At 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, terrorists destroyed a
hijacked plane by crashing it into the north tower of the World
Trade Center. At 8:41 a.m. on September 11, 2011, former Enron
adviser Paul Krugman destroyed whatever was left of his reputation.
“Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?”
Krugman began his post on the New York Times website.
“Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that
odd.”
Of course the commemorations were subdued. Some of the victims
of 9/11 were children, and most of the adults were in the prime of
life. In the normal course of events, they would still be with
their loved ones 10 years later. Thus the anniversary rituals
recalled losses that were sudden and that remain immediate.
Ecclesiastes teaches that “there is a time for everything, and a
season for every activity under the heavens…a time to mourn and a
time to dance.” Americans danced in May, when Osama bin Laden was
finally killed, but September 11 was a time to mourn.
That’s not what Krugman had in mind. For him, it is never time
to be silent and always time to hate:
What happened after 9/11—and I think even people on the right
know this, whether they admit it or not—was deeply shameful. The
atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a
wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and,
yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the
attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to
fight, for all the wrong reasons.
Krugman didn’t explain how Bush or Giuliani supposedly “cashed
in” on 9/11. He seemed to think that associating them with Kerik,
who went to prison after pleading guilty to tax fraud and other
charges, would be sufficient to convict them.
It’s also hard to credit Krugman’s argument that the Bush
administration and “neocons” were solely to blame for the breakdown
of national unity in the years after 9/11. Immediately after the
attacks, support for Bush policies was overwhelming. The Patriot
Act, for instance, passed the House 357–66 and the Senate 98–1. A
year later, the authorization to use military force in Iraq drew
strong, though far from unanimous, bipartisan support. It was
backed by 81 House Democrats and 29 Senate Democrats.
To the extent that terror policy ended up polarizing the
parties, then, it was because Democrats changed their minds.
Arguably they eventually profited politically from doing so. At the
very least, it did not prevent them from winning big victories in
the elections of 2006 and 2008.
Yet Barack Obama, who as a candidate was a harsh critic of Bush
administration terror policies, has proved unable or unwilling to
make any major changes in those policies, except in the area of
interrogation. In some cases, notably detention and military trials
at Guantanamo, Obama has continued the Bush policies in spite of
his own inclinations, under pressure from Congress. Yet that
pressure began in 2009–10, when Obama’s own party had huge
majorities in both houses—suggesting that the country is after all
fairly unified, that Obama is out of step, and that the Democrats’
move to the left between about 2003 and 2008 was merely
opportunistic and ideological.
Krugman went on to observe that in addition to Bush, Giuliani,
and Kerik, “a lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our
professional pundits—people who should have understood very well
what was happening—took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to
the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking”—note
the tasteful metaphor—“of the atrocity?”
He has half a point here. Consider the pundit who wrote on
September 14, 2001:
It seems almost in bad taste to talk about dollars and cents
after an act of mass murder.…If people rush out to buy bottled
water and canned goods, that will actually boost the economy.…The
driving force behind the economic slowdown has been a plunge in
business investment. Now, all of a sudden, we need some new office
buildings.
That was former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, who added that “the
attack opens the door to some sensible recession-fighting
measures,” by which he meant “the classic Keynesian response to
economic slowdown, a temporary burst of public spending.…Now it
seems that we will indeed get a quick burst of public spending,
however tragic the reasons.” He went on to denounce the
“disgraceful opportunism” of those who “would try to exploit the
horror to push their usual partisan agendas”—i.e., conservatives
who argued that free market policies would help the economy.
Krugman concluded his 10th-anniversary objurgation as
follows:
The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become
an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.
I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious
reasons.
As the Village Voice’s Nick Greene summed it
up: ”I need to get something off my chest today, but you
can’t.”
Blogger Ed Morrissey added that Krugman’s post was “so trite,
sad, and clichéd that it’s hardly worth the effort to rebut. He’s
mailing this in from 2003.” In fact, I found exactly the post from
September 11, 2003, that captures the sentiments Krugman expressed
this year. It came from a young Josh Marshall, proprietor of
TalkingPointsMemo.com, who described his reaction to a CNN
documentary two years after 9/11:
Watching brought me back to the newness and rawness of those
first hours and days.…I thought [President Bush] served admirably
in those first days.
As the documentary moved toward the aftermath, I wondered
whether those thoughts of mine would seep into the present to color
what’s happening today.
They didn’t.
What I felt wasn’t continuity but the jarring contrast, the
cheap, obvious lies, the hubris, the tough-talk for low ends, not
so much the mistakes as the tawdriness of so much of what’s
happened, especially over the last eighteen months.
Marshall weighed in again this September 11, with considerably
more maturity than Krugman. Avoiding the temptation “to relitigate
Iraq,” he instead poignantly observed that the 9/11 attacks were
“simply too much barbarity and aggression with too few to
punish”:
The immediate perpetrators died in the attacks, embracing and
thus stealing away from us whatever degree of punishment was
possible. And while there were many more people planning, working
money transfers and providing other kinds of support,
still…relative to the enormity of the violation, just too few. It
goes to a primitive part of ourselves. But you could hunt down and
kill every one of them and somehow it still wouldn’t be enough.
That may explain why, even a decade later, someone like Krugman
sees 9/11 as an occasion to lash out at his domestic political
opponents. “Everybody’s angry, to judge from my email,” wrote
blogger Glenn Reynolds, who offered some advice: “Don’t be angry.
Understand it for what it is, an admission of impotence from a sad
and irrelevant little man.”
Indeed. The 9/11 post was monstrous, but it was trivial in equal
measure. Paul Krugman is history’s smallest monster.
