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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Krugman on Complicity

Krugman on Complicity

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This is a great read and I completely endorse:

When was the last time centrist talking heads declared, “Donald Trump just became president” (because he bombed someone, or something like that)? I think it’s been more than a year. At this point, you have to be a truly fanatical practitioner of bothsidesism not to see that Trump is every bit as terrible a human being, and every bit as much a menace to the republic, as some of us warned when all the cool kids were busy snarking about Clinton’s emails.

You gotta love it when Kthug lobs a cruise missile over the bow of the SS Haberman. At any rate, the whole thing rocks, but this is super important:

Even now, I don’t think most political commentators have grasped how deep the rot goes. I don’t think they understand, or at any rate admit to themselves, that democracy really could die just a few months from now.

And if it doesn’t, if Republicans lose Congress and Trump leaves office on or before January 2021, the same people who kept declaring that Trump just became president will try to go back to pretending that Republican politicians are serious, honorable people who care about policy. But they aren’t.

So remember this moment. We’re seeing, in real time, what the GOP is really made of.

We have to make sure they don’t get away with it.

Reader Interactions

54Comments

  1. 1.

    Jim

    One thing Krugman left out about the Repubs is that they’ll also go back to claiming they’re the fiscally responsible party, and how the hell did the Dems let the deficit get this big? Time for some real cuts to those damn entitlements!

  2. 2.

    mad citizen

    Vote vote vote! I took a card at the State Fair from my (R) Secretary of State, with the website on how to check registration, etc. I checked, and I’m still good to go (I’m a regular voter). It was actually a decent website, with a full ballot, voting sites, etc. I’ll check back as November nears.

  5. 5.

    Yutsano

    Checked my registration. Voted in the primary just to be sure I would be good before the general election. Am now waiting to see if it’s possible to unlodge Dan Newhouse from his milquetoast seat. Doubtful, but if Lisa Brown defeats Cathy McMorris-Rodgers…I’ll take that.

  7. 7.

    schrodingers_cat

    So why is the media (by this I mean the oh so respectable NPR, PBS, NYT and the like) always giving Rs a pass?
    1. They are Rs
    2. Their bosses/owners are Rs
    3. They are afraid of Rs
    4. All of the above.

  8. 8.

    The Dangerman

    Even now, I don’t think most political commentators have grasped how deep the rot goes.

    Which is why the thought of cutting a deal that involves Trump simply resigning is such a bad idea; there is a cancer and it all must be excised.

    I don’t think they understand … that democracy really could die just a few months from now.

    Started with Bush v. Gore; Republicans don’t give a shit about Democracy. They just want the win and the tax cuts.

  11. 11.

    The Midnight Lurker

    Attention all Juicers! Yutsano’s post just reminded me! EVERYONE CHECK TO MAKE SURE YOU ARE STILL ON THE VOTER ROLL IN YOUR STATE. The lousy republicans are purging names!

    @Yutsano: Thanks.

  12. 12.

    Amir Khalid

    Maggie Haberman is not the first at The NYT that Krugman has defenestrated like this. He’s been doing it to David Brooks for years.

  13. 13.

    Balconesfault

    @The Dangerman: I continue to tell people over and over again when they say a certain election is the most important one of our time. It’s still all goes back to 2000.

  15. 15.

    Platonailedit

    The statement by Rudy Giuliani that "truth isn't truth" is another step towards authoritarianism. It also reminds us of Nixon's defense that "when the president does it, that means it is not illegal."

    Does this make you angry? Scared? If so, vote this Nov & get others to vote.

    https://t.co/gz9ixcYxVC— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) August 19, 2018

  17. 17.

    Brachiator

    @schrodingers_cat:

    So why is the media (by this I mean the oh so respectable NPR, PBS, NYT and the like) always giving Rs a pass?

    This is not “the media,” it’s just a slice.

    It’s irrelevant whether the publisher or top executives are Republicans. The NYT has endorsed Democrats for decades, but is still often a crappy rag.

    And where we are now, if these entities denounced Trump all day, every day, we would still have the same mess we’ve got.

    Read better papers, watch better tv news, listen to better public radio. And vote the GOP out of office.

    @The Dangerman: If Trump wanted to resign tomorrow, I would take that deal in a heartbeat.

    This would not stop the GOP, but it would slow them down.

  18. 18.

    Platonailedit

    @Brachiator:

    it’s just a slice.

    Really? Care to cite which msm org is actually calling out the republican corruption without bothsiderism?

  22. 22.

    The Dangerman

    @Brachiator:

    If Trump wanted to resign tomorrow, I would take that deal in a heartbeat.

