consult with one another on these pile-ons? Is there a right-wing Journolist where they say, “Yeah, let’s all demonize this one today and win the morning,” except their Journolist goes straight up to the offices of Roger Ailes and Karl Rove?
slag
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’m old enough to remember when Chris Matthews responded to the Jeremiah Wright flap during Obama’s election campaign by saying, “This is his Iraq. This is his Iraq”. Apparently, the kinds of people who think there is no difference between Bush and Obama are the same kinds of people who see no qualitative difference between invading a country under false pretenses and befriending a wacky preacher man.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@wrb:
I don’t see it that way. I think by the late 1990s our international and national regime was in its own unique way as potentially unstable as the European order which dissolved in 1914. And I place a lot of the blame on the degree to which we spent the previous decade+ making money by finding the slack in various systems and re-engineering them to take out the slack, which was viewed as nothing more than inefficiency and exess cost which could be arbitraged into profit for somebody. But the problem with doing that is that the “slack” was a mixture of geniune inefficiency, safety measures we needed to protect ourselves against low frequency, high-impact events within a particular domain, and buffers between domains to prevent a shock in one area from spreading to others.
And this shows up in many different previously unrelated domains: resource use, globalized financial services, physical architecture, transportation systems, even the political system (Gerrymandering is a form of arbitrage, a leveraged bet that the current ideological state of the electorate will remain constant for the next decade or so). In area after area when one looks at how we’ve learned to live over the last 2+ decades you see critical systems that don’t have any margin for error left in them, which contain some form of leverage which acts as a store of potential energy in the system just waiting to be unleashed, and which interact with each other, often in the form of positive rather than negative feedback loops (oops! not good).
My contention is that a regime built like that is not going to last very long before something, almost anything, comes along in the form of a disturbance which triggers the self-destructive urges built into the archictecture of the regime. And if it hadn’t been a political event like 9-11, something else, perhaps a big enough natural event, or a different sort of human inflicted event, would have happened within the current generation to make our big fat auto-destructing black box of a civilization go BOOM! And short of rebuilding a more robust and sustainable civilization, one in which people value otherwise useless and expensive firewalls because they understand that sometimes you have a big fire to stop (but not every damn day), we could have put off the evil day for a little while longer if we’d made better decisions, but not forever. Maybe another decade at most.
some guy
@Big Baby DougJ:
no doubt. and my reference to the BJ Center Right Two Minute Hate Club is to the commentariat around here, Doug, not to the front-pagers.
handy
Rum punch
Great title DougJ. That is all.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Big Baby DougJ: I wish he mattered more. Weigel had that story a couple of weeks ago about two Dem Senators reverently and fearfully discussing Friedman’s call for a third party. Can you imagine Dianne Feinstein and Max Baucus on that little subway saying “Did you happen to read that column by that guy who has a Nobel prize in economics who was right about that whole Iraq thing?”
lacp
I wonder why he didn’t demand that the NYT waterboard Krugman.
catclub
@j_h_r: about two minutes a day.
Southern Beale
Donald Rumsfeld had a New York Times subscription? I”m calling BULLSHIT.
Southern Beale
@Paul in KY:
WIN!
Frankensteinbeck
@Paul in KY:
The question is how fast it dispersed and how far away it was thick enough to be a threat at all. But there is a *LOT* of crap in two skyscrapers that you do not want to breathe as particulates, and it’s worse if they’re on fire. I would have expected the whole neighborhood to be unsafe for days. The thing is, I’m NOT an expert and if an expert told me ‘Naaah, it clears out in about six hours.’ I’d have to believe him. That’s some crazy physics shit, you know what I’m sayin’?
Kane
Remember Ann Coulter’s heartless attacks on the widows of 9/11? Remember Scott Ritter and Hans Blix and Joe Wilson? Remember how the previous administration casually destroyed the career of CIA agent Valerie Plame? Remember the relentless republican attacks upon Cindy Sheehan, her only crime being that she lost her son in Iraq and having the nerve to disagree with the administration’s policies. And of course who can forget that memorable 2004 GOP convention scene when band-aid wearing republicans joyfully mocked the combat wounds of a decorated war veteran.
Remember the vicious public attacks aimed at Max Cleland, Richard Clarke, Jack Murtha, Michael J. Fox, Paul O’Neill, Al Gore, and countless others having their patriotism questioned for doing nothing more than expressing beliefs that differ with republican policy?
