Krugman's 9/11 blog post (noted briefly yesterday) didn't strike me as very good (his follow-up was better), for reasons well-described here (to which I would only add: it seems very unlikely that the exploiters of 9/11, let alone the nation as a whole, "knows" or recognizes the exploitation of the atrocity). It was, of course, predictable that Krugman's posting--which violated all the rules for commenting on 9/11 in right-wing America--would make the crazies even crazier. You can get a taste by following the links here. (And Twitter is awash with insightful remarks like this, which shrewdly identifies Krugman's real motivation: money!) Let's just call this reacting entity, "the Right-Wing Blob," since it emits its largely predictable messages through various physically distinct, but otherwise indistinguishable, persons.
The Right-Wing Blob, as you can see from the preceding links, is very, very angry--especially since Krugman did not permit comments on his post. This is a sign of his "cowardice" according to the Right-Wing Blob (an example). The other possibility doesn't occur to the Blob: every civilized person knows that if you write something offensive to the Blob, it responds hysterically and stupidly, and just as you wouldn't want the Blob pissing on your carpet at home, you don't want it pissing on your website. Who wants to hear from know-nothings, after all? That's not cowardice, just a wise allocation of time and energy.
The Right-Wing Blob specializes in two rhetorical moves: armchair psychology and condescension from below. It is not, alas, very good at the former (a shame, it is fun when done well), and tends to be rather repetitive (witness the "cowardice" meme, above); it is utterly tone-deaf to the irony of the latter. Thus, we have some non-entity right-wing pundit, "John Hayward," who emits the "coward" meme, and then issues a threat conjoined with some condescension from below:
You are now at a decision point, editors of the New York Times. If Paul Krugman still works for you on Monday morning, you endorse every damned word he said in this piece. You will be endorsing the cowardice of this drive-by slander artist, whose failure as a human being exceeds even his miserable failure as an “economist.”
Your choice, New York Times. Your move. Your honor, decency, and integrity. Your consequences.
This is weird on so many levels. Does Mr. Hayward, whoever he is, think the New York Times must respond to his emission? Could he be this delusional? It appears so. As to Krugman's human failure exceeding his "failure as an 'economist,'" this doesn't seem so bad, since his failure as an economist includes a Nobel Prize for economics, tenured positions at MIT and Princeton, and a column in The New York Times. Personally, I am skeptical that qua human being Krugman really exceeds this litany of "failure."
Another non-entity with a website that somehow gets picked up on Google News, "John Romano," offers penetrating psychological insight:
Paul Krugman has emotional issues. Nothing shows that more than the angry rant he posted this morning over at The New York Times. The guy is filled with envy and hatred. In his rush to make sure America has no unity at all (he will fail of course, especially today) he even spelled the word “the” as “te”.
Now I suppose not even Freudians would read quite so much into typos on blogs, but put that to one side. Who is Krugman "envious" of? Mr. Romano? Rudy Giuliani? The Right-Wing Blob? Why would he be envious of these people? Again, the armchair psychology seems so manifestly inadequate one wonders why the Blob bothers. Accusations of "hatred" are akin to the Right-Wing Blob's favorite trope about "Bush Derangement Syndrome": it is just a rhetorical trick to dismiss well-grounded moral outrage about wrongful conduct.
One more example, from the blogosphere's leading practitioner of condescension from below: Glenn "InstaIgnorance" Reynolds denounces Krugman as a "sad and irrelevant little man." He does so, as best I can tell, without any sense of the irony of a middling legal scholar at the University of Tennessee who posts on a blog denouncing as "sad," "irrelevant" and "little" a Nobel Laureate in Economics at Princeton University who writes for The New York Times. And, of course, Krugman is so "irrelevant" that even a throwaway blog post necessitates the Right-Wing Blob, with its thousands of members, to swing into action!
And so it goes. These people are literally devoid of independent thought, they are just bits of slime that ooze off the Blob when the Blob is poked, and in the process, they do violence to the language, stand reality on its head, and contribute to the continuing degradation of the public culture.
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