For the unenlightened, Paul Krugman is the Princeton economist who also happens to write a twice weekly column for the New York Times. Of the seven regular columnists that the Times keeps on its roster, Krugman is by far and away the best writer, and sometimes the only one to call the Bush Administration on its general malfeasance. He has his own website, as well as another unofficial site that keeps track of Krugman and his work, so I'll try to link those soon. Krugman is especially important because in the past three years, the Times has lost three excellent columnists. A. M. Rosenthal, the former editor in chief of the paper turned columnist, retired three years ago. In the summer of 2001, the excellent Gail Collins left to become editor of the Times editorial page, and just last month, Frank Rich took a new assignment as editor of the Arts and Entertainment Section.
While I wish Rosenthal the best in his (well-earned) retirement and am grateful that Collins and Rich are doing excellent work within other divisions of the newspaper, the Opinion section of NYT is now immeasureably poorer for their departure. Paul Krugman remains the one excellent voice among six others who range from decent (Nicolas Kristof) to fair (Thomas Friedman, Bob Herbert) to mediocre (Maureen Down, Bill Keller) to nearly useless and occasionally outright mendacious (William Safire, the unrepentant Nixonite who takes wild stabs in predicting foreign policy, often gets it completely wrong, and then refuses to budge from his errors.) To be fair, Safire may indeed be the best writer on the sqaud, as he certainly has an ear for the English language. He just takes a warped, Hobbesian view of politics that serves no one. (Again, remember how he pushed the story on how Mohammad Atta had met with Iraqi officials in Prague, and kept harping on the subject as a ways to convince his readers that Saddam was indeed in cohoots with Bin Laden and crew? This story was pushed until the story was refuted by some naive organization that doesnt's support American values...what's the name of that organization again...oh yeah it was the motherfucking CIA that revealed that the story was horseshit. Safire's fictitious scandal-mongering was embarassing, but his retreat from the story was even more embarassing, claiming that the CIA was just trying to conceal its hand, even while Chimpy McSmirkster was desperately grasping for something, anything, to link Saddam and Osama. After all, they both speak Arabic right? But enough on old man Safire. He will be dead soon.
The point is, Krugman is the most honest and intelligent member of a group whose columns and opinions are quite possibly the most important in professional journalism. The fact that he's one of the few figures on the left who actually scares right-wingers, (see Andrew Sullivan or some asshole like Larry Kudlow bitch about PK without actually, you know, offering a rebuttle, and you'll see what I mean.) If you don't read the guy religiously like I do, every Tuesday and Friday, you should. It takes about three minutes to read a column and you will finish significantly more well-informed.
Below is a link to his latest column. As mentioned above, I'll have the websites on him linked up soon. Also linked is the full text of Nick Kristof's latest, which is tolerable, on the Iraq war. His point is that Iraq is not going to be another Vietnam, though it might start to resemble the Gaza Strip or Lebannon, both places where the Israelis have kicked ass in lighting wars only to discover that they can't defend against every asshole willing to strap dynamite to his chest. F-16s in those situations....not so helpful. I'm going to L.A. this weekend, so I won't update this till Monday. Next big piece though, Cursor vs. Townhall. It'll be super fierce.
Posted by mike at April 4, 2003 06:23 AM