Paul Krugman today:

"In a way, it was easy to take stands during the Bush years: the Bushies and their allies in Congress were so determined to move the nation in the wrong direction that one could, with a clear conscience, oppose all the administration’s initiatives."

To me this is the clearest explanation cum confession offered by an ostensibly thoughtful lefty about where the heck their common sense and intellectual integrity went during the past eight years. They left them behind "with a clear conscience," in the name of morally pure opposition.

Krugman is not an idiot. And yet anyone from quick-thinking geniuses to nose-picking morons knew exactly what Krugman's opinion was going to be about any issue for the past eight years - his opinion was the opposite of whatever the Bush administration supported. Krugman substituted a reliably pure strain of reactionism for thoughtful commentary and bleated it with all the gusto of an agitated sheep. Only now that scary Republicans do not inhabit the land's highest offices does he feel free again to flex his long neglected thinking parts.

Without getting into a whole "the media is biased" diatribe, this is the problem when media classes turn into left-right cliques. Krugman spent the last eight years in blind, unthinking opposition, and probably made himself more popular because of it. The lefties didn't want to hear careful thought about a Republican administration. They wanted their smart people to give them smart sounding justifications for their automatic opposition to everything that administration attempted. Krugman more than happily danced to that tune. The fact that this schtick works just as well for right-leaning pundits doesn't change the basic point - it's a fundamentally anti-intellectual approach to punditry. Rather than using reason to determine one's opinion, the opinion comes first and reason is used simply to justify it after the fact.

Now that the need for automatic rejection of an administration's efforts has passed, we're actually getting some punditry that doesn't start with a pre-determined conclusion. As an unintended consequence Paul Krugman is actually starting to become interesting again, and it's kind of amusing that this is something he himself realizes and admits, albeit not in quite those terms.

Don't get me wrong - he's still not right. He advocates the same collection of warmed over late 20th century liberalism as any of the other conventional lefty pundits. But at least now he feels like he has to explain it. And that makes a striking difference in his commentary.

I'll come back and do a proper take down of his bad opinions later. But for now I offer a simple congratulations and welcome back to a Man of the Left. You are once again becoming readable to people who don't necessarily share your conclusions, and that's an accomplishment I didn't think you had left in you.

Cross-posted at Bogus Gold. Comments welcome.