Friday, August 05, 2016

Just so you know

Via.
Dr. Krugman writes ("No Right Turn"):

we’re finally seeing some prominent Republicans not just refusing to endorse Mr. Trump, but actually declaring their support for Mrs. Clinton. So how should she respond?
The obvious answer, you might think, is that she should keep doing what she is doing — emphasizing how unfit her rival is for office, letting her allies point out her own qualifications and continuing to advocate a moderately center-left policy agenda that is largely a continuation of President Obama’s.
But at least some commentators are calling on her to do something very different — to make a right turn, moving the Democratic agenda toward the preferences of those fleeing the sinking Republican ship. The idea, I guess, is to offer to create an American version of a European-style grand coalition of the center-left and the center-right.
I don’t think there’s much prospect that Mrs. Clinton will actually do that. But if by any chance she and those around her are tempted to take this recommendation seriously: Don’t.
Some readers are a little baffled by that third paragraph: who are those commentators urging a right turn and a "grand coalition"?

John

  is a trusted commenter Hartford 34 minutes ago

This all seems something of a straw man. Krugman doesn't specify who these "some commentators" so it's hard to know who he has in mind. Rush Limbaugh? Bill O'Reilly? As far as one can tell Clinton has actually turned slightly left in her platform which in any case was very typical Democratic center left fayre. Basically what you're going to get is Obama's pragmatic and sensible approach with a slightly leftward tilt. She has no need to make to concessions to the right nor is she likely too as Trump's campaign goes into the ditch.
No, John, it's not Limbaugh or O'Reilly. It's the Universal Mustache, Thomas L. Friedman, whose Wednesday column made exactly that demand, asking Clinton to abandon the Democratic platform (most progressive ever, as they kept telling us at the convention, and it's true!) in favor of what he calls "pro-growth" policies:
There are a lot of center-right, business Republicans today feeling orphaned by Trump. They can’t vote for him — but a lot of them still claim they can’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary, either. Clinton should be reaching out to them with a real pro-growth, start-up, deregulation, entrepreneurship agenda and give them a positive reason to vote for her.
Dr. K. isn't mentioning Friedman's name for the same reason he never mentions David Brooks's name when he needs to check some idiocy Brooks has perpetrated, because all three of them work for the New York Times and it's house policy that they never attack each other directly. But that's no reason for us not to notice it.

More on the Friedman column from me (if you haven't seen it already) at this address.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

16 comments:

  1. Hi -- I'm on my way out. Thanks for posting. I think you might want to fix the link to your previous post, though....

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  2. Friedman, Bobo, et al, always have the same solution(s).
    Remarkable!

    None of these punTWITS has offered anything new, in ages.

    And they're trying to gild the same stinky shit that got us into this mess in the first place.

    Those business people don't have much of an alternative. tRUMP not only is stupid, ignorant, narcissistic, and bigoted, but he's erratic even withing those parameters.

    Besides, I don't think nuclear wars would be good for their businesses. So, as they used to say in Brooklynese, 'Wad cherce have dey got?'

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  3. Excellent. Yeah, that's classic Friedman all right.

    In other news in the weird world of the pundit bubble, Ryan Lizza tweeted yesterday that maybe if Clinton gave Republicans a supreme court nomination then they would abandon Trump en masse. Which has to be the stupidest fucking proposed bipartisan "compromise" I have ever heard of in my life.

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  4. HRC will have progressive capital. She should spend it in office. This election? The right can come over to "us". It's why victors love spoils......

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  5. I have long held that David Brooks holds the title of Second-Stupidest Man Ever To Hold a Regular Gig at the New York Times' Op-Ed Section (Butcher's Bill Kristol is, of course, the Padishah Emperor for Life in this realm), but young Ross Douthat hath a lean and hungry look, and the Moustache of Understanding, he who selflessly gave humanity the "Friedman Unit" as a measure of time, occasionally shows, as here, that he's still a contender. Brooks had better look to his laurels.

