krugman's column today is a good example of the fact that you don't actually have to reason when you're preaching to the choir. if there are protests about the taxing and spending policies of the obama administration, this is certainly entirely legitimate, as legitimate as, say, anti-war protests. that the admin is throwing a trillion dollars a week might be, as krugman thinks it is, obviously necessary or even, as he also thinks, too little. but it might also be ruinous. and that people assemble to provide some demonstration that enthusiasm is not unanimous and that people want some input into how they're being taxed and what the government is spending on what is exactly why we have things like freedom of assembly. then to just toss in the last six wacky things that right-hand pundits or politicians say to discredit the whole thing as insane is, putting it mildly, tendentious and irrelevant. i guess krugman's readers can't possibly get enough of the amazing observation that rush limbaugh runs the republican party: hearing that 80,000 times leaves them hungry to hear it again, each time gasping with delight at the witty incisiveness and originality. if people on fox approve - glen beck, say - that does not itself discredit the idea except to people who already disagree with it. if someone like krugman thinks protest or free expression is important when he agrees with what the people are saying - as, let's say, during the bush administration - he should acknowledge its legitimacy here as perfectly in keeping with our democracy, if any.

what i hate about contemporary politics is that everyone is for freedom for themselves, and restraints on the insane monsters that reject the deliverances of pure reason, i.s. the pet theories of whomever's yapping.