A tactless donkey

I used my previous two articles to scrutinize the hypocrisies of GOP candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry. I will leave Perry alone this week and focus my ire on New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, who wrote an extremely distasteful blog on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

Krugman is obviously a very informed, savvy and articulate individual, but that doesn’t seem to help him not be a tactless donkey. “The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue,” Krugman said in his 9/11 post. “Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror.

And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight for all the wrong reasons.” He seems to be unaware that his criticisms of Bush and Guliani (“fake heroes”) can now be applied to himself.

The 10th anniversary of the attack could have been a unifying event where we forgot about our great political divide and came together to mourn those we lost in the attacks. But instead, Krugman makes it a wedge issue to trumpet the same criticisms we’ve been hearing about Bush and the neocons for the past 10 years.

Sure, the issues of the rightness or wrongness of the Iraq War should be discussed, but was it necessary for such a pointed and provocative statement to be made on a national day of mourning?

Opinion columnists make their living violating the saying “If you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” and for good reason: The media needs to report, analyze and judge, especially when it is unpleasant to do so.

But on 9/11, one would be wise to abide by the saying. In the name of tact, Krugman should have waited to post whatever it is he wanted to say until the following day. Posting it on 9/11 was not essential to his argument. Instead, it became easier to dismiss it as tasteless and ignore the content.

Speaking of the content of the post, Krugman’s general attitude toward the post-9/11 years seems to be indicative of why our country is so deeply polarized. In his mind, and in the minds of so many liberals, Bush and his followers were involved in a malevolent, conspiratorial holy crusade against Iraq and worked toward world domination. I disagree with the war as well, but I view it as the Bush administration’s misplaced sense of justice.

Conversely, those on the right commit the same sin in thinking of Barack Obama as a socialist attempting to slaughter the sacred cow that is the American free market. Why can’t those on the far right think of him as acting on a misguided conviction of social justice and economic fairness and construct an argument from there?

There should be understanding with disagreement (with some exceptions, obviously, e.g., genocide). When we understand those we disagree with and when those who disagree with us understand us, we can begin to have a civil, constructive dialogue and dig ourselves out of our current destructive polarization.

On that note, let me say I don’t know much about Krugman, but I would like to believe that he wasn’t so sinister as to intend to spoil the 9/11 commemorations with his polarizing comments. No, he is just a smug columnist who can’t conceive of a world where everyone doesn’t want to know his opinion.

It’s easy to relate to.

­— sdance@indiana.edu