But what you will see, regularly, is Paul Krugman criticizing unnamed people who happen to have made the exact same argument as David Brooks. (Or Thomas Friedman.)

Last week, Krugman wrote a column attacking so-called "centrists" who defend the Paul Ryan budget plan and criticize the president for being too "partisan" about it. The column came a few days after Mr. Brooks defended the Paul Ryan budget plan and criticized the president for being too "partisan" about it.

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For example: David Brooks, whose most annoying schtick is to write something that sounds reasonable until you realize what he's actually arguing (like, for example, "people often don't intervene when they see something horrible happening" is a very interesting point, unless your real point is that this is because of hippies and the terrible '60s), wrote earlier this month that American income equality is overstated, and that the real income gap worth examining is that between the college-educated upper middle class, who are doing well, and those with only a high school education, who have been left behind by our post-industrial economy. (In this case Brooks' "actual" point is that "Blue inequality" is merely the resentment of educated liberals who hate success while "Red states" have the real authentic American inequality.)

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But Frum goes even further than that in his post "Were Our Enemies Right?" Frum suggests that the entire conservative movement has fundamentally misunderstood how to manage the economy, and he compares it to how the "left" failed to understand the true nature of Soviet Communism.

First he quotes a famous question posed by Susan Sontag in 1982:

Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?

Then he offers his Krugman parallel:

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"The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending, since that will depress the economy even further," he wrote in the Times Sunday, with a sentiment echoed during his Sunday show appearance.

Before party leaders Sunday night announced a debt ceiling deal that is "all spending cuts," as House Speaker John Boehner described it, Krugman offered a grim analysis. He predicted that unemployment would rise again to nine percent again and that America will experience economic consequences comparable to Japan's "lost decade," (when an economic program of frugality hindered recovery from an asset bubble collapse in the 1990s).

Krugman criticized the debt negotiations:

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Maybe it's the paradoxical tone of Wallace-Wells' eloquently articulated elegy for liberalism -- Krugman's got a lot going for him, after all -- Nobel Prize, prominent public intellectual bully pulpit, hugely trafficked blog -- but somehow Wallace-Wells uses the profile to tell a story of defeat: of Obama's failure to deliver true progressive change, and Krugman's failure to get Washington to listen to his liberal "purism."

For close followers of the political and economic scene, Krugman's Obama critique is all too familiar: The stimulus should have been bigger, healthcare reform should have included a public option, the banks should have been nationalized, et cetera. Krugman staked out his position before Inauguration Day -- Obama is insufficiently aggressive and ambitious -- and he has stuck to it ever since. But for those on the left who are feeling a sense of outright betrayal, Krugman delivers a bit of a surprise:

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Marc Lynch likes Obama's Egypt policy so far:

I think the instant analysis badly misread his comments and the thrust of the administration's policy. His speech was actually pretty good, as is the rapidly evolving American policy. The administration, it seems to me, is trying hard to protect the protestors from an escalation of violent repression, giving Mubarak just enough rope to hang himself, while carefully preparing to ensure that a transition will go in the direction of a more democratic successor.

Tony Karon thinks that Obama is realistically suspicious of Egyptian democracy:

Democracy movements are attractive to Washington when they target a regime such as Iran's, but in allied autocracies, they're a problem. There's no way for Egypt to be democratic and exclude the Islamists from political participation. The same is true for most other parts of the Arab world

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China's reasons for the move are clear: After successfully emerging from the global recession through the combined powers of a huge stimulus and an artificially weak currency, China's economy has been growing like gangbusters, and inflation is on the rise. U.S. and European central bankers would likely do the exact same thing if faced with a similar inflationary push. But China is also determined to be aggressively proactive in avoiding a potential crash. In recent months, China's leaders taken strong measures to quash the kind of disastrous property bubble that blew up the U.S. economy

From Bloomberg:

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But he is more like Captain Ahab, leading his diminishing crew of followers on a doomed quest in search of the great white stimulus package that will redeem us or destroy us, but either way will finally silence all those doubting voices.

Diminishing? Do we have any evidence of this? Are his pageviews going down? Are his blogs and columns any less popular? I can't quantify this, but it seems to me that Krugman's musings are usually ranked very high on the New York Times' list of "most-emailed" or "most-viewed" stories. Certainly the National Review would love to believe that Krugman is in decline, but simply asserting that it is so doesn't wash.

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It's not the differences in policy prescriptions that I object to: It's Krugman's cavalier belief that a war -- a total, full-on war, with all its attendant fiscal spending -- is what saved the American economy from the Great Depression.

It's Krugman's disturbing, nihilist inference, which he makes over and over, tucked away in his articles, but always there, like a nasty aftertaste of a drink laced with a roofie: So maybe another total war might not be such a bad idea now, so as to get us out of this new Global Depression.

That is what I object to in Paul Krugman: He seems to be offering up another war as the only way to fix the economy.

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I was surprised, but I shouldn't have been, by Obama's kind words for his predecessor, George W. Bush. I didn't expect Obama to excoriate the neocon chickenhawks who lied us into war, but I wasn't entirely prepared for his praising the president who got us into this mess. But he did:

It's well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset. Yet no one could doubt President Bush's support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security. As I have said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it.

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But even better, if you go back and read that post, you will find Krugman digging up a Morgan Stanley analysis of the housing market dating back to 2006 calmly dismissing any chance of "a much-feared decline in prices on a nationwide basis." Among those who had been warning of a housing bubble: Paul Krugman.

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Amanpour claimed her role at "This Week" on Sunday, replacing George Stephanopoulos on the show that competes with NBC's "Meet the Press," CBS' "Face the Nation" and "Fox News Sunday."

She appeared comfortable and aggressively inquisitive in her new position.

Guests on her first broadcast were Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Both interviews were pretaped -- a double departure from the usual live nature of the Sunday shows.

But mostly the hour format stuck closely to the past.

The second half consisted of the traditional round-table analysis by a trio of familiar faces: journalist George Will, political strategist Donna Brazile and economist Paul Krugman, along with Pakistani journalist and Taliban expert Ahmed Rashid, from Madrid.

"This Week" continues to originate from Washington's Newseum, but the show is newly billed as "from all across our world to the heart of our nation's capital."

"Having witnessed firsthand the global challenges and opportunities that America faces every day, I'm also eager to open a window on the world and cut through those classified issues that we all confront," Amanpour said at the top of the broadcast.

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Then add the celebrity cameos required by all zany comedies these days: Say, Meredith Vieira, Lars Ulrich, Paul Krugman. Wait -- hello? I must have had too many myself; for a second I thought you said "Paul Krugman." No, it's true. The Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist appears in writer-director Nicholas Stoller's dudealicious comedy, conversing with vomit-streaked talent agent Aaron Green (Jonah Hill) in the green room of the "Today" show. "My dad really loves your shit," Aaron assures him.

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Even though Obama administration economists probably agree with Krugman that what the U.S. economy needs most right now, as it faces high unemployment, excess capacity, and perilously low inflation, is more stimulus, "they know that such a plan would have no chance of getting through a Congress that has been spooked by the deficit hawks."

I'm sure that fear of deficits motivates some members of Congress. But as Krugman well knows, the Republican party fears a much scarier nightmare than red ink. Republicans are afraid of effective government. The worst thing that could happen for the Republican party is evidence that activist government works; that problems can be solved.

And it's not an imaginary threat. It's real.

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"One of these marquee columnists is right, and the other isn't," writes Hoyt, "and The Times owes its readers an explanation."

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Sorkin, the boy-wonder who dazzled the publishing world with his bathroom-break-by-bathroom-break account of the financial crisis, "Too Big To Fail," touched things off by asserting in a column on Tuesday that Krugman and economist Nouriel Roubini had both "declared that we should follow the example of the Swedes by nationalizing the entire banking system. "

Italics mine.

Krugman immediately sent Sorkin a white glove and offered him his choice of weapons for a duel in front of the New York Stock Exchange. No wait, that's wrong. He demanded an apology in his blog. "I certainly never said anything like that," he wrote.

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I thought, hmmm, that doesn't sound like the Paul Krugman I am familiar with. So I read the piece, and I'm glad I did, because now I have something handy to recommend to anyone who wants a cogent, forceful introduction to the economics of climate change.

But as for the charge that Krugman understates the potential consequences of doing nothing? I'm not sure that will wash. After all, the second sentence of the piece is: "If we continue with business as usual, they say, we are facing a rise in global temperatures that will be little short of apocalyptic."

Other excerpts:

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Fujita, who played his collegiate ball at U.C. Berkeley, told the New York Times last month that he gets some teasing in the locker room for the progressive politics of his alma mater's town, but that's cool.

"There is a certain stigma that comes with being from Berkeley," he said. "And I'm proud of that stigma."

Way to stand up, Scott! Berkeley salutes you. But now let's turn to Paul Krugman, who mentions Berkeley in the course of being interviewed by Larissa MacFarquhar for a lengthy profile in the March 1 edition of the New Yorker.

"The book tour for 'The Great Unravelling' was like revival meetings, because so few people were speaking out then," Krugman says. "There was a great event -- it was in Berkeley, which devalues it a bit -- but there was this event with a joint appearance by Al Franken, Kevin Phillips, and me, with three thousand people in the audience, and when we walked onstage we got a standing ovation. That would have been 2004."

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Krugman doesn't suffer fools gladly, and there are a lot of fools on the Senate Banking and Finance Committee. It would be a match made in heaven. No more cautious equivocation, a la Geithner or Bernanke. No more quisling accommodation to Wall Street. Paul Krugman would take seriously the Fed's responsibility to address unemployment, and would do everything in his power to push progressive goals.

Of course, that's supposing he ever got past his confirmation hearing, which is a prospect that even he calls "crazy." For a decade, Paul Krugman has been a unrepentant partisan warrior. He's said many many very hurtful things about Republicans over the years. Nominating him would guarantee a Republican filibuster that might even garner a few Democratic votes -- because Krugman is considerably to left of a significant number of Democratic senators.

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As you read the economic news, it will be important to remember, first of all, that blips -- occasional good numbers, signifying nothing -- are common even when the economy is, in fact, mired in a prolonged slump ... the odds are that any good economic news you hear in the near future will be a blip, not an indication that we're on our way to sustained recovery.

Krugman's fear is that politicians will take too much heart from a few good indicators, and turn their attention, too soon, to self-defeating efforts  aimed at deficit reduction, instead of continuing to forcefully address mass unemployment with additional economic stimulus measures. To do so would repeat the mistakes of 1937, a point that Krugman and Obama economic advisor Christina Romer have been making since the beginning of the year.

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