Krugman is quoted in the Weekly Standard as saying politics has been dominated by “monsters” like Rove and Cheney, the last “who saw 9/11 as an opportunity to start torturing people,” personally I suppose.

However on Krugman’s behalf you can’t say he is more insane than millions of other liberals, not all of them unknown and not a few over at the Times. But still, a twisted human being.

By grownups demented Paul means people who think they can steer huge national economies, hopefully better than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were steered.
But then neither success or failure are really that important. What matters is who holds the throttles of power.

Far be it for me, some unwashed, to poo poo on a Nobel prize winner, but if my memory is correct, he won the prize for positing the theory that protectionism is superior to free trade?

It gets better. He proved it using select data. IE he picked and chose what industries, time frames, ect. would be used in his model. He cooked the model.

Hack as a pundit, hack as an economist.

Krugman won his Nobel for describing consumer preference for variety and its effects on, among other things, concentration of populations in cities. It had nothing to do with his work at the NYTimes.

In addition, Krugman is not a protectionist and makes fun of protectionists pretty consistently in his column.

There are plenty of valid reasons for disagreeing with Krugman, but you don’t seem to have hit upon any of them.

“Demolishes” isn’t the right word. Mankiw’s rebuttal is tepid at best. Krugman is as disgustingly and blindly partisan as any leftist “hack” in the media today. They should team him up with Olbermann in a new show and call it “Hatefest.” Krugman’s comments, to which Mankiw is responding, are typical of the kind of childish slobbering one has come to expect from the editorial page of the NY Times. In any rebuttal, Krugman deserves to be beaten to a bloody pulp (rhetorically speaking).

Mankiw exhibits how you credibly criticize the cant coming from the left:

1) you grant every possible inference in their favor, interpret their evidence in the light most favorable to their position, agreeing with as much as humanly possible, but then

2) deftly, with understatement and concision, show how what remains of their argument is nevertheless wrong.

You really can’t do any more than that. If you point out that their evidence is lacking, or equivocal at best, they will accuse you of misrepresenting their position. If you show relish in pointing out their lies and hypocrisies, they will attack your basic humanity. Remember, although it is always socially-acceptable for the left to interrupt lectures, protest in costume, and scream ad hominems, any conservative who engages in only a tenth of these theatrics (like Rush, or Coulter) is accused of being the devil. Mankiw “demolished” Krugman in the only way possible.