Grasping Reality with Both Hands: An Open Letter to Patricia Cohen of the New York Times

Personally, Brad, we both know that there's only one direction whence intellectually responsible criticism of the Geithner plan -- the Obama plan -- comes, and that's from Paul Krugman, James Galbraith, and others making substantially similar points. However, they don't count as serious commenters about whom I can write a story for my employer: they're well known to be attacking the plan from the left, not from the right, and they're all DFHs too -- not one of them supported the Iraqi war.

My problem is that I need to write articles about GOP opposition to this plan, and after the shambles that become of the GOP "alternative" budget, I can't very well go to congressional Republicans to get my story. On the other hand, on the far right economic wing of the GOP there are organized groups trying to expand the Overton window by casting FDR as the cause, not the cure, of the Great Depression. Since they're sufficiently well funded to hold a "conference" intended solely to persuade callow and impressionable reporters and pundits to include their agit-prop in future articles.

Clearly, these criticisms of the Geithner plan are serious, since some of the people at the conference are well known to be GOP operatives. So, I could persuade by bosses that this was a legitimate story, and I could achieve my goal of a front-page story. Of course, I wrote the article so that anyone who already knows that this CFR conference was full of mountebanks and charlatans would understand that I thought so, too. But, if I came out and said it -- or if I even allowed enough facts into the article so more than a small minority of readers would understand the truth -- my employers wouldn't have published the article.

I'm sure you know all this already -- only people as naive as Paul Krugman don't understand how the business works.

Posted by: Patricia Cohen (NOT!) | April 05, 2009 at 07:37 AM

... they they fight you, and then you win, according to Gandhi. He missed a step: going batshit insane. Perhaps that's part of the "fighting you" bit.

They are updating the method, as the ending is still wrong.

I guess I see the emergence of Amity Schlaes as pretty much the bellwether of insanity. Agitprop at it's finest. What's fascinating is that the rich really feel that they would be better off returning us to the 1920s. As such it's clear that their motivation is not so much "money" (which they are not short of even now) but "power."