I Am John Galt (10 page)

What did it feel like? Everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame. You tell yourself that any publicity is good publicity in our celebrity-driven culture. But no one wants what my family and I went through: week after week in which I was accused, over and over again on the Internet by the hate-filled leftist blogging community, of having committed the kind of felony associated with psychopaths. By November, the affair had become such a cause célèbre it had even been chronicled in the
New Yorker
.
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The worst parts were the death threats aimed at my wife and daughter.

Here again I felt I was living out scenes from
The Fountainhead
. Ellsworth Toohey deliberately used his position in the media to ruin the reputation of Howard Roark, who represented in Toohey's mind the primal spirit of individualism to which his own philosophy of collectivism was fundamentally opposed. I wish I could say anything so cosmic was at work in Krugman's attempt to destroy me. Sure, a clash of philosophies was involved. But for Krugman I doubt that had much to do with it; I was marked for destruction simply because I'd gotten in his way, and from his narcissistic point of view as a wannabe “psychohistorian” whose “secret fantasy” was to control the galaxy, that was enough.

However, unlike what happened to Howard Roark after one of Toohey's smear campaigns, I didn't have to go work in a granite quarry. My career survived Krugman's attack. And my Krugman Truth Squad stayed on the job, and moved on to achieve several decisive victories against Krugman.

The Errors of His Ways

In addition to exposing Krugman's lies on my blog and in the Krugman Truth Squad column, I pelted the
New York Times
with requests for formal corrections—and was consistently rebuffed or ignored. That was to change dramatically. But at first I was surprised, since the
Times
has a reputation for absurd punctiliousness when it comes to corrections—setting the record straight concerning the slightest details, sometimes months or years after the error was originally run.

But I learned that the
Times
editorial page is managed entirely separately from the rest of the paper. It reports to the publisher, not to the executive editor. At that time it had no formal corrections policy whatsoever, except that corrections were at the discretion of the opinion writer; so human nature being what it is, there were hardly ever any corrections at all. I set about to change that—and I did.

Again, this isn't the way Ayn Rand's heroes dealt with her villains; they mostly ignored them. But if it's a value to you to take on the villains in the real world, and you're willing to pay the price, then this story proves you can do it.

I got my break when the Jayson Blair scandal erupted. Blair was a young
Times
reporter who resigned after he was caught fabricating stories and plagiarizing from other newspapers. To help rehabilitate its damaged reputation, the
Times
created the post of “Public Editor”—what other newspapers call an ombudsman—to act as an independent watchdog to assure the paper's integrity and serve as a disinterested conduit for reader concerns. The man they hired was Daniel Okrent, and I made it my mission to recruit him to the Krugman Truth Squad.

We struck up an ongoing e-mail correspondence. When I met with him personally, his first words to me were: “You're much better looking than Paul Krugman.” He told me that the
Times
didn't deserve to be called the “newspaper of record” and vowed, “When I'm done with this assignment, I want everyone to know that.”
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I raised with him how strange it was that the editorial page had no corrections policy. I shared with him various errors and misquotations in Krugman columns that I felt were simple and objective enough to merit formal correction. Over time, in a number of cases he agreed with me about the errors, and went to Krugman and to Krugman's editor, Gail Collins, to get corrections with or without a formal policy.

But Okrent got stonewalled, just as I had. He wrote,

I learned early on in this job that Prof. Krugman would likely be more willing to contribute to the [GOP Senator] Frist for President campaign than to acknowledge the possibility of error. When he says he agreed “reluctantly” to one correction, he gives new meaning to the word “reluctantly”; I can't come up with an adverb sufficient to encompass his general attitude toward substantive criticism.
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Frustrated that working behind the scenes was not producing results, Okrent threatened to use his Public Editor's column to expose Krugman's and Collins's intransigence. As a result, in March 2004 the
Times
put in place for the first time a columnist corrections policy. Okrent described the policy this way, quoting in part a memo from Collins:

[C]olumnists must be allowed the freedom of their opinions, but . . . they “are obviously required to be factually accurate. If one of them makes an error, he or she is expected to promptly correct it in the column.” Corrections, under this new rule, are to be placed at the end of a subsequent column, “to maximize the chance that they will be seen by all their readers, everywhere.”
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It was a victory, but a partial one to be sure. The corrections are to be worked into subsequent columns, not flagged in the paper's separate corrections department, nor are the columns in which the errors were originally made to be flagged in the archives as having been subsequently corrected. With all those loopholes remaining, Krugman must have breathed a sigh of relief. But how his blood must have boiled when he read Okrent saying in the same column,

Paul Krugman, writes Donald Luskin of Palo Alto, Calif., has committed “dozens of substantive factual errors, distortions, misquotations and false quotations—all pronounced in a voice of authoritativeness that most columnists would not presume to permit themselves.”

For a wider audience, Luskin serves as Javert to Krugman's Jean Valjean. From a perch on
National Review Online
, he regularly assaults Krugman's logic, his politics, his economic theories, his character and his accuracy.
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A year and a half later, Okrent moved on. In his final column as Public Editor, he took a parting shot at Krugman, listing among the things he regrets he didn't write more about that “Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults.”
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A new Public Editor, Byron Calame, took Okrent's place. And my Krugman Truth Squad was ready to take our battle for columnist corrections to the next level.

