Times Watch for September 3, 2003
Paul Krugman, Mad Economist
Times columnist Paul
Krugman talks to the website
Liberal Oasis
to say America has gone mad: The key thing, in terms of the state of the world
right now, is that the United States has gone mad. Lets get some return to
fiscal and environmental and general governmental sanity in this country, and
then we can talk about we manage globalization.
On those benighted
Democrats unconvinced of the danger Bush poses, Krugman says: They keep on
imagining that, Oh, you know, they have limited goals. When they make these
radical pronouncements thats just tactical and we can appease them a little bit
by giving them some of what they want. And eventually well all be able to sit
down like reasonable men and work it out. Then at a certain point you realize,
My God, weve given everything away that makes system work. Weve given away
everything we counted on. And thats basically the story of whats happened
with the Right in the United States. And its still happening.
Labor
Day No Holiday for Bush-Bashers
David Sanger accentuates the negative in his
Tuesday story on Bushs Labor Day speech, Bush Defends Tax Cuts and Announces
Jobs Post. As Slate magazines liberal-leaning Eric Umansky says in his
Todays Papers column: David Sanger, perhaps ticked off he had to work on
Labor Day, wallops Bush.
Sanger comes out snarling:
Since the last time President Bush addressed a Labor Day picnic-with
carpenters in Pennsylvania-the economy has lost 700,000 jobs, most of them in
manufacturing. So by the time Mr. Bush arrived at a rain-drenched field today to
talk to highway construction workers, he faced what some of his supporters
acknowledge is a far more complex political task than he did a year ago:
convincing layoff-weary voters in crucial states like this one, which he carried
by a mere three percentage points in 2000, that his tax cuts had saved workers
from a worse fate and that 14 months before the next presidential election he
has a strategy to bring back the kind of jobs that many economists say are
leaving the United States for good. Things are getting better, Mr. Bush told a
subdued crowd here.
For the rest of Sangers piece on Bushs Labor Day
speech,
click here.
Damned
If You Do
Sometimes it seems like providing security in Iraq
is a damned if you do, damned if you dont job for U.S. troops. And the Times
will be damned if they make the job any easier.
Here are Times reporters
Neil MacFarquhar and Richard Oppel from
their Saturday piece on the car bombing in Najaf that killed a Shiite
cleric, Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim: There were no American forces in the
vicinity, as senior Najaf clergymen had made it clear they did not want troops
patrolling anywhere near the holy site.
And heres MacFarquhar
writing in Thousands
at Burial of Slain Cleric, his dispatch on Wednesday: Mourners chanted
condemnations of the United States military for failing to provide security,
with one participant pointing out that the looting the American forces failed to
stop in April allowed all sorts of munitions to flow out of military stockpiles.
The police say they believe that the explosives used in the attack were old army
mortars and other similar hardware.
MacFarquhar doesnt
mention his reporting from four days ago, in which clergymen refused security
from U.S. troops, instead letting the latest Iraqi accusation stand as another
example of alleged U.S. incompetence.