Economist turned knee-jerk liberal columnist Paul Krugman savaged his two favorite enemies, Fox News and the Tea Party, in Monday's "Fear and Favor [1]."
Krugman first worked in a snide reference to "Birth of a Nation," a notoriously racist early film production from 1915 by D.W. Griffith, perhaps playing into liberal smears of the Tea Party as racist.
He then latched on to another evidence-free conspiracy, making a false connection between political analyst David Frum's criticism of Fox News and his resignation (Krugman calls it a firing) from the American Enterprise Institute, a right-of-center think tank. Krugman finished that anecdote with an Orwellian reference, ironic considering Krugman's columns are indistinguishable these days from a "two minutes hate [2]."
A note to Tea Party activists: This is not the movie you think it is. You probably imagine that you're starring in "The Birth of a Nation," but you're actually just extras in a remake of "Citizen Kane."
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Something else has changed, too: increasingly, Fox News has gone from merely supporting Republican candidates to anointing them. Christine O'Donnell, the upset winner of the G.O.P. Senate primary in Delaware, is often described as the Tea Party candidate, but given the publicity the network gave her, she could equally well be described as the Fox News candidate. Anyway, there's not much difference: the Tea Party movement owes much of its rise to enthusiastic Fox coverage.
As the Republican political analyst David Frum put it, "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox" - literally, in the case of all those non-Mitt-Romney presidential hopefuls. It was days later, by the way, that Mr. Frum was fired by the American Enterprise Institute. Conservatives criticize Fox at their peril.
So the Ministry of Propaganda has, in effect, seized control of the Politburo. What are the implications?
Tell us, Paul!
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