Paul Krugman opens up

Kevin Drum has posted a must-read interview with Paul Krugman on his blog. As someone who’s tangled with Krugman in the past, I was entranced by the interview’s mix of defensible economic critiques and wild-eyed political paranoia (and a hat tip to Drum for doing a great interview). Here are some of the choice quotes:

From the introduction to Krugman’s new book, The Great Unraveling: “There’s a pattern…within the Bush administration….which should suggest that the administration itself has radical goals. But in each case the administration has reassured moderates by pretending otherwise — by offering rationales for its policy that don’t seem all that radical. And in each case moderates have followed a strategy of appeasement….this is hard for journalists to deal with: they don’t want to sound like crazy conspiracy theorists. But there’s nothing crazy about ferreting out the real goals of the right wing; on the contrary, it’s unrealistic to pretend that there isn’t a sort of conspiracy here, albeit one whose organization and goals are pretty much out in the open.”

Krugman on the book: “The central theme is, we’re being lied to by our leaders, and I just felt I really needed to put that very strongly in context.”

Krugman on his political transformation: “During the 2000 campaign I was inspired to get radicalized. You know, this was not your ordinary average slightly misleading campaign, this was something off the scale, but most people just wouldn’t go at it. And that’s when I started saying that if Bush said the Earth was flat, the resulting article would say ‘Shape of the Earth: Views Differ.’ And then after September 11th it was really impossible, because people wanted to believe good things that just weren’t true.”

Krugman on America’s social cohesion: “Is this the same country that we had in 1970? I think we have a much more polarized political system, a much more polarized social climate. We certainly aren’t the country of Franklin Roosevelt, and we’re probably not the country of Richard Nixon either, so I think we have to take seriously the possibility that things won’t work out this time.”

Krugman on his blog preferences: “I’m on the web, I read Josh Marshall regularly, and Atrios regularly, and I read you occasionally, once every couple of days so I know what’s going on.”

Go read the whole thing. [Won’t your conservative readers be too pissed off to bother?–ed. Then they would be falling into the same trap that Krugman’s last quote suggests, which is reading only one half of the blogosphere. However, for those who are right of center, open up a new page and look at this Charles Krauthammer essay on Bush-hating and then read Krugman. UPDATE: Krugman is giving a lot of interviews to promote his news book. Here’s a link to his chat with Buzzflash. One excerpt:

[A] good part of the media are essentially part of the machine. If you work for any Murdoch publication or network, or if you work for the Rev. Moon’s empire, you’re really not a journalist in the way that we used to think. You’re basically just part of a propaganda machine. And that’s a pretty large segment of the media.

And here’s Donald Luskin’s critique of Krugman’s Sunday New York Times Magazine essay (though also check out Brad DeLong on Luskin).