Sparks flew when MSNBC host Joe Scarborough matched up against his new nemesis, Times columnist Paul Krugman, on Monday's edition of Charlie Rose. They have a little history, engaging in testy debate on Scarborough's "Morning Joe" back on January 28, and that carried into Monday night's face-off on debt and the economy, in which Scarborough did not appreciate Krugman hassling him with his sighs.
Noel Sheppard documented some of the meatiest back and forth [1] at NewsBusters under the totally accurate headline "Krugman: Quoting What I Said in the Past Is an Ad Hominem Attack."
JOE SCARBOROUGH: The thing is, though, we don't know, as Bob Ruben says, you never know when a bond crisis is going to come. It's not like we're going to get a warning. You're going to wake up one day and suddenly there's going to be a crisis. When is that going to happen? I don't know.
PAUL KRUGMAN: All kinds of things can happen, right?
SCARBOROUGH: What do you mean all kinds of things? Paul, again, you've been predicting this for 20 years.
KRUGMAN: You know, that's such a tired argument. You go and search for quotes and stuff I said once upon a time instead of dealing with the issue.
SCARBOROUGH: It’s not once upon a time. We’re talking about you said this for fifteen years. And so then you woke up one day and said, “I was wrong.”
KRUGMAN: No.
SCARBOROUGH: You said we needed to create a housing bubble to replace the NASDAQ bubble.
KRUGMAN: Come on, that’s a, you know that I was joking when I said that. Come on.
SCARBOROUGH: You were joking?
KRUGMAN: Yes, yes of course. This is so disappointing.
SCARBOROUGH: It is disappointing.
KRUGMAN: So disappointing. Is all you can do is ad hominem and say, “Oh, you said this” and you were, pull out the…
SCARBOROUGH: Well, anybody that knows me knows I don't engage in ad hominem attacks.
KRUGMAN: That's what you’re doing right now. That’s awful.
SCARBOROUGH: Actually, I'm quoting back what you say.
KRUGMAN: We're trying to have a serious discussion here.
SCARBOROUGH: Well then don’t accuse me of ad hominem attacks.
Near the end, Scarborough got annoyed with Krugman interrupting his point on the history of Social Security with a sotto voce "Wow," and reacted (see clip) by comparing Krugman to another infamous liberal "sigher" – Al Gore!
SCARBOROUGH: You know what? If you could just stop from saying ‘Wow’ and being childish.
KRUGMAN: I’m sorry. I've written about this so many times, and it's just-
SCARBOROUGH: Let me just finish a point Paul.
KRUGMAN: I'm sorry, that was an involuntary reaction.
SCARBOROUGH: You and Al Gore really need to talk about it because, again, this is a real problem. If people don't agree with you 100 percent of the time – you talk about ad hominem attacks, you always feel like you have to take the cheap shot, so if I could just finish-
KRUGMAN: Go ahead.
SCARBOROUGH: -I'd listen to you.
The self-regarding Krugman sensed he'd come off worse after the taping and pre-emptively made excuses for himself on his nytimes.com [2] blog Monday afternoon. How dare Scarborough cite his previous work!
Well, we’ll see how it comes out after editing, but I feel that I just had my Denver debate moment: I was tired, cranky, and unready for the blizzard of misleading factoids and diversionary stuff (In 1997 you said that the aging population was a big problem! When Social Security was founded life expectancy was only 62!) Oh, and I wasn’t prepared for Joe Scarborough’s slipperiness about what he actually advocates (he’s for more spending in the near term? Who knew?)