Columnist Cal Thomas claims in “Obama’s Cronkite moment” that Nobel Award winning, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, “who has enthusiastically supported the president’s redistributionist and stimulus plans, has bowed to the reality that they are not working.” Thomas then goes on to extrapolate “The administration is so locked into its left-wig “tax, borrow and spend” ideology that it has become like someone trapped in a cult: unable to escape and endlessly repeating the same mantra.”
WATCHDOG: Krugman has been saying over the past year that the administration needed a second Recovery Act, more stimuli. Thomas would craftily lead us to believe that Krugman thinks the Recovery Act was a mistake.
In fact, Krugman states in the cited rticle “In the case of the Obama administration, officials seem loath to admit that the original stimulus was too small. True, it was enough to limit the depth of the slump – a recent analysis by the congressional Budget Office says unemploymenet woule proably be well into double digits now without the stimulus – but it wasn’t big enough to bring unemployment down significantly.”
A contributor recently asked of an earlier Thomas article: “Is this not simple deceit plus gratuitous fear mongering which amounts to demagoguery?”
There are good conservative columnists who can make a thoughtful case, not distort in order to throw raw meat to their readers. The New Era should replace Thomas with one of them.
