I join Hollywood actor Danny Glover in urging the president to
appoint a truly robust progressive — the New York Times
columnist and former economist Paul Krugman — as the next U.S.
Treasury Secretary. Nothing would do more to cement the confederacy
of dunces that the president is gathering around him as his
second-term cabinet.
In an April 24, 2012 New York Times blog
post one wag
titled “Why I Don’t Write About Israel,” Krugman, who is
Jewish, played the part of Pontius Pilate in publicly washing his
hands of any sense of personal responsibility, or any real remorse,
for the calamity that will surely follow for the Israeli people if
Iran or Hamas succeed in getting their hands on nuclear weapons.
This is how the professional gadfly and author of The
Conscience of a Liberal explains his craven and disingenuous
silence on Israel/Palestine:
The truth is that like many liberal American Jews — and most
American Jews are still liberal — I basically avoid thinking about
where Israel is going. It seems obvious from here that the
narrow-minded policies of current government are basically a
gradual, long-run form of national suicide — and that’s bad for
Jews everywhere, not to mention the world. But I have other battles
to fight, and to say anything to that effect is to bring yourself
under intense attack from organized groups that try to make any
criticism of Israeli policies tantamount to anti-Semitism.
In other words, Krugman worries a lot about the so-called Jewish
lobby. He’s one of those people.
So, too, of course, is Chuck Hagel, the nominee for U.S.
Secretary of Defense, who, as it happens, is not Jewish. The former
Republican senator from Nebraska has a long record of hostility
toward Israel — once boasting that, unlike his peers, he wasn’t
intimidated by “the Jewish lobby.” Hagel has urged President Obama
to open direct negotiations with Hamas and, in 2007, he voted
against identifying the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps as a
terrorist group. While still a senator, he decried any use of
military force against Iran to keep the country from developing
nuclear weapons.
No doubt Krugman and Hagel — joined by John Kerry as secretary
of state and Barack Obama as commander in chief — would work well
together in putting screws on Israel to adopt “less narrow-minded
policies” … in making more and more concessions to an enemy (Hamas)
that will never accept anything less than the absolute destruction
of the Israeli state. While favoring almost every other kind of
government handout, this all-star team of mollifiers and appeasers
would undoubtedly do its best to hold financial and military aid to
Israel to the absolute minimum needed to assure that well over 60
percent of the Jewish vote will continue to go to the ruling
Democrats (regardless of any concerns within the vaunted “Jewish
lobby” about Israel’s security).
They will also do their best to buy time for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
and the other crazies running the show in Iran so that they can
continue to pursue the means of destroying Israel in a single
strike without fear of U.S. military intervention.
But Obama doesn’t really need Krugman’s help to sell out
America’s only real ally in the Middle East.
Krugman’s real value to Obama would be in the economic sphere.
There is no bigger cheerleader for increased government spending
and increased public debt than the delusional and pop-eyed
Princeton professor. Krugman thought that the original “Stimulus”
bill, which was passed in 2009 and sent more than $800 billion of
taxpayer money down the drain in an assortment of hastily arranged,
poorly administrated, and wasteful ventures, was too small by
half.
In “The Education of John Boehner,” the lead op-ed in Monday’s
Wall Street Journal cited
yesterday by Jeff Lord, Stephen Moore began with the
observation:
What stunned House Speaker John Boehner more than anything else
during his prolonged closed-door budget negotiations with Barack
Obama was this revelation: “At one point several weeks ago,” Mr.
Boehner says, “The president said to me, ‘We don’t have a spending
problem.’”
Too bad Obama didn’t have Krugman at his side. If he did, he
would have taken things a step further, saying: “Yes, John, we have
a spending problem: The problem is not that we are spending too
much; rather, it is that we are spending far too little.”
That is what Krugman always says. Wherever he goes, he campaigns
ceaselessly against government austerity — as if government
aggrandizement has ever contributed to the spread of human
happiness or prosperity. He believes that the “little fairies” that
may be conjured up by greater borrowing and public spending are the
“little fairies” that put bread on the table for you, me, and other
workers and business owners.
But it seems unlikely that the president will look favorably on
Danny Glover’s — or my — petition to bring Krugman into his
cabinet. And I really don’t give a damn. I believe that the only
way to deal with this fatally flawed government is to oppose it at
almost every turn.
