IDLE CHATTER

I am warming to Paul Krugman.  His blog posts lately have been really fine piece of polemical snark.  Krugman is very smart, and his politics are progressive Democratic, which is to say, just about the best one can realistically hope for at the present time.  He is, of course, an enabler of capitalism, but if you refuse to take seriously anyone whose heart does not belong, as mine does, to Karl Marx, then you are condemned, in the immortal words of Callicles, to "whisper in a corner with a few boys" [and girls, but that is of course not what Callicles said, he being a fifth century B. C. Athenian.]  I mean, his politics are not any different from those of Jon Stewart, who is a worthy heir to the great tradition of Jonathan Swift.

Krugman's taste in music is deplorable, to be sure, and he does tend to get a little whiny about the fact that, like Rodney Dangerfield, he don't get no respect from the powers that be, despite having been right [as he repeatedly tells us] about the consequences of deficit spending in a time of near zero interest rates.  Nevertheless, these are difficult times, and we must take such comfort as we can find.