Krugman Explains the Depression to George Will

From firedoglake, which headlines this clip "Krugman Schools Will On the Great Depression". The arrogance of George Will, to spout conservative nonsense about the economy while sitting next to a Nobel-Prize winning economist.

George Will's Acorn*

George Will says McCain is unqualified to be president because of his temper.

George F. Will, WaPo: McCain Loses His Head

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that "McCain untethered" -- disconnected from knowledge and principle -- had made a "false and deeply unfair" attack on Cox that was "unpresidential" and demonstrated that McCain "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does."

*Even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while.

Nixonland

Nixonland by Rick Perlstein is the next political book I want to read.

Here's the Amazon.com review:

Amazon Best of the Month, May 2008: How did we go from Lyndon Johnson's landslide Democratic victory in 1964 to Richard Nixon's equally lopsided Republican reelection only eight years later? The years in between were among the most chaotic in American history, with an endless and unpopular war, riots, assassinations, social upheaval, Southern resistance, protests both peaceful and armed, and a "Silent Majority" that twice elected the central figure of the age, a brilliant politician who relished the battles of the day but ended them in disgrace. In Nixonland Rick Perlstein tells a more familiar story than the one he unearthed in his influential previous book, Before the Storm, which argued that the stunning success of modern conservatism was founded in Goldwater's massive 1964 defeat. But he makes it fresh and relentlessly compelling, with obsessive original research and a gleefully slashing style--equal parts Walter Winchell and Hunter S. Thompson--that's true to the times. Perlstein is well known as a writer on the left, but his historian's empathies are intense and unpredictable: he convincingly channels the resentment and rage on both sides of the battle lines and lets neither Nixon's cynicism nor the naivete of liberals like New York mayor John Lindsay off the hook. And while election-year readers will be reminded of how much tamer our times are, they'll also find that the echoes of the era, and its persistent national divisions, still ring loud and clear. --Tom Nissley

He was on Morning McCain on MSNBC and went toe to toe with Nixon henchman, racist Pat Buchanan. Watch the video here.

Digby loved the book.

The New York Times assigned George F. Will to review it. Guess what he thought? Read his scathing review here.

If George Will hates it, I need to read it.