    (I have deliberately omitted Maureen Dowd from this accounting of dumbth at the NYT because I believe that her shtick, her patented witch's brew of toxicity and trivia, is the product of malice and mendacity rather than actual dull-wittedness. Still, if she triples her alcoholic intake she could grow up to be Peggy Noonan one day.)

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  6. Some observers are making book on how many days into her administration she takes the anticipated hard right turn.

    History only repeats to those paying attention.

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  7. Although I happen to enjoy Maureen Dowd's snark (a little snarky vitriol spread over my breakfast toast every few mornings goes a long way toward aiding my digestion) and I'm rather more tolerant of David Brooks than most of the crowd here, I personally wouldn't mind seeing Tom Friedman drawn and quartered in prime time television.

    One suspects his column exists solely to flack for his books. Thus when he wrote "The World Is Flat," he used that phrase with such regularity, in so many columns, that I nearly lost my breakfast more than once.

    Then suddenly the world wasn't merely flat. It was "Hot, Flat and Crowded," and guess what started showing up in his columns? Yup.

    But what fascinates me is a 2012 book that could have been the template of the Trump campaign, entitled "That Used To Be Us." According to the book's blurb (nope, I didn't and won't read the book; life is too short to waste that much of it on Tom Friedman) "America has a huge problem. It faces four major challenges on which its future depends, and is failing to meet them...." but the book will "spell out what we need to do now to rediscover America and rise to this moment."

    In other words, we can, umm, wait for it....make America great again. And as I mentioned in a post a few days ago, it's an idea that one can posit was stolen from a cartoon character on a cereal box.

    Little wonder that, seeing the Trump campaign slide into a miasma of self-defeating and uncompromising buffoonery, Friedman is asking the other side to compromise. In effect he's begging Hillary, "Well, since Trump can't win, could you at least implement some of the programs of the people behind him?"

    One wonders what the title of his next book will be then. "Hillary Used To Be Trump?" "The Democrats are Hot and Crowded?" "Hillary Is Hot and Flat?"

    Stay tuned.

    Yours most crankily,
    The New York Crank

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  8. Shorter Friedman: It is better to beat two birds with one bush.

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  9. Good Lord. "My party isn't how I like it, so HRC should fuck the Democrats and give me what I want RIGHT NOW!!!"

    Is this not what Republicans moan about when they moan about 'entitlement'? The belief that both major political parties belong to you, and that if neither capitulate to your demands you're being persecuted?

    Jesus, Friedman. Get a grip on your fucking party and keep your fingers out of ours.

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  10. What I find interesting is that Krugman, although an HRC partisan in '08 and again during this cycle's primaries, apparently thinks the chances of her taking a right turn are at least sufficient to merit a warning against it.

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  11. Yeah, progressive economic platform. Owned by Soros, Saban, James Simon, Herbert Sandler, Donald Sussman.

    In 2003 alone, the Iraqi invasion cost 60 billion, three times the yearly budget of education.
    Not only has Clinton never apologized, she threatens to turn the screws similarly on Russia and Syria.

    Meanwhile

    "On trade, infrastructure and job creation, and, most important of all, on matters of war and peace – especially, but not only, with the Muslim world and Russia – he (Trump) is actually the more progressive of the two. This is why hardcore neocons hate him and love her."

    http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/05/could-hillary-lose/

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  12. @KenRight - yeah, if only President HRC had decided in 2003 that sanctions against Iraq were the way to go. NO ONE ELSE BUT HER could have stopped the march to war.

    As for the idea that Trump is more progressive than Clinton on anything... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

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  13. Anonymous5:45 PM

    Who are those commentators? Here's another one: Ryan Lizza, of The New Yorker.

    https://southernbeale.wordpress.com/2016/08/03/the-internet-is-full-of-bad-ideas/

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  14. Brad DeLong took notice of Yastreblyansky today, and rightly so.

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  15. @Jim, thanks for the heads up! I didn't see that.

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