Krugman ought to take up the outrageous vitriolic Obama supporting interpretation with his own paper's Hillary endorsing editorial board. This from the morning after the NH primary:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/09/opinion/09wed1.html?scp=1&sq=unite+really+this&st=nyt

Mrs. Clinton ran an angry campaign in New Hampshire, and polls showed that voters noticed. She won narrowly, but came perilously close to injecting racial tension into what should have been — and still should be — an uplifting contest between the first major woman candidate and the first major African-American candidate.

In the days before the voting, Mrs. Clinton and her team were so intent on talking about how big a change a woman president would be — and it surely would — that some of her surrogates even suggested that it would be a more valuable change than an African-American president. Mrs. Clinton managed to energize the women’s vote in New Hampshire to win the contest, but the Democratic Party should be celebrating its full diversity, a refreshing and notable difference from the field of Republican contenders.

In Mrs. Clinton’s zeal to make the case that experience (hers) is more important than inspirational leadership (Mr. Obama’s), she made some peculiar comments about the relative importance of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson to the civil rights cause. She complimented Dr. King’s soaring rhetoric, but said: “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ... It took a president to get it done. ”

Why Mrs. Clinton would compare herself to Mr. Johnson, who escalated the war in Vietnam into a generational disaster, was baffling enough. It was hard to escape the distasteful implication that a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change. She pulled herself back from the brink by later talking about the mistreatment and danger Dr. King faced. Former President Bill Clinton, who seems to forget he is not the one running, hurled himself over the edge on Monday with a bizarre and rambling attack on Mr. Obama.

Mr. Clinton has generally been a statesman as ex-president, and keeping up this sort of behavior will undermine his credibility and ability to do more good.

We understand, and usually admire, Mrs. Clinton’s determination. Allowing her team’s wearyingly familiar strong-arm instincts to take over would be damaging for the Democrats in the fall, no matter who gets the nomination. Polls in Iowa and New Hampshire show that Democratic voters liked all of their candidates — they simply chose one. It would be a mistake for a politician whose unfavorable ratings across the nation have long been stuck in the 40 percent range to erase that good feeling about her party.

Truth is, Krugman's column jumped the shark during Bush's second term and has solidly commenced its death spiral during the primaries. I will not defend him against the right again, and don't feel it necessary to. There are plenty of progressive economists that are not hacks given to deception that I wouldn't be embarassed to defend. Professor Krugman is quite simply not trustworthy. He has bent over backwards to link this unsubstantiated charge against Obama to Bush, which is a ridiculous stretch. He is wrong about health care (http://sentineleffect.wordpress.com/2007/12/01/health-mandates-a-talk-with-obama-health-advisor-david-cutler/, http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/2/4/24033/97081/188/449344), penned a column about health care in which he promoted misleading statistics that he knows are misleading (advancing the idea that taxpayer costs = total costs, i.e. social costs by omission), was wrong about economic stimulus, (http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/01/stimulus-packag.html), did not re-raise these same, purportedly sincere, objections when Clinton ended up aping Obama's stimulus package, and, worst of all, has steadfastly ignored Hillary's right wing talking points campaign against Obama's progressive taxation plans,(http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/02/a_clinton_mailer_in_arizona.php), rhetoric that would undermine her own case were she to ever to push for it as President (i.e. the exact argument Krugman has so stridently made against Obama on health care mandates).

If there is anyone who is pumping vitriol into this Democratic Primary, and doing so with reckless abandon in a way that is unbecoming to him, and counterproductive to the ends he ostensibly backs, it is one Paul Krugman. Hack extraordinaire.

that cythera45 isn't just some Republican operative that has multiple pseudonyms, some outrageously anti-Hillary, some outrageously anti-Obama (that one in fact), and that has so many folks falling for it, reacting to it, and becoming even more strident along the way. As an Obama supporter, I see and record the anti-Obama stuff better, and probably miss some of the anti-Hillary stuff, but not so much that it doesn't exist.

Point being tensions are now elevated and we have gotten ourselves in the position where we will be easier to manipulate, (if we aren't already), by people in whose interest it is that we ratchet up the acrimony. That's a problem whose solution I don't have an answer to. Because if you listen to Krugman, (who, in spite of this conciliatory post, I still think is a hack), and compare him to Frank Rich, you have two Democrats that are highly respected by Democrats but couldn't more forcefully or stridently disagree than they do in their last two columns respectively. What's to become of the Democratic Party in August?

Indeed, as the man says, I fear civil war, especially as we seem to be reacting like lemmings to the worst on each side, as described by pseudonyms that very nearly could not even belong to that side. Joan Walsh even cited these ('Obama supporters' posting letters) in her column! Not good.

And we know what that means; now the REAL fun begins...