Because I guess I don’t hear enough Bush-bashing every day from my friends, family, co-workers, and everyone else I know, I decided to endure a bit more last night, attending a book signing at the Union Square Barnes & Noble with liberal stalwarts Al Franken and Paul Krugman.
I should be upfront: I’ve long been a fan of Franken’s, but I’ve never liked Krugman much at all. While Al has had a distinguished career in comedy for nearly 30 years and has the advantage of being from my home town, I find Krugman’s columns dry, repetitive and paranoid, although he’s by no means my least favorite Times columnist (that honor either goes to Maureen Dowd, or Frank Rich, who has written the exact same column- “here’s what the #1 movie was last week, and here’s why it proves all my notions about why Bush sucks”- every Saturday for two years).
Neither man did much to alter my impressions of him- Franken repeated a lot of lines from the book and his usual talk show appearances, except for a couple of new ones, namely “these people are lying assholes.” I get the impression that Franken wrote “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot” he was just having fun, but now he’s legitimately pissed off. More at Fox News than at Bush, but that’s understandable.
Franken’s nemesis Bill O’Reilly likes to lump Franken in with Michael Moore, just as he does with John Kerry, but that’s really inaccurate. While Franken may be a partisan Democrat with a vitriolic disposition, he’s no where near as left-wing as Moore. But if there’s a mile of sunlight between Franken and Fat Fat Fatty, there’s probably about three feet between the filmmaker and Krugman.
The Princeton professor, formerly a moderate who used to criticize the anti-globalization movement in the NYT’s pages, spent most of his remarks talking about how evil and scary the Bush Administration is, at one point alleging that everyone in every corner of the executive branch makes regular practice of lying with impunity. I talk to government people all the time for work, and while it may be true of a few, it’s laughable to suggest that all 15,000-or-so employees are all conspiring together. He also apparently believes every anti-Bush meme- discredited or not- from the past four years, and seemed to take as a given that the terror alert the other day was wholly fabricated.
All in all, Krugman seemed to not think those people (al-Qaeda) who are trying to kill us all are such a problem, as he only mentioned them once; the one he’s really afraid of is a president who may very well be out of office in five months.
As for the crowd, I’m reminded of this PJ O’Rourke line, from when he attended a Clinton speech last year:
"The members of the audience were slobs. They went to see a former President of the United States in their play-date clothes. They had almost all crossed the meridian of life. Some had sailed far beyond. But the men wore little-boy windbreakers and billow-seated wide-wale corduroys with inseams measured for Yao Ming, of the Houston Rockets. Their sweaters bore patterns that sheep might see on drugs. I counted only seven neckties, including Clinton's, the moderator's, and my own. The women all seemed to make their own jewelry. Some had donned the blowsy knits of the increasingly dowdy New Age. Others were mutton dressed as lamb."