Krugman hates to say, ‘I told you so,’ but…

March 10, 2006

Paul Krugman’s column today asks conservatives who are turning on Bush an important question. It’s one a lot of us have been thinking about for a long time. “What took you so long?”

Bruce Bartlett, the author of “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” is an angry man. At a recent book forum at the Cato Institute, he declared that the Bush administration is “unconscionable,” “irresponsible,” “vindictive” and “inept.”

It’s no wonder, then, that one commentator wrote of Mr. Bartlett that “if he were a cartoon character, he would probably look like Donald Duck during one of his famous tirades, with steam pouring out of his ears.”

Oh, wait. That’s not what somebody wrote about Mr. Bartlett. It’s what Mr. Bartlett wrote about me in September 2003, when I was saying pretty much what he’s saying now.

Krugman isn’t bitter; he seems delighted to have people like Bartlett and Andrew Sullivan break with their ideological allies and publicly denounce the president. As Krugman put it, “[B]etter late than never.” But Krugman’s broader is even more important.

[W]e should guard against a conventional wisdom that seems to be taking hold in some quarters, which says there’s something praiseworthy about having initially been taken in by Mr. Bush’s deceptions, even though the administration’s mendacity was obvious from the beginning.

According to this view, if you’re a former Bush supporter who now says, as Mr. Bartlett did at the Cato event, that “the administration lies about budget numbers,” you’re a brave truth-teller. But if you’ve been saying that since the early days of the Bush administration, you were unpleasantly shrill.

Similarly, if you’re a former worshipful admirer of George W. Bush who now says, as Mr. Sullivan did at Cato, that “the people in this administration have no principles,” you’re taking a courageous stand. If you said the same thing back when Mr. Bush had an 80 percent approval rating, you were blinded by Bush-hatred.

And if you’re a former hawk who now concedes that the administration exaggerated the threat from Iraq, you’re to be applauded for your open-mindedness. But if you warned three years ago that the administration was hyping the case for war, you were a conspiracy theorist.

Exactly. Bartlett and Sullivan’s analysis isn’t new; it’s just new for conservatives.

Some of us were criticizing Bush before criticizing Bush was cool.

Totally, CB.

But let’s not take the chance of thinking we can let it play itself out- let’s all try to direct how the changing winds effect things.

We’ve got to take care of what’s going on, and always in the right measure- as in all things, never too much, never too little- and we’ve got to keep it up, right down the line. The more we are able to convince some of these people that things are not the way they thought they were, the better off the world will be for it.

I’ve got some new stuff up on my blog, and will be keeping it going. So you all can check in on what I’m thinking on how things are going for us when you want to.

  • I was against him before I was against him.
    Where did I put those damned torches and pitchforks?

  • Krugman is one of the few reasons I still have a small amount of hope left for our country.

  • This all feels like “locking the barn door after the horses are out.” Anyone with half a brain could have looked at Bush 2 in Y2K and realized that he was a burned out coke head. The whole “Lord Changed my life” thing is sickening. If this guy is a practicing Christian, then he has some explaining to do. This guy is a murderer, and a thief, and has allowed the looting of the treasury as well as the destruction of an entire nation through an unprevoked attack. Why did it take these right wingers so long to figure it out? Where are their sensibilities?

  • Worse than being wrong is being right too soon. You can be forgiven for being wrong. No one will ever forgive you for having been right too soon.

  • Mr. Bartlett was taken to task by Laura Ingraham for his views cited in his book. When are the Bush cheerleaders and kool aid drinkers going to come to their senses? Only the captain goes down with a sinking ship.

  • “What took you so long?” is a good question. But there’s a more critical one: What’s taking the rest of the country so long?

  • OK, we were right, they were wrong.
    But still, it does take courage to finally stand up to this administrarion. The Bush/Cheney crime syndicate play the hardest of hardball, and these folks are going to get their share of the slime, backstabbing & swiftboating that Paul O’neil, Richard Clarke, etc., etc. got. And they know it.
    We should wecome them back to the real world. And, this proves that the Bush Kool-aid is not a fatal brew.

  • Why be satisfied with these tepid greenhorn Bush-bashers? We’re all well past the basic Bush 101 material here. After you’re done congratulating the new freshmen class, go get yourself a refreshing slug of some advanced Bush-bashing: Gore Vidal holds forth at Truthdig.

  • Why did it take these right wingers so long to figure it out? Where are their sensibilities?

    Comment by Gracious

    We don’t want to give them more credit than they deserve. They sense the ground shifting beneath their feet and like animals fleeing mysteriously before an earthquake or a tsunami, they start running knowing only that something bad is coming. If Dear Leader wasn’t starting to attract sharp objects like a dartboard, plenty of his currently “wised up” detractors would still be singing his praises. And it’s all just constructive criticism for the good of Shrub and party. If he makes a comeback then they will take credit for righting the ship and getting Dear Nitwit back on course. You can bet they would rather see that happen, (and have the world spin off into a plutocratic/theofascist hell with them being raptured out of the whole mess in some form or fashion), than admit they were ever wrong.

    The potential for grinding their sour faces in their own poopy underwear is approaching but there’s buckets more bullshit they should be prepared to savor than just what’s in front of them right now.

    Let’s hope their backpedaling makes them really hungry.

  • The problem with personalized criticism of the President and the administration is that it allows the Conservative Philosophy off the hook. In fact the militarized approach to the Middle East, massive tax cuts for the most wealth, and retreat from social security, health care, and pensions are all mainstay planks to the Conservative platform of the last 20 years. The administration is in trouble for trying to implement this philosophy. If the criticism is simply personalized then conservative republicans simply plug in another character(McCain is a likely choice)who continues the same philosophy with the result of impoverishing most Americans and leaving us debt ridden and dependent on foreign oil and creditors.

  • Wake up, Americans. This administration has been about ONE THING and one thing only. The radical religious right agenda, the blood-for-oil-and-pipelines wars, the tax cuts and deficits, the un-elected puppet presidency, the subversion of the media…small potatoes. This administration only took power to do one thing: TO TRANSFER THE PUBLIC WEALTH OF THE RICHEST NATION IN THE WORLD INTO PRIVATE BANK ACCOUNTS.

    This administration has been a straight-up loot-and-pillage operation on an epic scale. This is it, folks, the scam and heist of the millennia.

    Over the last 5 years, the contents of our federal treasury have been transferred into the bank accounts of private contractors, armament industries, communication and energy companies, favorite drug companies (what do you think the Medicaid thing is about?), private corporations and doled out in cash by the palette-load in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    What’s truly horrifying is that this money isn’t just the surplus this administration inherited from the last one, or revenue from the last 5 years. This deficit will have our kids and grandkids enslaved and indebted throughout their lifetimes. The federal services designed for their benefit have been and will further be cut to fix this ‘money problem.’

    That’s a killer coup, eh? Not just to steal the money, but to steal it in such a way the victims will have to work 2-1/2 lifetimes, with far fewer safety nets, to try and replace it? Complete with tax cuts that insure that the robber barons won’t be the ones responsible for paying back any of it?

    It’s too late. We’re all screwed, and they’re rich beyond a glutton’s wettest dream. They stole America’s money. We let them. It’s gone.

    Better wake up before the administration finally figures out how to transfer Social Security — the last, vast, untapped oil field of federal and public monies — into the pockets of the brokerage houses. It’s 3-1/2 years late, but people, lets impeach them now. Can we afford, in ANY currency…fiscal, moral, political…three more years of this?

  • Great crowd, especially kanders. You did leave out their goal of starving the government.

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