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| Home Front: Politix |
| Gore Derangement Syndrome |
| 2007-10-15 |
| Perusing the Times so you don't have to. By PAUL KRUGMAN On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal’s editors couldn’t even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore’s name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more. And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with “that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance.” You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change — therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists. What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane? Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration. And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme. The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved. But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening. Consider the policy implications of taking climate change seriously. “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said F.D.R. “We know now that it is bad economics.” These words apply perfectly to climate change. It’s in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater. The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common good is to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right thing. In this case, people have to be given a reason to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on emissions or by requiring that they buy emission permits, which has pretty much the same effects as an emissions tax. We know that such policies work: the U.S. “cap and trade” system of emission permits on sulfur dioxide has been highly successful at reducing acid rain. Climate change is, however, harder to deal with than acid rain, because the causes are global. The sulfuric acid in America’s lakes mainly comes from coal burned in U.S. power plants, but the carbon dioxide in America’s air comes from coal and oil burned around the planet — and a ton of coal burned in China has the same effect on the future climate as a ton of coal burned here. So dealing with climate change not only requires new taxes or their equivalent; it also requires international negotiations in which the United States will have to give as well as get. Everything I’ve just said should be uncontroversial — but imagine the reception a Republican candidate for president would receive if he acknowledged these truths at the next debate. Today, being a good Republican means believing that taxes should always be cut, never raised. It also means believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not negotiate with them. So if science says that we have a big problem that can’t be solved with tax cuts or bombs — well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists must be slimed. For example, Investor’s Business Daily recently declared that the prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the nefarious schemes of — who else? — George Soros. Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. Gore: in his case the smear campaign has failed. He’s taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it drives them crazy. Ya gotta admit, Paul does know deranged... |
| Posted by:tu3031 |
| #8 Trying to wipe out the sting of Bush Derangement Syndrome by making up one of their own? |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-10-15 22:14 |
| #7 Gore drives the Right insane? Like how, Paul? I'd counter that Gore himself IS insane. Just ask him a question about anything as a baseline, then ask him something about George W. Bush and watch him positively seethe. Gore is a laughing stock on the right. If Paul Krugman wants to take the cackling to be a sign of insanity, I guess that's his inexpert opinion. |
| Posted by: eLarson 2007-10-15 22:10 |
| #6 It seems that in his delusions, Krugman has become afflicted and become GAL. Gore Ass Lamprey. The lunacy of people never ceases to amaze me. |
| Posted by: Silentbrick 2007-10-15 19:32 |
| #5 The asshole writes "And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme." on the same day that all media runs the headline story "Al-Qaeda In Iraq Reported Crippled" qualifies ole Krugman as Number One Most Obvious Asshole. Timing IS everything. |
| Posted by: wxjames 2007-10-15 19:24 |
| #4 Krugman, Krugman - oh yeah, the goofy putz with the scraggly beard up on twelve, right? He's an asshole. What about him? |
| Posted by: mojo 2007-10-15 16:22 |
| #3 I believe he is also a former consultant to Enron. May I propose that when any MSM columnist writes a piece like this about Al Gore --i.e., a gushing mash note tinged with BDS--that we refer to it as a "Gore-basam." |
| Posted by: Mike 2007-10-15 15:50 |
| #2 Um, no. Krugman is/was a superb economist, particularly with issues concerning world trade. The problem is, he thought his talent and experience regarding economics translated into thinking great thoughts in just about everything else. Think of him as Alec Baldwin with a PhD in economics and it begins to come together. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2007-10-15 15:25 |
| #1 Krugman is a small disguised man who couldn't teach correct economic theory (communism and socialism are so passe) that he had to turn to something only the stupid could write, the stupid could agree with and the stupid could understand - BDS. He has 18 months left on his clock. |
| Posted by: Jack is Back! 2007-10-15 14:25 |