What Krugman says

I love Paul Krugman. He is one of the shining lights of the lefty pundit class. But unlike most of his brethren, he operates from Princeton, safely insulated from the ever present conventional wisdom of Washington D.C. For that reason, Krugman can say things that would get your average DC columnist tossed from the cocktail party circuit. Simply put, he does not care about conventional wisdom. He cares about facts. Yesterday’s column is a perfect example (hat tip to mparent7777).

Now that the Democrats are favored to capture at least one house of Congress, many people are urging them to walk and talk softly if they win. I hope the Democrats don’t follow this advice.

What the make-nice crowd wants most of all is for the Democrats to forswear any investigations into the origins of the Iraq war and the cronyism and corruption that undermined it. But it’s very much in the national interest to find out what led to the greatest strategic blunder in American history, so that it won’t happen again.

What’s more, the public wants to know. A large majority of Americans believe both that invading Iraq was a mistake, and that the Bush administration deliberately misled us into war. And according to the Newsweek poll, 58 percent of Americans believe that investigating contracting in Iraq isn’t just a good idea, but a high priority; 52 percent believe the same about investigating the origins of the war.

Why, then, should the Democrats hold back? Because, we’re told, the country needs less divisiveness. And I, too, would like to see a return to kinder, gentler politics. But that’s not something Democrats can achieve with a group hug and a chorus of “Kumbaya.”

[Snip]

The truth is that we won’t get a return to bipartisanship until or unless the G.O.P. decides that polarization doesn’t work as a political strategy. The last great era of bipartisanship began after the 1948 election, when Republicans, shocked by Harry Truman’s victory, decided to stop trying to undo the New Deal. And that example suggests that the best thing the Democrats can do, not just for their party and their country, but for the cause of bipartisanship, is what Truman did: stand up strongly for their principles.

Absolutely – go read the whole thing. If and when the good guys take back the House, they should give no quarter and show no mercy. We should go for the jugular and rebrand the current Republican leadership for what it is: corrupt, incompetent, and lacking compassion. Investigate Katrina, Iraq, and Cheney’s energy policy. Pass a minimum wage hike, lobby reform, and kill the oil company giveaways. Then watch the conservatives figure out how to vote against any of it. That would be good fun, no? What we do not want to do is fold for the sake of appearances. Too many times have the Democrats extended the olive branch only to have some Republican pitbull bite it off. When the majority party equates dissent with treason or questions the patriotism of war heroes for political expediency, fuck comity and the calls for bi-partisan civility. When Newt Gingrich strode the Capitol like a colossus, he devised a party strategy to demonize Democrats and liberals by constantly associating us and our ideas with words like sick, traitorous, decrepit, vile, weak, perverted, etc. – you get the general idea. That is right wing civility. It’s time we stand up and force them to change.