Tom Maguire of the Just One Minute blog quoted this earlier today without comment. Perhaps it was Tom's sense of delicacy, or simple disbelief,  that caused him to leave it up to readers to call a spade a spade about the profoundly offensive level of mudslinging to which Krugman has now descended. It's been bad enough for Krugman to call everyone with whom he disagrees a liar. It's quite another matter, now, for him to start calling his ideological opponents Nazis.

"He [Henry Kissinger, in a book] talked in very generic terms about the difficulty of people who have been accustomed to a status quo, diplomatically, coping with what he called a 'revolutionary power.' ...he was clearly intending that people should understand that it related to the failure of diplomacy against Germany in the 30s.

"...confronted with people with some power, domestic or foreign, that really doesn’t play by the rules, most people just can’t admit to themselves that this is really happening.

"They keep on imagining that, 'Oh, you know, they have limited goals. When they make these radical pronouncements that’s just tactical and we can appease them a little bit by giving them some of what they want. And eventually we’ll all be able to sit down like reasonable men and work it out.'

"Then at a certain point you realize, 'My God, we’ve given everything away that makes system work. We’ve given away everything we counted on.'

"And that’s basically the story of what’s happened with the Right in the United States. And it’s still happening."

Krugman can dress it up all he wants with references to scholarly works by Henry Kissinger. And he can justify it all he wants with statements like "The key thing, in terms of the state of the world right now, is that the United States has gone mad." But the blunt fact here is that a columnist for America's most respected newspaper -- not a has-been comedian like Franken -- has gone way beyond any acceptable bounds of constructive public discourse. Just within the last six months Krugman has escalated from comparing George W. Bush to Captain Queeg and Emperor Caligula to likening his administration to the greatest force for death and suffering in the history of the world. "Gone mad," indeed.

Oh... and a note to W. W. Norton, publisher of Krugman's new book: don't think that your denial of my repeated requests for a review copy of the book is going to keep me from saying what needs to be said.

Update... Tom Maguire has updated his earlier post (same link), and notes that Krugman is hardly the first to make the Nazi analogy. Tom's right -- in fact, it's been made many times, and with many different targets in mind. Indeed, one of the things that's so obnoxious about Krugman's making the analogy is that he goes to so much solemn trouble to be so unoriginal. Yet at the same time, I think it is missing the point to dismiss this on such grounds. It is significant and troubling that this gutter attack would be uttered by someone of such immense putative authority and respectability as a columnist for the New York Times.

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 7:52 PM | link