March 20, 2006
Sull of a Gun
Against my better judgement, I actually like Andrew Sullivan. He's a self-professed conservative who has (to varying extents) actually stood up and denounced the crap that the Bush Administration has pulled these past several years. He's proof that it is possible to identify as conservative and yet not (entirely) Republican.
But he can also be irritatingly obtuse and contrary at times, and this is one of them. He's taking issue with Paul Krugman's (a favorite bête noire of his) recent column in the NY Times:
They can't even criticize Mr. Bush for the systematic dishonesty of his budgets. For one thing, that dishonesty has been apparent for five years. More than that, some prominent conservative commentators actually celebrated the administration's dishonesty. In 2001 Time.com blogger Andrew Sullivan, writing in The New Republic, conceded that Mr. Bush wasn't truthful about his economic policies. But Mr. Sullivan approved of the deception: "Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smokescreen of 'compassionate conservatism.'" As Berkeley's Brad DeLong puts it on his blog, conservatives knew that Mr. Bush was lying about the budget, but they thought they were in on the con.But Krugman is grotesquely misrepresenting me. My delusion in 2001 was that Bush was actually a conservative. I thought "compassionate conservatism" meant unleashing private armies of compassion and this emphasis on the voluntary sector would soothe and distract liberals who would otherwise demagogue cuts in public spending. I was obviously wrong - in retrospect laughably so.
Emphasis mine. Sullivan complains that Krugman has him all wrong, y'see - Sullivan wasn't in favor of Bush's lies until he found out he was the one being lied to, he was in favor of Bush's misdirections until he found out he was being lied to. A terrible lapse on Dr. Krugman's part.
Posted by ben at March 20, 2006 03:24 PM