Yea, team! Krugman wins...

AS AN economics-challenged  regular reader of Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times,  let  me offer my enthusiastic congratulations to him for his Nobel Prize.  For the years of the Bush presidency,  he has been the Paul Revere of impending economic meltdowns in subprime mortgages,  warning  often of the dark fate of housing bubbles.  One of his major targets was Alan Greenspan, the self-accommodating former Federal Reserve chief who flattered Bush economics  by supporting the unchecked mortgage industry's  reckless policies that brought down the market to disastrous depths.  (To this day, Greenspan has yet to concede that he made any judgmental errors as the Bush administration's go-to guru and continues to live quite well, thank you. ) During those same years Krugman, a Princeton economics professor, was considered by many trickle-down conservatives to be nothing more  than an Ivy League nuisance, a liberal campus type navigating blindly in matters best left to the deep thinkers on Wall Street and at Greenspan's personal fiefdom at the Federal Reserve.  These days I have begun to wonder whether we would have ever reached this crises if Krugman had been the head of the Federal Reserve or the Treasury Secretary.  Well, what if...?  

 

She qualified for the role!

Some debate, huh?  What  restraint Joe Biden must have called upon to remain a perfect gentleman against an opponent who appeared to be auditioning for a high school class play! Sarah Palin would have won the role easily.   She repeated her lines perfectly as they skidded from one Republican talking point to another.  As scripted for her, she went after Obama/Biden like the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:  Win the war without surrender...cut taxes for Joe Sixpack ... reform the government (without mentioning  George Bush's central role in the meltdown)... deliver all of us from evil.  Tax-cutting has been a GOP staple  in the GOP playbook as far back as I can remember.  And guess what?  Read-my-lips Bush  (the present incumbent's father) campaigned fiercely against taxes and then went on to support new taxes.  Of course he did. So have others. 

Paul Krugman pointed out that Palin's closing testament to freedom was lifted from Ronald Reagan's appeal to the the wives of physicians in the early 1960s (not yet president) to resist, um...  socialistic Medicare.  Is that what she really wants to tell Joe Sixpack?

She also told Fox News (where else?) that she was annoyed by some of Katie Couric's questions and that she wants to talk to Americans "without the filter."  Bush, the current one, used to refer to filters, too.  He preferred to read the unfiltered morning briefings from his staff rather than  newspapers.  My hunch is that he was peeking at other printed words, too, but it's always comforting  to attack the left-wing media,  which is largely owned by Republican businessmen.

I've been thinking about filters and decided there is no higher calling than to filter the filters, the latter being those politicians and others who command public attention.  So journalistic filters must figure out how to discard the nonsense and find the stuff that is often purposely left out by the newsmakers.   That may be confusing, I know,  but I can live with it.