Whom The Gods Would Destroy, They First Make Bipartisan

Brad DeLong points us to a truly weird column by Clive Crook, which apparently was supposed to be a satirical take on Paul Ryan’s critics but falls completely flat. This follows on an almost equally weird piece by Ben Smith berating all those people who had the temerity to judge Ryan the great Truthteller on whether he actually, you know, told the truth.

What’s going on? Well, the Ryan phenomenon wasn’t primarily driven by the hard right, which has plenty of heroes. It was driven, instead, by “centrist”, self-righteously nonpartisan pundits who seized upon Ryan as their demonstration that see, there are honest, reasonable conservatives who must be taken seriously.

And these people have been hit really hard by Ryan’s precipitous plunge from icon to punchline, which is made much worse from their point of view by the fact that some of us warned years ago that Ryan was in fact an obvious con man.

I feel their pain.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/whom-the-gods-would-destroy-they-first-make-bipartisan/