In Which I Just Start Re-posting Paul Krugman, Ctd.

From Dr. Shrill, covering themes which regular readers will find very familiar by now:

Whom The Gods Would Destroy, They First Make Bipartisan

Brad DeLong points us to a truly weird column by Clive Crook, which apparently was supposed to be a satirical take on Paul Ryan’s critics but falls completely flat. This follows on an almost equally weird piece by Ben Smith berating all those people who had the temerity to judge Ryan the great Truthteller on whether he actually, you know, told the truth.

What’s going on? Well, the Ryan phenomenon wasn’t primarily driven by the hard right, which has plenty of heroes. It was driven, instead, by “centrist”, self-righteously nonpartisan pundits who seized upon Ryan as their demonstration that see, there are honest, reasonable conservatives who must be taken seriously.

And these people have been hit really hard by Ryan’s precipitous plunge from icon to punchline, which is made much worse from their point of view by the fact that some of us warned years ago that Ryan was in fact an obvious con man...

The Beltway Hack Full Employment And Mutual Protection Act of 1988 clearly states that at no time shall the received wisdom of the Deans of American Political Opinions ever be directly confronted or challenged.

The Act further states that exceptions to this Prime Directive can be made under such extraordinary and unforeseeable circumstance as may arise when the sheer weight and force of Reality may overwhelm the Deans of American Political Opinions' capacity to sandbag it back out of sight with the usual, workaday bullshit. At such time it is permitted to go so far as to admit that "everybody got it wrong". However, members who are subject to the Act are reminded and should consider themselves duly notified that at no time are members permitted to admit that one side (Liberals) got anything right that others (Centrist and Conservatives) got horribly, horribly wrong: if such does, in fact, represent a significant aspect of the prevailing Reality, members should consider themselves reminded and duly notified that it is their duty under the Act to manufacture such positions as would balance the blame between Liberals and Centrist/Conservatives if such positions were factual and to relentlessly impute such positions to Liberals until the prevailing Reality changes to conform to the new, "everybody got it wrong" position.