Paying Attention to a Nobel Laureate in Economics, or A Krugman By Any Other Name is Just as Smart

In case you are not a regular viewer¹ or you just happened to miss the June 18th edition of The Colbert Report, Paul Krugman was the guest.

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Colbert outing Krugman as a member of The 1%, now can openly drive his Bentley to the yacht club²

[We think you really need to know who Paul Krugman is if you are at all interested in public affairs, but in case you don't, here's his Wikipedia page.  He won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2008.  It's kind of a big deal. -ed.]


While Krugman's appearance on Colbert was nominally to pimp his new book, End This Depression Now!, the by-proxy focus of the interview was on the Presidential race and how it pertains to the world economy.  Colbert takes his usual satiric, arch-conservative stance to draw an analogy between Obama and the European Union, but Krugman astutely points out how the ruined nations in the Euro Zone are more akin to the Romney economic platform.  And, he also notes that one of the most socially generous nation in Europe, Sweden, is doing just fine, thankyouverymuch.  The punchline here happens at the 5:45 mark where he explains how Republican pet policies line up best with one of the biggest disasters in Europe: Ireland. 

As should surprise no one, the Democrats are failing to fully utilize someone like Paul Krugman to hammer the Modern Republican Economic Message.  You see, Paul is highly educated with a Ph.D. from MIT, and a professor at a prestigious Ivy League University, and a columnist with The New York Times, and the author of a book and blog entitled The Conscience of a Liberal.  Heaven forfend.  So, naturally he is pushed to the periphery of election-year discourse.

The shame of it is Paul Krugman is just the type of person that best disarms the Republican's misinformation machine piloted by Karl Rove and his band of neck-less-old-white-men.  The failure of the Democrats to effectively counteract the Fiction-Based Truth from the far right has been their biggest weakness of late.  The Dems have to be the most frustrating, self-destructive political parties in history, but that is a different blog post entirely...


¹We can assure you, dear reader, that your intrepid blogger is a regular viewer


²We can assure you, dear reader, that Paul Krugman doesn't drive a Bentley and probably doesn't belong to a yacht club

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