Krugman Is Right (As Usual)

Paul Krugman's recent op-ed, "Gore Derangement Syndrome," addresses the Extreme Right's outrage over Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is right on the money. The whole piece is great, but here is my favorite section:

* * * What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved. * * *

The Extreme Right's recent attacks on Gore have been nothing short of hilarious. As Krugman mentioned in his op/ed, the National Review Online suggested that the Nobel Peace Prize should have been shared with "that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance" (bin Laden apparently mentioned climate change in one of his videos, so that is enough for the Right Wing to allege that Gore is in cahoots with The EvilDoers).

But Imbecile Supreme Bill Kristol and his cohort-in-idiocy Charles Krauthammer had the funniest responses:

Conservative commentators Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer appeared on the program Fox News Sunday this morning and were eager to rain on the environmental activist and, now, Nobel laureate's parade.

"Friday, I felt a warm glow thinking this man had won the Nobel Peace Prize for bloviating about global warming," Kristol said through a snarky grin. "It's a prize given by bloviators to bloviators."

Krauthammer perhaps felt Kristol was letting the prize committee and prize winners off easy.

"Look, let's not forget what the prize is about," he admonished. "Al Gore joins the ranks of Yasser Arafat, the father of modern terrorism, Le Duc Tho, who sign a treaty on behalf of a government that two years later invaded and extinguished the country it signed that treaty with, and the most disgraceful ex-president of the United States Jimmy Carter," another undeserving winner in Krauthammer's view.

How do we know for sure that giving Al Gore the Nobel Peace Prize was the right thing to do? Because Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer thought it was the wrong thing to do. And that's enough confirmation for me, given the track record of these idiots. Indeed, Kristol has made a career out of being wrong.