Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman again takes a pot-shot at your lowly blogger today. I won’t link, because the NYT has him behind a fire-wall. But allow me to explain two claims of his that evaporate upon inspection. We begin with this:
"Mr. Bush’s new conservative critics don’t say much about the issue that most disturbs the public, the quagmire in Iraq. That’s not surprising. Commentators who acted as cheerleaders in the run-up to war, and in many cases questioned the patriotism of those of us who were skeptical, can’t criticize the decision to start this war without facing up to their own complicity in that decision.
Nor, after years of insisting that things were going well in Iraq and denouncing anyone who said otherwise, is it easy for them to criticize Mr. Bush’s almost surreal bungling of the war. (William Kristol of The Weekly Standard is the exception; he says that we never made a "serious effort" in Iraq, which will come as news to the soldiers.)"
It will come as some surprise to my readers that I have not been criticizing Mr Bush’s conduct of the Iraq war. The plain record shows that I have been criticizing it since the first week it was launched. My disdain for Bush’s conduct for the war even led me to endorse John Kerry, something Bill Kristol didn’t. I criticized the conduct of the war before many other conservatives; and have done so with much more gusto. Readers will also be surprised to find that I have not owned up to "my complicity" in the decision to go to war. I specifically did so in explicit terms. Does expressing personal "shame and sorrow" not count? Then there’s this:
They can’t even criticize Mr. Bush for the systematic dishonesty of his budgets. For one thing, that dishonesty has been apparent for five years. More than that, some prominent conservative commentators actually celebrated the administration’s dishonesty. In 2001 Time.com blogger Andrew Sullivan, writing in The New Republic, conceded that Mr. Bush wasn’t truthful about his economic policies. But Mr. Sullivan approved of the deception: "Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smokescreen of ‘compassionate conservatism.’" As Berkeley’s Brad DeLong puts it on his blog, conservatives knew that Mr. Bush was lying about the budget, but they thought they were in on the con.
But Krugman is grotesquely misrepresenting me. My delusion in 2001 was that Bush was actually a conservative. I thought "compassionate conservatism" meant unleashing private armies of compassion and this emphasis on the voluntary sector would soothe and distract liberals who would otherwise demagogue cuts in public spending. I was obviously wrong – in retrospect laughably so. So as soon as I realized that I had been conned, I started complaining about the Bush spending increases – earlier and more insistently than many other conservatives. Here’s something I wrote ten months into the Bush administration:
"If Clinton was an Eisenhower Republican, Bush looks increasingly like a Nixon liberal in domestic economic policy. The Nixonian gambit of buying public support for the war by reckless, pro-corporate Keynesianism at home is a sobering precedent, and could wreck Republican credibility on the economy in the months and years ahead."
To imply, as Krugman does, that I once supported the budget chicanery and suddenly now don’t is patently dishonest. I just wanted to reduce government power and spending and thought Bush did too. Boy, was I wrong. And boy, do I deserve a shellacking for that early misjudgment. But I recognized it as soon as the fall of 2001; and my campaign against spending has been consistent thereafter; and I backed Kerry in protest. And I’m the conservative Krugman picks on?
There is a reason for this. It’s important for the left to knee-cap conservative critics of this administration in order to discredit conservatism as a whole by conflating it with the Bush debacle. That’s what these smears against Bartlett and me are about. Krugman’s gambit, of course, is to deny the facts of a massive explosion in spending under Bush. He’s stuck because he hates Bush but loves the spending. And so he decides to smear not those conservatives who went along for the ride; but those conservatives who got it right sooner than many. If he can discredit us, then his ideology advances. And that, rather than intellectual honesty, is what he cares about and what he represents. I’m sorry I have to respond in such detail. But Krugman is published by the New York Times; and he is engaged in character assassination, based on lies. I’m not Michael Dukakis.
The Dish 