Poor Paul Krugman.. [1].
So there’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that “I believe in states’ rights,” he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.
Indeed, you do really have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.
When he went on about the welfare queen driving her Cadillac, and kept repeating the story years after it had been debunked, some people thought he was engaging in race-baiting. But it was all just an innocent mistake.
Here’s someone whose entire world view, myopic as it is, is totally dependent upon defeating his greatest philosophical enemy, Ronald Reagan, in absentia…. (Since nobody could defeat Reagan while he was alive.) Of course, to do that, you have to take the gippers arguments and twist them around to the point of non-recognition. Straw men are always easier to defeat…. which is perhaps why Krugman limits himself to these.
As an example, Paul;
It has been pointed out to me that Reagan opposed making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday, giving in only when Congress passed a law creating the holiday by a veto-proof majority. But he really didn’t mean to disrespect the civil rights movement – it was just an innocent mistake.
So, it’s impossible, say you, to respect MLK, and yet be against creating yet another day off for government and union workers? I’m sure this little oversight of yours was just an innocent mistake.
More, Memeorandum
Addendum:
Matt Yglesias, [2] With whom I’ve had a fair share of disagreement with over the years, points out that this whole thing from Paul Krugman is actually a part of a long running battle between Krugman and David Brooks:
More calumnies [1] from the left, with wild-eyed nutjob Paul Krugman arguing that Ronald Reagan’s opposition to creating a federal holiday for Martin Luther King and his efforts to prevent Bob Jones University from losing its tax-exempt status for failure to desegregate might have had something to do with an effort to court the white supremacist vote.
Hilariously, for some reason Krugman and David Brooks need to carry out this argument without referring to each other by name or even acknowledging that the other one exists..
Interestingly enough, or as Yglesias puts himself, hilariously enough if that’s to be the center of the argument, Krugman had better be packing up and going home right now. The argument of courting the “white supremacist ” vote is laughable on its face, due to the small numbers involved. Even in the day, that wasn’t going to win anybody anything substantial other than serious problems from the remainder of the electorate.
I say it again; what this amounts to, is a rabid leftist arguing against his greatest nemesis, living or dead. And losing.
And, no, I don’t mean David Brooks, Matt.