Everybody’s favorite delivers a thorough thwacking to The Nation‘s William Greider, who seems to have come to the interesting (though sadly not unique) conclusion that what’s bad for America must be good for the world.
Greider:
The scandals of Enron et al., unfortunately, must compete with another story–the war on terrorism–that’s more exciting, and threatening, than dirty bookkeeping or the looted billions. The two crises are intertwined in perverse ways. The smug triumphalism of Bush’s unilateralist war policy could be abruptly deflated by economic events–which probably would be a good thing for world affairs, since Washington couldn’t run roughshod over others…
DeLong:
I don’t know which is stranger: the anticipatory schadenfreude at the fantasy of U.S. unemployment climbing toward 15 percent, or the strange and ill-thought-out chain of logic by which a decline in the value of the dollar is supposed to produce a domestic depression and a shift in U.S. foreign policy…This guy was, twenty years ago, one of our best and most incisive reporters. Now his chains of logic snap at the first touch, and his overriding hope appears to be that the flaws in the American economy manifest themselves by throwing a lot of people out of work, so that “the fashionable boastfulness about America… [will] implode…”
Advantage: DeLong !
And here’s a link to the Nation story, since as much as we love Prof D, he still hasn’t quite got the hang of the ole’ link-to-the-story-you’re-spanking thing…
Update: Prof. Delong responds to my gentle chiding: “Hey! I didn’t realize until I read your weblog that the _Nation_ piece was online. You see, I read it in what is called ‘paper’–I realize you may be unfamiliar with the concept. Every week or so, this 48 page flimsy flexible thing arrives at my doorstep… kinda like a regular email but kinda not. Anyway, thanks. I’ve added the link on my website.”
Bizarre. Next he’ll be raving about how he chissels his grocery list into granite tablets…