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Sunday, November 20, 2011

The Double Standard at Work

I made the mistake today of watching the panel discussion on ABC's This Week when they spoke about the GOP presidential race. Paul Krugman of the New York Times was one of the panel members, and he expressed the view that all of the Republican candidates other than Mitt Romney were "fools and clowns". No one reacted to this statement, not even an eyebrow got raised. As I heard this, I thought to myself what the reaction would be if a Sunday morning panelist called president Obama a fool or a clown. There would be an immediate outcry with charges of racism. There would be outrage at the hate speech being directed at the president. Whoever said that would get dropped from the program. In other words, people would react.

Have we really gotten so used to the double standard for conservatives and liberals that we can sit silently while good people are slammed in this way. Krugman did not take issue with the policies supported by the GOP candidates; he attacked them personally as idiots or as being unserious.

The truth is that Krugman is a polemicist with not much to say other than his personal attacks. Even his writing on economics frequently is flawed. It makes one wonder how he won the Nobel Prize. Was his uncle on the committee?

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