Monday, September 05, 2005

NYT Nuts - Is there any sport in taking down Paul Krugman anymore? He’s the original gorilla of Bush Derangement Syndrome, alternating between articles proclaiming President Bush’s fecklessness and, paradoxically, his all-powerful ability to (always) cause wreckage all around us. Anyway, Rick at the Rightwing Nuthouse fisks the former Enron advisor in “The Fulminator.” Here’s a great opening line: “Watching New York Times columnist Paul Krugman plumb the depths of depraved Bush bashing is getting close to becoming something of a guilty pleasure; sort of like viewing pornography but without the edifying inclusion of the undraped model’s vital statistics to offset the charge of prurient behavior.”

Extra – Here’s Daily Pundit: “I used to hate seeing Frank Rich's byline on NYT op-ed columns, but no longer. Like Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman, Rich has become an active embarassment, an unwitting ally in the ongoing destruction of the Times as a respectable news organ.

More from Decision08: “Either Bob Herbert believes what he says, and thus is proven as a delusionary, paranoid mental case, or he intentionally and deliberately engages in a foul, viscious lie, and thus is shown as a despicable moral degenerate.”

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Which part of Frank Rich's op-ed column was the active embarrassment? And for whom?

*"The president's declaration that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees" has instantly achieved the notoriety of Condoleezza Rice's "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center."

*"You could almost see Bush's political base starting to crumble at its very epicenter, Fox News, by Thursday night. Even there it was impossible to ignore that the administration was no more successful at securing New Orleans than it had been at pacifying Falluja."

*"In that sense, the inequality of the suffering has not only exposed the sham of the relentless photo-ops with black schoolchildren whom the president trots out at campaign time to sell his "compassionate conservatism"; it has also positioned Katrina before a rapt late-summer audience as a replay of the sinking of the Titanic. New Orleans' first-class passengers made it safely into lifeboats; for those in steerage, it was a horrifying spectacle of every man, woman and child for himself.
The captain in this case, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, was so oblivious to those on the lower decks that on Thursday he applauded the federal response to the still-rampaging nightmare as "really exceptional." He told National Public Radio that he had "not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and water" - even though every television viewer in the country had been hearing of those stranded refugees for at least a day."

*"But a president who flew from Crawford to Washington in a heartbeat to intervene in the medical case of a single patient, Terri Schiavo, has no business lecturing anyone about playing politics with tragedy."

"Eventually we're going to have to examine the administration's behavior before, during and after this storm as closely as its history before, during and after 9/11. We're going to have to ask if troops and materiel of all kinds could have arrived faster without the drain of national resources into a quagmire. We're going to have to ask why it took almost two days of people being without food, shelter and water for Bush to get back to Washington.
Most of all, we're going to have to face the reality that with this disaster, the administration has again increased America's vulnerability to the terrorists it was supposed to be fighting after 9/11. As Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar, pointed out to The Washington Post last week in talking about the fallout from the war in Iraq, there have been twice as many terrorist attacks outside Iraq in the three years after 9/11 than in the three years before. Now, thanks to Bush's variously incompetent, diffident and hubristic mismanagement of the attack by Katrina, he has sent the entire world a simple and unambiguous message: Whatever the explanation, the United States is unable to fight its current war and protect homeland security at the same time.

Anonymous said...

I guess TobiasM is the Kos Kid or DU poster assigned to this site tonight. Really funny how the trolls are showing up on the conservative websites. I wonder if they REALLY think we will agree with them?

Anonymous said...

"Troll" = anyone who expects more from their leaders than "FedUp." Ha!

It's like Longhorn fans visiting all the Oklahoma Sooner websites, after this weekend's 17-10 loss to TCU. Just rubbing in the good news that your team is cho-o-o-oking!

Eric said...

I didn't post this to counter or refute the articles but rather to show the predictable reaction of the NY Times. Frank Rich throws pounds of red meat to the faithful before lamely concluding that we're going to have to "examine" the Administration's response after the waters recede. Until then, let's just hammer away.

I've very pointedly noted that I think there's plenty of blame to go around. There are gobs of blogs pointing fingers at Nagin, Blanco, Bush, etc. Go there for a fight.

But if you want to stand on the bodies, do an end-zone dance, and yell "your team is choking!" well, there's nothing I can say in response.