KRUGMAN: Who's Crazy Now?

From the New York Times via the Progressive American:

The truth is that many of the people who throw around terms like "loopy conspiracy theories" are lazy bullies who, as Zachary Roth put it on CJR Daily, The Columbia Journalism Review's Web site, want to "confer instant illegitimacy on any argument with which they disagree." Instead of facing up to hard questions, they try to suggest that anyone who asks those questions is crazy.

Indeed, right-wing pundits have consistently questioned the sanity of Bush critics; "It looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again," said Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist, after Mr. Gore gave a perfectly sensible if hard-hitting speech. Even moderates have tended to dismiss the administration's harsh critics as victims of irrational Bush hatred.

But now those harsh critics have been vindicated. And it turns out that many of the administration supporters can't handle the truth. They won't admit that they built a personality cult around a man who has proved almost pathetically unequal to the job. Nor will they admit that opponents of the Iraq war, whom they called traitors for warning that invading Iraq was a mistake, have been proved right. So they have taken refuge in the belief that a vast conspiracy of America-haters in the media is hiding the good news from the public.

Click here for the rest.

There are people who, to this day, still believe that Nixon was railroaded. I think it's fair to say that a certain percentage of the US population will never come around to the point of view that Bush is either evil or incompetent or both, same as with Nixon. What's different today is that so many of the deluded are in positions of power, in both government and the media. Nixon-lovers pretty quickly ended up as a sort of lunatic fringe back in the 70s, and that's what they've been ever since. Today's lunatic fringe is mainstream, and apparently willing to fight until the bitter end.

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