Krugman, monster

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal is a professional lightweight; but Paul Krugman’s comments about the 9/11 anniversary are so egregious that they stir even Taranto to a flame of moral indignation.

- end of initial entry -

Alexis Zarkov writes:

I was long puzzled my Paul Krugman. Sometimes he would come across in his columns, articles, and books as a rational, intelligent and sensible person. At other times, he comes across as petulant, immature, bilious, and irrational. He contradicts himself. He called Robert Barro’s opposition to stimulus spending “boneheaded” because Barro used WWII data (he actually used data from three wars). Krugman conveniently forgot that in a Rolling Stone article (link dead) he wrote that WWII got us out of the Great Depression. Who is the real Krugman? What accounts for this Jekyll-Hyde behavior? After reading a New Yorker article about Krugman, I think Mr. Hyde is actually Mrs. Krugman—an angry black woman, Robin Wells. According to the New Yorker, Paul has Robin edit his copy. From the article:

When he has a draft, he gives it to Wells to edit. Early on, she edited a lot—she had, they felt, a better sense than he did of how to communicate economics to the layperson. (She is also an economist—they met when she was a postdoc at M.I.T. and he was teaching there.) But he’s much better at that now, and these days she focusses on making him less dry, less abstract, angrier. Recently, he gave her a draft of an article he’d done for Rolling Stone. He had written, “As Obama tries to deal with the crisis, he will get no help from Republican leaders,” and after this she inserted the sentence “Worse yet, he’ll get obstruction and lies.” [emphasis added]

If this article is accurate, then Wells could be the source of the extreme partisanship and anger we find in many of Krugman’s publications. I know the angry-black-woman personality type. While intelligent and academically successful (often through affirmative action), she has a chip on her shoulder, and thinks of Republicans and conservatives as racist. In my opinion, Robin is hurting Paul’s reputation. If she’s behind the 9/11 blog, then this time she’s gone too far. I also suspect that Paul can’t say no because like many Jewish men, Paul is henpecked. Too bad because I think he’s is basically a sane and intelligent man.

LA replies:

This is funny. On a day on which I had posted items about two angry and anti-socially self-assertive black women, Michelle Obama and Serena Williams, who were in the news, a third item I posted, about the insanely angry and hate-filled New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, turns out to be in reality about an insanely angry and hate-filled black woman.

But if this is true, if he has turned over the key writing of his NYT op-eds to another person, isn’t that a serious scandal? It would, however, help explain how he writes so many op-eds. It seems to me that almost every time I pick up a Times, there is a Krugman op-ed in it, all of them over-the-top angry in the same Krugman way, which now turns out not to be the Krugman way, if this revelation is correct.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 12, 2011 06:35 PM | Send