    Trump resigning won’t change much; having a fuckload of people going to jail will. I don’t know how many people went to jail after Watergate; the number from THIS mess, if allowed to play out, might be an order of magnitude higher…

    …though the “play out” thing concerns me. Last week, I was at 60/40 for a hanged jury for Manafort. I’d probably call that 75/25 today. I don’t know how you get an impartial jury in anything Trump related.

    ETA: I mean all 12 impartial; chance of having a lone asshole seems high.

  23. 23.

    Yutsano

    @The Midnight Lurker: To be fair, I think it was you (or someone) who got me on checking in the first place. So I was all over that after I got my ballot.

    Also: vote by mail is hecking amazing.

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: I checked on my state website. Fortunately I live in Washington, so it’s really easy.You can even view your previous voting records there, as in when you voted in previous elections etc.

  24. 24.

    suzanne

    So our primary is this month, and everyone in my household is on the PEVL, aka the Permanent Early Voter List. Mr. Suzanne and I received our ballots, but SuzMom has not. Concerning.

  27. 27.

    JR

    Think, gentlemen, of the old monarchy: it was stronger than you are, stronger in its origin; it was able to lean more than you do upon ancient customs, ancient habits, ancient beliefs; it was stronger than you are, and yet it has fallen to dust. And why did it fall? Do you think it was by the particular mischance? Do you think it was by the act some man, by the deficit, the oath in the tennis court, Lafayette, Mirabeau? No, gentlemen; there was another reason: the class that was then the governing class had become, through its indifference, its selfishness, and its vices, incapable and unworthy of governing the country.

  28. 28.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @Yutsano:
    Ohio’s the same exact way. They even have an app that shows you all your voter info and voting history. It also tells you what your voting districts are.

  29. 29.

    Brachiator

    @Platonailedit:

    Really? Care to cite which msm org is actually calling out the republican corruption without bothsiderism?

    The msm are all sellouts to the GOP and they are the enemy of the people pumping out fake news. You must appreciate their flexibility.

    @The Dangerman:

    RE: Watergate. Info is not hard to find.

    The scandal also resulted in the indictment of 69 people, with trials or pleas resulting in 48 being found guilty, many of whom were top Nixon officials.

    Come up with charges for GOP dopes and I will go along and still be happy with a Trump resignation.

    I don’t see the point in trying to predict the outcome of the Manafort trial. We will find out soon enough.

  31. 31.

    Ellen H

    @suzanne: You can check on the Registrar’s website to see if the ballot was mailed. If not, you may still be able to request it. If it is too late for that, then there should be several locations where she can vote early. I am sending a friend of mine who misplaced her early ballot down to the county recorder’s office in the morning so she can vote before she leaves on a ten day vacation in the afternoon. I am relentless!

  34. 34.

    Bill Arnold

    I loved that Paul Krugman piece; one of his best. The rewrites were apparently a serious struggle.

    The party has long been in the habit of rejecting awkward facts and attributing them to conspiracies: it’s not a big jump from claiming that climate change is a giant hoax perpetrated by the entire scientific community to asserting that Trump is the blameless target of a vast deep state conspiracy.

    This is particularly on point. The rot is intellectual, and at all levels. I’ll freely admit that the American right does not have a US monopoly on uncritical thinking, but they do dominate. At the bottom, there’s the extremely monetizable gullibility. At all levels there’s gullibility about fake news, e.g. Polarization, Partisanship and Junk News Consumption over Social Media in the US

    We demonstrate that (1) on Twitter, a network of Trump supporters share s the widest range of known junk news sources and circulates more junk news than all the other groups put together ; (2) on Facebook, extreme hard right pages distinct from Republican pages share the widest range of known junk news sources and circulate more junk news than all the other audiences put together ;

  35. 35.

    Mandalay

    We’re seeing, in real time, what the GOP is really made of.

    We’re also seeing what the NYT is really made of. A recent article contained this nonsense:

    Mr. Trump, who enjoys military history, called last year for a parade of troops, tanks…

    Several comments from readers rightly savaged the White House lackeys for their stenography. For example:

    The reporter writes: “Mr. Trump, who enjoys military history …” Prove it. Are the editors asleep? There is no evidence in this article, or elsewhere, that the “reality star in the White House” has the capacity, much less the desire, to enjoy any academic discipline like history (military or otherwise). This line crediting Trump with a zeal for an intellectual pursuit is pure propaganda. Name one book our dear leader has read. Save this nonsense exalting Trump for Fox News.