Amir Khalid
Like Weigel implies, Krugman’s critics have got nothing. By not raising even one substantive issue, they’re admitting as much. So fuck’em.
@Zach:
It was Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council that convinced me the Bush 43 administration could not justify invading Iraq. If that was all the evidence they had to show, and it was so transparently flimsy, then they plainly had no case.
The Bushies’ case was an appeal to irrational fears gripping the US, of mushroom clouds over their city, of anthrax spores let loose in their midst, of Osama in cahoots with Saddam. People who knew better did their best to debunk these fears, but to no avail. Those in the grip of such fears have a hard time hearing reason.
bottyguy
Since nobody reads anymore I guess this is an attempt to keep him off of “This Week”, that way there are only republican on Sunday morning.
At least I can be assured that Krugman won’t be claiming he ‘misspoke’ after all he’s been saying roughly the same thing going on 10 years now. I hate it when people cave on their beliefs to keep a gig.
Morzer
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
This is a superb comment, maybe the best comment that I’ve seen here. For my money, what we are doing as a society is getting addicted to taking long-shot gambles, with the expectation that somehow a miracle will bail us out when the bad times come, having put aside no reserves that might enable us to regain control of our destinies. I’ve found that, whenever I push something to an extreme and rely on a series of perfect and fortuitous outcomes, something always goes wrong, which is why I try mighty hard not to do this any longer. I fear that we are destined to learn some brutal lessons in the next twenty years and I don’t anticipate much in the way of happy endings.
wrb
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Bugz:
I both agree and disagree. I think your description of the way resilience was value-engineerd out of our systems is spot on, however I think that better decisions since 2000 could have produced a vastly better outcome.
Truly great decisions would have included re-introducing some resilience and redundancy.
Should have taken that left turn…
Dennis SGMM
@jayjaybear:
Not him, them.
catclub
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: You mentioned that very bad things happened faster (and presumably worse) than those after Archduke Ferdinand was killed. I would guess that so far, nothing really like what engulfed Europe for the next 5 years after that has actually happened. Things may be pretty bad, but I do not see a cataclysmic breakdown over the past ten years.
Not to say it isn’t coming. But muddling through remains in force. ( Dead Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani citizens not eligible for this offer.)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@slag: Wow. I don’t remember that. Even for Tweety that’s amazing. But not really surprising when you consider that David Broder stated outright, several times, in print and online, that Clenis-gate was worse than Iraq because Clinton lied on purpose and Bush didn’t know he was lying. Or something. It was never terribly clear. Joe Klein said that his last conversation with Tim Russert (they were close friends) was Russert arguing the same thing. It really is hard to understate how morally and intellectually bankrupt or pundit class is.
Culture of Truth
I love Krugman, I think he knows more than anyone, including Obama and his team, about economics. Do I think he or some FT twit knows more about politics or winning elections? No, I do not. Still love him.
rlrr
@slag:
Befriending wacky preacher men is a requirement for becoming the Republican nominee…
IrishGirl
Wow, I wouldn’t have seen that Krugman post if not for this blog. I just wrote my own 9/11 post today. It’s much longer but the epilogue portion speaks about the same thing Krugman does. 9/11 changed me but only in so far as people like former Pres. Bush took advantage of it. And that’s how I will always view 9/11 now…as tainted. It’s nice to know that I’m not alone in this view.
Zach
@Amir Khalid: “It was Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council that convinced me the Bush 43 administration could not justify invading Iraq.”
For me it was the total non-reaction to Hans Blix’ final public presentation of his findings. As I recall, people went nuts over a remote-controlled airplane. That’s a genuine fear w/ drones today, but not in 2003. He said something to the tune of, “We go everywhere we’re told to go within a few hours and have total access. Where else should we look?”
jl
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
“It really is hard to understate how morally and intellectually bankrupt or pundit class is.”
And worse, they do have a big effect on how people think.
I remember Rummy and Cheney saying all sorts of stuff on the TV to justify the Iraq invasion, and my reaction was that these two were nuts or lying or both. Anyway, totally unbelievable on any level, from the gut reaction level all the way up to the higher faculties and calm review of the publicly available evidence.
But almost most of the people I know would say that Friedman, or Matthews, or somebody else on TV, agreed, or mostly agreed.
My response was that the media people did not know anything and could not think straight. But most people had a different view.
slag
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
It really is. Here’s the video:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/24300543#24300543 . Just watching it again makes me wonder what value these people think they have in our society. Kthug’s value is fairly self-evident (his making Rumsfeld cry is really just the icing). It must be hard for him to think of his job as being even remotely connected to what the rest of them do.
