Krugman Calls Bullshit On Liars McCain & Palin

I lost a lot of respect for Paul Krugman a long time ago, when he threw journalistic integrity to the wind and served as Hillary's personal propaganda echo chamber during the primaries, never saying anything negative about her, while never hesitating to throw any blatantly disingenuous or hypocritical attack at Obama. I have had a hard time stomaching Krugman ever since, but I must say, today he redeemed himself quite a bit, because he tore into McCain-Palin for their nonstop lying, and he really just knocked it out of the ballpark. Here's a taste:

Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, "Thanks, but no thanks" when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?

These stories have two things in common: they're all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.

[...]

I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.

He also takes it to the media, echoing something I've been pissed about for a long time, that the media seems to think they have to not do their job in order to be balanced, which makes them restrain favorable coverage of Obama where it is due, and restrain negative coverage of McCain, where it is most certainly due (like when he LIES!)...and this goes a long way to explain why this election is a lot closer than it should be, the media is trying to balance out not its coverage, but reality, and reality isn't even close to balanced in this case. Here is a little bit of what Krugman had for the media:

Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being "balanced" at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong, it reports that "some Democrats say" that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.

In the end Krugman says something that I think really needed to be considered:

And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

Anyway, DEFINITELY read the entire article, it is a good one, and I hope the MSM is really starting to get the memo on Team Liar. And if you, like me, have found yourself disappointed in Paul Krugman in the past, let this be the first step toward absolution.