    The faux praise was bad enough in itself, but since the blowback from readers the article has been doctored to remove the propaganda, without any acknowledgement of that removal. Even now you can link to the article using a google search for trump “enjoys military history”, but the text is missing in the linked article. This is not what Trump means by “fake news”, but it surely is that. NYT simply cannot be trusted as an honest news source for Trump’s Administration.

  36. 36.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @Bill Arnold:
    This reminds me of that one article where a legit fake news outfit from Macedonia explained that US liberals didn’t buy into conspiracy theories and actual fake news as easily as their right wing counterparts did, so they stopped trying to target lefties.

  38. 38.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @Mandalay:
    You mean they didn’t post an acknowledgement that they made a correction? Christ, that’s unethical as fuck.

  39. 39.

    Irony Abounds

    I bounce from deep anger that fuels optimism that Dem energy will result in a huge blue wave, to despair that this country is already too far gone – after all, any country that elected Donald Trump as president is more likely the squalor in the ghetto rather than the shining city on the hill. I’m voting, and exhorting others to vote, but until Trump’s fat ass is thrown out of office we’re on a knife’s edge.

  41. 41.

    cmorenc

    I’m not nearly so pessimistic as many of you about the Manafort jury – odds are strong they’ll convict him on at least several of the more serious counts, even if not quite all of them. It’s very common for juries in serious cases to request clarification of the “reasonable doubt” standard, even when there’s zero political or other special overtones to the case. The part that’s more concerning is how Trump reacts to a guilty verdict – will he decide to take concrete steps to shut down the Mueller investigation, by pardoning Manafort and revoking Bruce Orr’s security clearance to test the waters for beginning to revoke the clearances of other members of Mueller’s team?

  42. 42.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @cmorenc: I’ve been on several juries and reasonable doubt is always a problem for some jurors. I don’t find the jury asking the judge for clarification concerning at all, generally the judge will read back the jury instructions.

  43. 43.

    James E Powell

    Krugman called out his colleagues, though he didn’t name names, for giving Hillary Clinton the Gore treatment in the summer. As far as I can tell, it had no effect on their behavior. Nothing is going to stop them from doing what they’ve been doing.

  44. 44.

    Villago Delenda Est

    The utter scum of the Village needs to pay for their crimes against journalism, against Democracy, against decency. They are as guilty as the racist scum of the GOP in this matter.

    Wipe them out. All of them.

  46. 46.

    cmorenc

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    @cmorenc: I’ve been on several juries and reasonable doubt is always a problem for some jurors. I don’t find the jury asking the judge for clarification concerning at all, generally the judge will read back the jury instructions.

    I’ve been on a jury twice – was even the foreman on one of them in a federal court criminal trial. We did engage in partial jury nullification in that case – it was a sixteen count indictment, and we convicted on the first felony count and acquitted on the rest because we felt the prosecutors had unnecessarily piled excessive charges on the defendant, which we feared might result in disproportionate jail time under federal sentencing guidelines, relative to the nature of what the defendant actually did.

    Something that positively impressed me about my fellow mates on the jury was that we were a diverse lot, and each one of us noticed at least one critical detail in the evidence that the rest of us had missed noticing. At least on that particular jury, our collective evaluation was stronger than the evaluation of any single one of us.

  48. 48.

    dimmsdale

    Speaking of the depth of the corruption, I hope someone among the Dem power structure with some stones and some resolve, is archiving all the felonies our Republican scum buckets and their minions are committing (I’m talking about everything from violations of the Hatch Act to using insider knowledge for personal gain to the hideous excesses of ICE) so that we can return to some sort of normalcy once the R’s are out of power (that’s an ‘if’, of course). As vast as the scale of corruption is, that’s how vast the efforts to redress and restore the democracy and our civilized norms ought to be. (as big in scope as the Nuremberg trials, if there’s any proportionality to it.) I know this is getting the cart WAY before the horse, but visions of ICE personnel being called out in a court of law for their crimes helps me stay even. The HELL with ‘looking forward, not back.’

  52. 52.

    sherparick

    @mad citizen: Vote where you can an scream about Republican Voter suppression as much a possible. Pay attention to the local elections (Governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General, and State Representative.

  53. 53.

    Jack the Second

    @schrodingers_cat: I think their motivation is at least parallel to R’s.

    They are comfortable upper class mostly white, mostly male people.

    They aren’t particularly affected one way or the other by the policies which are the end-result of politics. To them all it is is the horse race, a game no different than football or basketball, divorced from the suffering and death that comes from bad political outcomes. Their healthcare, their livelihoods, their rights, their lives aren’t at risk. It’s just entertainment.

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