Putting Krugman in the Correctional Facility—for Life

In August 2005, Krugman claimed in a
Times
column concerning the disputed 2000 Florida presidential election:

Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore.
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On the same day, on my blog I called him out on what was an egregious lie.
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The
Times
itself was a member of one of the consortiums, and said in 2002 that “Mr. Bush would have retained a slender margin over Mr. Gore if the Florida court's order to recount more than 43,000 ballots had not been reversed by the United States Supreme Court.”
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I immediately started a dialogue with new Public Editor Byron Calame to force Krugman to correct it. It should have been a slam dunk, but it took many weeks, and many e-mails and phone calls to Calame.

Over the ensuing weeks, Krugman pulled every possible trick to avoid making a correction. In his next
Times
column three days later on August 22, he wrote about the “outraged reaction” about his original claim.
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He used this column, as new Public Editor Calame would later complain on his blog, only “to explain the misstatement without admitting any errors. . . . absent a formal correction, the information didn't get appended to his flawed Aug. 19 column.”
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Then, four days later in his August 26 column, Krugman added a new correction that was itself erroneous.
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Calame exploded, “It was wrong on the results of the
Miami Herald
statewide manual recounts. And it didn't deal with the fact that the original Aug. 19 generalization, the Aug. 22 column and the formal correction all erred in describing the findings of the other news media consortium (in which
The Times
was a participant).”
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What was so tricky about it was that Krugman's error had come, in part, from reliance on an erroneous story in the
Miami Herald
(which had performed the recount for the media consortium) in which one of the scenarios where Bush won was omitted. I ran this down personally by locating and contacting a former
Herald
editor who had since moved to Washington, D.C., and who at my insistence went up to his attic to obtain the records necessary to establish the facts—which I passed on to Calame.

Calame's complaints were posted on his blog on September 2, which drove Krugman to post later the same day a statement on the
Times
web site—but not in print—acknowledging his original error, but blaming it on the
Miami Herald
, and asserting that it didn't matter anyway.
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There it remained for two weeks, with no formal and complete in-print correction. I kept hectoring Calame. Then on September 16, Calame wrote a blog post protesting,

Mr. Krugman still hasn't been required to comply with the policy by publishing a formal correction. Ms. Collins hasn't offered any explanation. . . .

All Mr. Krugman has offered so far is a faux correction. . . . Mr. Krugman has been allowed to post a note on his page that acknowledges his initial error, but doesn't explain that his initial correction of that error was also wrong.
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Finally, two weeks later, Calame announced on his blog that a new columnist corrections policy would be forthcoming from Collins.
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No longer would corrections be appended only to future columns. Instead, they would be appended in the archives to the original columns in which the errors appeared, so that readers doing Web-based searches, or using services like LexusNexus or Factiva, would be informed that the articles they were viewing had been subsequently corrected.

Several days later, on October 2, Collins revealed the policy, saying that Krugman “asked if he could refrain from revisiting the subject yet again in print.” We can just imagine that conversation—the word “asked” is probably not entirely accurate. Whined? Pleaded? Begged? Whatever—Collins's column concluded with a full and formal correction of Krugman's multiple errors, misrepresentations, and evasions about the Florida election, and the same text is now appended to all the Krugman columns involved.
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The same day's editorial page carried another correction under the new policy—a particularly telling and funny one.
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Three (count 'em:
three!
) of the
Times
's columnists had to recant a single falsehood that
all
of them had made in the attempt to portray cronyism in the Bush administration—with Krugman having made it
twice!

Op-Ed columns by Paul Krugman (Sept. 5 and 9), Maureen Dowd (Sept. 10) and Frank Rich (Sept. 18) said Michael Brown, the former FEMA director, was a college friend or college roommate of Joe Allbaugh, his predecessor. They went to different colleges and later became friends.

Cut Down to Size

Several years have passed since then. I've stopped posting to my blog, The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid, and I haven't written a Krugman Truth Squad column for many months. I decided that it was time to declare victory. And what do you know—that book of mine finally got written. Or at least a version of it, which you are reading right now.

With all I and my fellow Krugman Truth Squad members did to expose Krugman's lies, and with a new columnist corrections policy that imposes a formal reputational cost on Krugman if he keeps on lying, it seems that Krugman has nothing to say—at least nothing that has the power to influence the national debate, as his columns once did. It turns out that it's a lot harder to convince people when you have to stick to the truth.

Need proof? Just think how Krugman must have felt in late 2010, when the 2003 Bush tax cuts he did so much to oppose—including embroiling himself in the humiliating divide-by-10 contretemps—were extended by a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress. Impotence just doesn't get any more humiliating than that.

At the same time, Krugman has become a victim of his own success. His vicious cycle of ever looser and ever coarser discourse has reached a dead end, and left him facing a new generation of competitors as loose and as coarse as he is. He just doesn't stand out anymore.

There are other victims. It may be that Krugman's vicious cycle has reached a dead end in a tragically literal sense, with the January 2010 shootings in Tucson of a congresswoman and several bystanders. There's never been any evidence that the shooting was politically motivated, but before the blood was dry Krugman had published a post on his
Times
blog instantly leaping to the conclusion that “odds are that it was,” and asserting that she had been targeted because “she's a Democrat who survived what was otherwise a GOP sweep in Arizona.” He went on to blame “the rhetoric of Beck, Limbaugh, etc.” for creating a “climate of hate.”
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