Posted by
The Hermit Crab on Thursday, October 28, 2010 2:05:14 PM
Crab friend Tony the Libertarian sent me a link to another psychotic Paul Krugman column, which led me again to ruminate on how the once-respected Nobel Prize(s) has (have) slipped in public esteem. I trace the beginning of the slide to the awarding of the prize to terrorist Yasir Arafat in 1994. (It may go back further, but that was the first outrageous awarding of the prize in my memory. Actually, Rigoberta Menchu was awarded the prize in 1992, but she just turned out to be a fraud.) For some years, only the Peace Prize seemed to be tainted, if "tainted" is a strong enough word for an award given to the UN, Kofi Annan, the International Atomic Energy Agency (do I hear Three Blind Mice playing somewhere?), global warming conners the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (AlGore) Gore Jr., and the notoriously anti-Semitic international meddler Jimmy Carter. A sort of peak was reached when the prize was first offered as a bribe, which is the only way to explain the 2009 awarding of the prize to Barack Obama.
Then the contagion spread. In 2008 the Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to loony economist Paul Krugman, who occasionally scribbles hysterical and error-ridden screeds for the New York Times. His columns are so factually challenged that National Review Online used to carry a regular feature called the
Krugman Truth Squad, dedicated to correcting all of the false assertions and deranged theorizing of the now-Nobel Laureate. I miss the old feature, but Donald Luskin, Chief Investment Officer for Trend Macrolytics and unofficial chairman of the Truth Squad, has more important business to attend to than constantly correcting the honesty-allergic JK Galbreath-without-the-charm Krugman. When the committeee gave away the prize to a loon, they also gave away what remained of their credibility. To win the award in economics, it is now clear, you don't even have to ever be right, as long as you're Left.
If the (audibly oxymoronic) Nobel Committee ever tries to give me the prize, I intend to sue for slander.