Portrait of a Coward

This needs to be said.

Paul Krugman is a cowardly, evil, lying sack of dung-beetle excrement. (With apologies to other cowardly, evil, lying sacks of dung-beetle excrement whom I’ve defamed with the unfair comparison.)

On the 10th anniversary of the most horrific attack on US soil, this is what Krugman had to say:

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te (sic) atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

This man is literally consumed with hatred—not against the perpetrators of indiscriminate murder and mayhem that day—but toward the patriots who responded to those attacks with decisive determination and resolve to prevent other attacks and bring those responsible to justice.

No response to this vile calumny is necessary. Krugman’s column does not even attempt to make a coherent argument or articulate a political position. His malevolent screed does not even rise to the level of “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Rather, his words are evidence of something else altogether. Call it spiritual sickness, mental illness, moral imbecility or more precisely, the metaphysical refuse of a diseased soul. They all fit.

No response to this blood libel would be persuasive. You cannot convince a person through reason or logic to abandon positions (or hatreds) that were not arrived at by way of reason or logic in the first place. His despicable remarks deserve no response except condemnation by decent Americans on both sides of the political spectrum.

To put Krugman’s comments in proper context, it is worth recalling this: in the immediate aftermath of a bloody and brutal civil war that left over one million dead and nearly destroyed the union, Abraham Lincoln appealed to the better angels of our nature as he asked his fellow Americans on both sides to forego hatreds and divisions that make our current political disagreements look like petty schoolyard fights. Lincoln sought to heal the nation’s fresh wounds “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” On this, the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Krugman hijacks the memory of 3,000 dead and uses the hallowed ground of Ground Zero as a Porta-Potty to publicly dump on his political opponents.

I’m not surprised he disabled comments in advance “for obvious reasons.”

Cowardice and spitefulness are the obvious reasons that come to mind.

“Socialism is a modern incarnation of godlessness, the Tower of Babel built without God, not to raise earth to heaven, but to bring heaven down to earth. They hope to make a just order for themselves, but having rejected Christ, they will end by drenching the earth with blood, for blood calls to blood, and he who draws the sword will perish by the sword.”
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov