“When they go low...” well, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman goes even lower. On Friday the once-respected economist, who is no stranger to classless rants, filed a blog post with the offensive title “The Sorrow and the Pity,” a ham-handed swipe of the incoming Trump administration as akin to the Nazi occupation of France.
(The Sorrow and the Pity is a 1969 documentary about how the Vichy government of France infamously collaborated with Germany during the World War II occupation.)
A lot of people in politics and the media are scrambling to normalize what just happened to us, saying that it will all be OK and we can work with Trump. No, it won’t, and no, we can’t. The next occupant of the White House will be a pathological liar with a loose grip on reality; he is already surrounding himself with racists, anti-Semites, and conspiracy theorists; his administration will be the most corrupt in America history.
Krugman blamed everyone, but saved his most withering fire for his media colleagues:
“....Every news organization that decided, for the sake of ratings, to ignore policy and barely cover Trump scandals while obsessing over Clinton emails, every reporter who, for whatever reason -- often sheer pettiness -- played up Wikileaks nonsense....then there’s the FBI: it’s quite reasonable to argue that James Comey, whether it was careerism, cowardice, or something worse, tipped the scales and may have doomed the world.
He hopes there will be a backlash “big enough to constrain Trump from destroying democracy in the next few months.”
And anyone who doesn’t -- who plays along and plays it safe -- is betraying America, and mankind.
The Times also worked the extremist angle in a seemingly unrelated story Tuesday on Pope Francis making it easier for priests to forgive abortion. Elisabetta Povoledo and Liam Stack’s report from Vatican City included the Pope’s usual pleas against what he calls hatred of immigrants and refugees. The Times concluded with this extraneous, unsubstantiated bit from a left-wing group that gets donations by smearing its conservative political opponents hate groups and extremists.
Harassment and violence against immigrants and other marginalized groups surged after Election Day in the United States, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes and domestic extremist groups.