Mark D
Shorter wingnuts:
The GOP: Convinced that they, and they alone, own 9/11 since … well, 9/11.
slag
@rlrr:
I thought all the Republican nominees were wacky preacher men.
Earl Butz
You take away 9/11 and you take away the GOPs reason for existence. They need the nation to wallow in 9/11. They need you to wallow in 9/11. And fear.
Touré says it all on Rhatigan’s show. And what little he leaves unsaid, the troglodytes spamming the comment thread over at mediaite show it in their naked panic at someone daring to question the prevailing religion.
Rhatigan realized what he was doing was wrong, it’s written all over his face. So can you as well. Stop feeding the beast already.
Rihilism
Sorry to step into the thread without reading anyone’s comments (I’ll read every last one of them later, I SWEAR!), but I went to the Gawker link and ran into this in the comments section.
Anybody familiar with this guy? I’m not, though in my defense, I’m incredibly lazy and apathetic. So, I must rely on others, more in tune to the intertubes, to create suitable opinions for me as I wallow in my sloth.
I thought it was pretty good. But what do I know?
Found this rather amusing as well….
tkogrumpy
I make it a point not to take the opinions of un-indicted war criminals too seriously.
susan
@Zifnab:
“Wait, is Rumsfeld going to cancel his subscription right away? Or is he going to wait a few days, a few weeks, but not more than a few months?”
That probably falls under the category of an unknown unknown.
Morzer
After further review: Rumsfeld is definitely a clowned clown, rather than an unclowned unclown. The ruling on the field stands. Ten yard penalty, repeat third down. Or do I mean clown?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@catclub:
My bad if that’s how the comparison scanned to you. What I meant is that our contemporary problems came faster and harder than would have been the case if our circa 1990s civilization had been wired in a more robust fashion. I didn’t mean to make a comparison with 1914 in terms of speed, scale, etc. The relevance of comparions with 1914 lies in the way that in both cases a triggering event unleashed chaos already latent in the ancien regime on a scale much larger than what the event itself justified as a stand-alone happenstance.
The other area where I think a comparison with 1914 may be of value is that I think there is a sort of natural frequency for these highly significant events in human history, on a scale of roughly 3-4 generations. My theory is that inter-generational memory transfer of information concerning past mass traumas starts to fail on that time scale and so people get complacent and greedy and tear down the firewalls that seem useless to them, and that’s when Big Trouble comes looking for us. For example I don’t think it is any coincidence that in the financial services industry by circa 2005 there was hardly anyone left who remembered 1933, any nobody was listening to those old farts anyway when there was good money to be made and anyway that was way back then and those rules don’t apply to us today.
It isn’t just in finance that this problem shows up. If you look at the history of really big nasty whole-system scale wars in the European states system, it is noticeable that 1914 came roughly 4 generations after the last spasm of system wrenching mass violence during the Napoleonic wars. So my guess is that things are wired to go bad about the time that everbody stops listening to those really ugly, scary stories that were handed down from our great-grand parents and from that point forward it is a matter of luck how long it takes before something goes BOOM!
Rihilism
Related to my last comment, I think it’s about time we started talking about this stuff. Not the tragedy of the day, the tragedy that was the decade.
The Bush Administration turned 911 in to a cudgel and beat the shit out this country. If there is any justice (I don’t believe in God, so I have to rely on justice), these men will, one day, pay dearly for death and destruction they inflicted on everyone. If that day never comes, at least we can wish all the players a slow, painful and lonely death and hope some random quantum fluctuation delivers on our wishes.
For the present, they should be ostracized and mocked for the pathetic losers they are, frequently and incessantly….
Nutella
@Steve M.:
SATSQ: Yes.
There must be a daily position paper that goes out from the Koch brothers’ lair telling Ailes, Rove, and the people who write the chain emails what that day’s crazy line is. It’s the only reasonable explanation.
JR
Runsfeld is just another war criminal, who should be in prison without access to sources of entertainment like the NY Times.
He should be in a cell beside the Balkan terrorists who have been convicted of crimes against humanity, just for his contribution of the attack on Iraq.
