Howard Kurtz

Wow, Howard Kurtz was erratic even when he had good editors and now at Daily Beast he is verging into total incompetence. His naive whitewash of the Tucson shooting is embarrassing and shameful.

Can he really be stupid enough to write this: "This isn't about a nearly year-old Sarah Palin map; it's about a lone nutjob who doesn't value human life"?

Apparently. The lesson here is clear: inflammatory rhetoric, while poisoning politics for those of use who think of ourselves as rational and stable, can set off the mentally ill, and it is not just the "fault" of the mentally ill. It's like the pathetic shill on TV Sunday who once again proffered the feeble NRA excuse that it's not guns that are responsible since most gun owners are adult. The problem is that a mentally unstable young man, with a documented history of disruption and borderline violence, can get an automatic weapon so easily.

It is not a sign of unity or compassion to bury our heads in the sand like Kurtz would have us do and pretend that, hey, what can you do, there's nutjobs out there? The Pima County sheriff has a much better grasp of what's going on than this useless pundit.

Update: And let's add Peter Beinart, another Daily Beast contributor, whose temporizing pseudoliberalism pretty much destroyed The New Republic to the list of white-washers.

Economist pundits

Paul Krugman is still my hero. No one tells it so consistently the way it is. I occasionally part ways with him, as on the tax cuts for the rich, where he just beat that horse to death, but he is remarkably lucid and a darn good writer.

Today's column nails the hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of the Republican members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which is now officially a joke.

Unfortunately, I may have to part ways more permanently with my other hero pundit economist, the incredibly prolific Simon Johnson, who has been so good on the too big to fail question. Johnson seems irremediably ensconced in the deficit hawk camp, as this column today evidences, whereas I continue to find the post-Keynesian view of deficits completely convincing. In any case, Johnson's voice in this issue will be lost in the chorus of orthodoxy, whereas he was a prophetic voice crying in the wilderness on the bank issue.

Update: Alas, now the leading post-Keynesian guru, Bill Mitchell, has consigned Simon to the nether world for the same offense. Underlines the importance of diversity of opinion, I guess

Charles Krauthammer

Charles Krauthammer used to be reasonably intelligent but he has not fared well in the polarized era. Maybe it has something to do with dyeing his hair.

I try not to read him in the Post, but last Friday, he did pick up quickly on Obama's "enemies" diatribe in his Univision address, which was obviously another huge political error on the president's part.

But then Krauthammer went on, much as a global warming denier, to assert that this midterm election was not about the economy:

"Democratic apologists would prefer to pretend otherwise - that it's all about the economy and the electorate's anger over its parlous condition. Nice try. The most recent CBS/New York Times poll shows that only one in 12 Americans blames the economy on Obama, and seven in 10 think the downturn is temporary. And yet, the Democratic Party is falling apart. Democrats are four points behind among women, a constituency Democrats had owned for decades; a staggering 20 points behind among independents (a 28-point swing since 2008); and 20 points behind among college graduates, giving lie to the ubiquitous liberal conceit that the Republican surge is the revenge of lumpen know-nothings."

He ignores the obvious points that even if you don't blame the economy on Obama and even if you think the downturn is temporary (what isn't in life?), you still want the administration to do something about it. Once again, this pundit, well beyond his sell-by date, lets ideology blind him to the facts.

The tip-off is his concluding throwaway prediction: Rangers in seven.