Paul Krugman is Insane

We always knew that Krugman couldn’t add or subtract. As an economist, the guy is a terrific writer. And fantasy is his genre.  

But the fact that he thinks that we’ve all been secretly ashamed of our reactions to 9/11 for the last ten years should be enough to place him in observation for indulging in too much fantasy.

“What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not,” writes Krugman as his sick 9/11 tribute, “was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue.”

Way to unify us Paul.

“Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush,” says Krugman “raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.”

This is not a country that has a great fear of expressing itself. We have way too much self-love for that. If we were secretly ashamed, we’d go on Oprah and proclaim our secret shame to the world, as many liberals like Krugman have done. Or we'd write a book about it.      

There were no fake heroes, as Krugman has called Rudy Guiliani and George W. Bush, after 9/11. No one was anxious to cash in on the war that was declared by Osama bin Laden in 1996 against the U.S.

Mistakes? Yes. There were many.  

As Winston Churchill observed, wars are made of up surprises and disappointments. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth waging.   

Contrast Bush’s reactions at 9/11 to the “Osama bin Laden is still dead” World Tour that Obama engaged in after he watched Seal Team Six dispatch bin Laden on his TV set.

All that was missing in front of Obama was popcorn and a Snuggie. No fake hero there.

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Just a faux one.  

The outpouring after the cowardly attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon was universal. So was the coalition that went into Afghanistan to kick out Al Qaeda and the Taliban sheltering them.

You had all the elements that liberals love including UN authorization, abuse of women, oppression, blight, gobs of government grant money and Congressional approval to wage war in Afghanistan.

Oh. That’s right. Scratch that last one. Liberals don’t care about Congressional authorization as long as Obama’s doing something to hurt Israel and support jihadists in North Africa.      

Certainly the war that we have waged against radical Islam since 9/11, including the war that has still produced the Arab world’s only true democracy in Iraq, has cost America something.

But there has been no democracy in Egypt or Syria or Libya or any of the clients of the so-called Arab Spring. There are exactly two democracies in the Middle East: Israel and Iraq. If thriving democracies aren’t in the best interest of the United States in the Middle East, I don’t know what the hell is.  We fought for them in Europe. Why should we do less for the Middle East and Central Asia when it improves our own security?   

I will admit that the global war on terror- including the one in Iraq- is responsible for the much of the uncertainty and fear in the financial markets over the last ten years. We lost the peace dividend we gained after winning the Cold War.  

And I don’t think we’ll get back to robust financial markets until we’ve gone a much longer way towards crushing Islamists out of existence including stabilizing Iraq.

But to pretend that everything would have been great had we not invaded Afghanistan or Iraq gets you about as far as pretending Al Qaeda didn’t attack the United States.

It’s like pretending the world would have been a much better place if we hadn’t stood up against Stalin and waged the Cold War, which is exactly what some liberals would have had us do.   

And to pretend that somehow lobbing cruise missiles at Moammar Gadhafi in Tripoli is morally superior to ground operations in Iraq or Afghanistan is a logically flawed proposition.

Say what you will, but both liberals and conservatives- with the Ron Paul exception- have waged war in their own way for their own reasons.

Mr. Krugman would do well to respect those reasons.   

We have not created the conditions of subjection and oppression in the Arab world that more than anything else is responsible for the attacks of 9/11, the war in Iraq, the uprisings in the Islamic world. But he is right that we do control our actions and must be responsible for them.

But ashamed of them?

Only one American should be ashamed by his reaction to 9/11.  But the insane often feel no shame.  

John Ransom | Create Your Badge

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