Paul Krugman and other mainstream writers get it entirely wrong

Admittedly, it is not such a huge surprise that Paul Krugman made a mistake in his New York Times column.

But this one was so flagrant that it deserves some attention. Newt Gingrich, in discussing the political fallout of Obamacare passing, said that the Democrats "will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years" by passing his Great Society legislation. The Washington Post, the source of the quotation, later made a point of writing that Gingrich was referring to the Great Society.

But Krugman -- and a host of others in the MSM -- took the remark to mean Gingrich was referring to civil rights legislaion. The Powerline blog notes one of the reasons that logic is absurb, commenting, "If Krugman knew anything about history, he would know that his fabrication made no sense, since Republicans supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act more heavily than Democrats. But Krugman is both too ignorant to be aware of that well-known fact, and too lazy to look it up. To all appearances, he hasn't spent more than 30 minutes on a column in years."

The Times even issued a correction. Of course, by that point, it had been picked up on many blogs that Gingrich was trying to divide on the basis of race. Which, it turns out, Krugman and the others were guilty of.