Everyone knows, or should, that Iraq had no way to pose a threat against the US, and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack.
wrb
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
There was a book reviewed in The Economist a few years back- I don’t remember the title or author- that made this point and traced these cycles back something like 800 years:
1) Disaster
2) Rules put in place or practices adopted to prevent such disasters
3) Enough time passes that those who remember feeling the pain of the previous disaster are no longer in charge or around.
4) The bothersome/costly rules/practices are loosened
5) Disaster
Seemed like the lesson was that history, intellectual memory isn’t enough for enough of us, only emotional memory is.
Delia
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
You’ve a lot of great ideas here. My concern about the US today: I’ve been hearing a lot of blather about the resilience of the American people in overcoming this tragedy, etc. Aside from the fact that I’m getting really sick of the word, “resilience,” I just don’t think it’s true. Most Americans don’t know enough history to even make sense of your posts here. Most seem to be so addled by this “America, Fuck yeah” sort of patriotism and too much time spent in front of electronic devices that they have no idea what’s going on in the world outside. War is just an extension of the video game world. We seem to be witnessing a disintegration of our political system before our eyes and not enough people are interested or able to stop it.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@wrb:
Yes, it isn’t exactly an orginal insight on my part. But it is one thing to read about these sort of multi-generational cycles in a history book and another thing entirely to live through one. The old joke about the Ancient Chinese Curse “May you live in interesting times” isn’t so funny when you live it. I know that the years 2000-present very strongly reinforced my inner contrarian, such that now whenever I hear most of the people around me saying “the old rules don’t apply…” that’s when I feel like its time to start filling sandbags, stocking up on emergency supplies, and hiding cash in the mattress.
wrb
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
yup.
Them old rules, persistent they are.
Gibbon?
Thucydides?
Best avoided these days
bisquits
It’s ironic really. I cancelled my times subscription because of Judy Millers enabling lies. Rummy does cause he can’t handle the truth. Poor ny times. They just can’t win.
Robert Waldmann
Doesn’t “Emanuele Goldsteins” violate doubleplust Goodwin’s law ?
Ruckus
@danimal:
The misuse of that 9/11 moment of unity is a tremendous shame for the conservative movement, and like Krugman states, deep down they know it.
I don’t think they have a deep down.
Evil doesn’t have a deep down.
They have and are what you see.
Ruckus
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I think you are correct. There were a number of issues that were heading in the wrong direction and just needed an event to focus the direction and speed they would go. I’m not sure it was 9/11 but I am pretty sure it was Jr. and his magic white house, who took advantage of it.
El Cid
Does Sarah Palin know yet if this is one of those newspapers she ever read? Or was it covered under “all of them”?
El Cid
@Kane: Remember Stephen Colbert introducing the world to what it looked like when a commentator stepped up to the Emperor and made the Emperor watch while he mocked him [on live TV, no less] for not having clothes in the guise of one of the super-patriot assholes and the lickspittle ‘news’ media who assured him his clothes were the finest?
Bruce S
Is Rummie aware of just how long America’s subscription to Don Rumsfeld has been cancelled?
Bruce S
What’s truly unfortunate in re: The New York Times is that Lawrence O’Donnell had a respectful, if not fawning, interview with Thomas Friedman about his ridiculous new book on “The Last Word” tonite.
Bad Lawrence!…your job is to eviscerate fools, not coddle them.
Bruce S
Why didn’t the NYT pre-emptively cancel Rumsfeld’s subscription years ago? I wouldn’t deliver a Domino’s pizza to that douchebag.
pattonbt
@Paula: I can assure you, for me, it was one of two main reasons I did not vote for her in the primary (the second being I wanted a break from the dynastic political grip on the white house).
Had she won the primary, my vote and money were all hers.
Paul in KY
@Chris: Ask her exactly what she means by WMD’s. Bush/Cheney would always talk about them like Saddam had a hoard of nukes, however when pressed, they would say they were chemical weapons (which are technically WMDs, but a whole magnitude less dangerous than nukes).
When ‘Joe American’ heard WMDs in the runup to the war,he was thinking nukes & not mustard gas. That was only one of the many cons they played.
Paul in KY
@Steve M.: Krugman is much, much more influential than Tbogg or Roy Edroso. Krugman is also thought of as part of the Village. The others you mentioned are DFHs.
Paul in KY
@Frankensteinbeck: I saw those huge clouds go whooshing down the streets when the buildings came down, plus you had the fires that were not put out for days. I would think the stuff was still percolating in the air for weeks (at least).
Paul in KY
@wrb: I think some guy named Santayana wrote something about that…