It’s Good Friday so let’s dispense with the small talk. …And
the winner is Paul Krugman. He turned himself in
early this morning with a New York Times column
that cleared the air for good as to who is and who isn’t for David
Brock. Against: all those whom Krugman loathes. For: all those like
Krugman who loathe everyone to the right of Sidney Blumenthal,
George McGovern, and the fellow one of our heroes liked to refer to
as Nikolai Lenin.
“An appallingly well-financed hard-right is still in the
business of smearing anyone who disagrees with its agenda,” the
Krugman writes, wiping away new tears as he recalls the ordeal HE
went through after it was reported that once upon an innocent time
he received major infusions of cash from the devils at an evil
corporation called Enron for participation on an advisory board
that never advised anyone and at a time when he was a lowly college
professor also in no position to influence anyone (some teacher he
must be). Today he knows better than anyone that the right will
stop at nothing to expose liberal hypocrisy. Anyone who sees him as
he is is by definition a hater.
The Krugman also makes a conceptual breakthrough. Up to know his
ilk and he would blame the Whitewater unpleasantness experienced by
Sts. Willie and Hillary on a “scandal machine … financed by a
handful of wealthy fanatics — men like the Rev. Sun Myung
Moon…and Richard Mellon Scaife.” How unfortunate that Krugman
preferred luxuriating in his Enron-filled bathtub to reading what
his own newspaper had to say in breaking and developing the
Whitewater story. But that’s old news. The new news is that “KEY
FIGURES FROM THE SCAIFE EMPIRE ARE NOW SENIOR OFFICIALS IN THE BUSH
ADMINISTRATION.” Forget Enron, in other words; we have a new
Enron.
It’s only logical. Brock is of no use to the hard left if it
simply means refighting old battles. But if he can be a tool in the
left’s renewed campaign to do in Bush II in the same way he way it
went after Reagan-Bush and Bork-Thomas, then he just might be the
most useful idiot ever to jump into its lap and hide under its
skirt.
It’s quite a manly collection: Conason, Rich, Lyons, Hertzberg,
Krugman, Gitlin, Lauer, Media Whores Online, and the guy who wrote
a puff book on Hillary’s Senate campaign. At last check, no woman
has gone out of her way to defend Brock. (For once, Ann Coulter
might be the object of feminist solidarity.) Nor has Krugman been
endorsed or defended by women in his midst, though maybe that’s
simply been a constant in his life. He must be some colleague if
even Maureen Dowd recently dismissed him in a rather cutting
reference.
So there we have the Brock camp, which is filled out by
footsoldiers who’ve never quite recovered from the demise of the
Village Voice. Since 9/11 many kept an eye on the left primarily to
see how eagerly it would join sides with the anti-anti-terrorists.
But now it’s as if 9/11 never happened.
As Krugman lets on in his concluding paragraph, his column was
necessitated by the sharp liberal dismissal of Brock in Slate
by Timothy Noah. Liberals who have no use for Brock are of no use
to Krugman. There may be an anti-terrorist war going on, but it’s
small potatoes to the real anti-terrorist war Krugman and friends
have been waging for decades. So how does it feel, Enemy Central
backers? Are you ready to face a military tribunal officiated by
Krugman-Brock?
