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Ooops. In Which I Apologize to Jeffrey Frankel...

It is a very good line, and we should credit Jeff as its originator:

The Tenth-Ranked Quotation of 2008?: The Yale Book of Quotations seeks to fulfill a useful service: It tabulates well-known sound-bites, but tries to get the exact quote and citation right, which is rare.... The editor compiles an annual list of Top Ten Quotes of the Year.... Number 1 for example is “I can see Russia from my house,” carefully attributed to the Tina Fey parody rather than what Sarah Palin actually said. The good news is that the title line in my blogpost of July 17 was chosen as one of the top ten quotes of 2008 (tied for tenth place, it is true). The bad news is that the quote was attributed to Paul Krugman, who had used it subsequently on the Bill Mayer Show.    

The sentence is: “If there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no libertarians in financial crises.”   I had originally used it in 2007 as the first line of an article in a Cato Journal issue devoted to financial crises.  Among the others who subsequently picked up on the line were Ben Bernanke, Mark Shields, Bloomberg, WallStreetJournal.com, Brad deLong, and Tom Keene--generally with attribution, when the format permitted.... Krugman immediately set the record straight on his blog, as I knew he would...

And then Jeffrey starts meditating on a peculiar phenomenon--one best expressed, I think, by an offhand remark by a non-economist friend of mine: "I loath Paul Krugman, and the fact that he was completely totally spectacularly right about Bush and his administration doesn't make me loath him any less." Which is strange because to us Paul is a thoughtful, generous, rather shy personality. (Well, he does owe Laura d'A. Tyson a big apology...)

Jeff writes:

But there are some other, more interesting, aspects. One is an illustration of how tough is the world in which highly visible columnists like Krugman live. There are lots of Krugman-haters out there... [because] he consistently has been liberal and anti-Bush (not precisely the same thing). But the antipathy goes very deep.

The Yale/AP list was called to my attention yesterday by one Joel West.   I told him I was indebted to him for pointing out the misattribution.   But I also told him that I was sure that there had been no desire on Paul’s part to steal my line:  TV shows like Bill Maher don’t customarily allow their guests to display footnotes. But Mr.West must be one of the Krugman-haters, because his subsequent blogpost blithely accused Krugman of dishonesty. As had another Krugman-hating blogpost before that....

Ironically, of the other two soundbites that share tenth place... [one] is from the all-time champion Krugman-hater, Donald Luskin. Luskin earned the Top Ten honor when quoted as saying “Anyone who says we’re in a recession, or heading into one — especially the worst one since the Great Depression — is making up his own private definition of “`recession’”  in the Washington Post, September 14. This was, of course, after a huge fraction of economic commentators had already decided that the country was probably in recession, as turns out to have been the case...

I attribute the "phenomenon" to two factors.

First, there were an awful lot of people who knew in the summer of 2001 exactly what Paul Krugman knew, and I knew--that George W. Bush was a horrible president, intellectually lazy, incurious, suspicious and fearful of expertise, yet convinced that it was his job to be the "decider" and to make decisions based on inadequate information and then never to revisit them--for that would be a sign of "weakness." But they didn't say what they knew. And know they feel very guilty. And one way the guilt works itself out is by denigrating those--like Paul Krugman, like Ron Suskind, like Philippe Sands--who were brave enough to say that the emperor was buck-naked at the time.

Second, the right-wing slime machine worked spectacularly well in the 1990s.. And the slimers continued into the 2000s. And a bunch of other people said: "Hey, if it worked for Rush Limbaugh, it can work for me." And so you got the first wave of Krugman-haters--the Mickey Kauses, the Andrew Sullivans, the Donald Luskins--and from then on it was monkey-see monkey-do.

What to do going forward is unclear. It is certainly the case that in a good world nobody who was not denouncing Bush by the end of 2003 would have any place in American politics or in our public sphere of discourse--to have been so spectacularly wrong or so spectacularly cowardly or both tells us something about their judgment and honesty, and there are lots of politicians and commentators of good judgment and honesty out there to listen to, who should have the available slots...

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