The Coming Darkness

In a column titled “America Goes Dark,” Paul Krugman writes about the collapsing empire.

… a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.

And a nation that once prized education — that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children — is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead.

The question is, why can’t people see what we’re doing to our own country by refusing to invest in infrastructure and education? Of course, a big part of the answer is that people have been soaked in right-wing anti-government propaganda for so long they think rot is normal. But I’d like to think there are a substantial number of Americans who would support investing in infrastructure and education if someone would stand up and show some leadership in that direction.

In fact, I think that’s why a lot of people voted for Obama, but he’s gotten bogged down somehow. Maybe The System is just too big, too entrenched, for even a president to shake it.

BTW, on Right Wing News our buddy William Teach criticized Krugman’s column, and then in the comment thread wrote,

A person is only an expert as long as they are usually correct in their assumptions/predictions/etc. Krugman has been wrong time and time again, as has Obama and Co.

So I asked for a list of ten examples of Krugman being wrong, and of course they can’t come up with ten examples. One guy provided a list of Krugman’s most recent columns, but of course there was no proof that Krugman said anything wrong in those columns, just that the guy disagreed with the columns.

What’s actually come out of the experiment is that the wingnuts can’t tell the difference between opinion and fact. In other words, an opinion they agree with is the same thing as a fact in their world. I keep pushing for real-world examples, and they obviously have no idea what I mean by that.

But that’s part of the problem, I think. Apparently this crew is still insulated enough that they can live in their fantasyland, but one of these days the real world is likely to bite them in the ass. And then maybe they’ll notice what the difference is between fact and opinion.