Threefer

Shorter Peggy Noonan: "Peggy Noonan is on vacation."

Shorter David Brooks: "David Brooks is off today."

Shorter Paul Krugman: "Senate Dems blew FISA but won big on health care."

Dubya Con

Shorter Jacob Weisberg:

Weave a circle round me thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For I on Bush's lies hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Mmm mmm mmm. Kool-Aid, good to the last drop...

Update: Krugman on the Weisberg column: "Why are political writers still unaware that Bush’s phrase 'compassionate conservatism' wasn’t an acceptance of the Great Society, but rather a dog-whistle to the religious right?"

Gathering Storm

Yesterday on his blog, Paul Krugman read the health care tea leaves in a National Review article surveying the Democratic advantage on domestic issues heading into the '08 elections:

[...The NR's] greatest fear is that if the Democrats do win,

It would probably also mean a national health-insurance program that would irrevocably expand government involvement in the economy and American life, and itself make voters less likely to turn toward conservatism in the future.

I think that sentence contains a grim truth for progressives: the right will fight any health reform tooth and nail. They believe — and so do I — that the implications of universal coverage would extend far beyond health care, that it would revitalize the New Deal idea. And so they’ll do anything to stop it.

Health care reform is shaping up as the great political challenge -- and opportunity -- of our generation. But we'll have to battle millions of cornered ideologues to get there.

In related news, "Krugman’s version of his appearance is disputed."

It's Always Time for Tax Cuts

Paul Krugman has identified a financial corollary to the law that All News is Good News for Republicans. Responding to the meme that's recently appeared everywhere along the ideological spectrum from NRO to the WSJ, that a recession would provide an opportunity to push more tax cuts, Krugman has deduced that Everything that Happens is Good for Tax Cuts:

If the economy is growing, and tax receipts are rising, then it shows that past tax cuts achieved wonders, plus the Laffer curve is right — so let’s cut taxes some more!

If the economy is shrinking, well, it needs a boost — and what better boost than another round of tax cuts!

See, cutting taxes is always good. It makes you wonder why we ever had taxes in the first place.

Because if taxes didn't exist, Republicans would have to invent them.

Update: Sorry, I didn't see that Atrios did this story last night. I actually went to Krugman's blog to see if he would shoot down Ruth Marcus again on her latest Social Security op-ed. He hasn't, yet.

Update 2: Krugman has now shot down Ruth Marcus. Again. The first Krugman link, which puts the silliness of the whole "Social Security obssession" into context, is well worth reading.

St. Ronnie Recollected

Over on his new blog, Paul Krugman illustrates Ronald Reagan's pattern and practice of racist appeals, giving the lie in so doing to the recent denials by David Brooks and David Broder that I blogged about on Friday and Saturday.

Same As It Ever Was

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal should avoid antagonizing his moral and intellectual superiors quite as cheaply as he did Paul Krugman in his Friday WSJ column, "Best of the Web Today." In this morning's NY Times, Krugman responds to Taranto's taunts, which include a juvenile riff suggesting Krugman stole the title of his new book, The Conscience of a Liberal, from dead Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone, who among others also published a book by that title. (If there's anything these conservative creeps love, don't you know, it's a chance to dance on Paul Wellstone's grave.)

Channeling Digby on one of her favorite themes, Krugman reliably pins the entire history of movement conservatism onto the donkey's ass of this Bush White House. From godfather Barry Goldwater's 1960 anti-government The Conscience of a Conservative (and Goldwater's support of the likes of Sen. Joseph McCarthy), through right-wing icons William F. Buckley and Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney and Oliver North and Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, right up to today's divisive, warmongering and S-CHIP vetoing President George W. Bush, Krugman shows that American movement conservatism has ended up just as it was always destined to be: the same as it ever was. (May David Byrne forgive him.)

Go read all the details.