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Listening to Republicans Peggy Noonan and Kathleen Parker on the panel of This Week practically swooning over Mark Sanford's emails to his mistress and excusing his behavior was truly a sight to behold. They both looked downright giddy this morning while dismissing his actions because he was in love.

Paul Krugman and Michael Eric Dyson do their best to try to point out that the trouble is not so much the cheating since it is human nature which is not reserved for one party, but the hypocrisy of the Republicans being the party of family values and people like Mark Sanford's words coming back to bite him. Of course Noonan and Parker were having none of that.

Noonan: Ooohh...I never think that when politicians, Democrats and Republicans get in these stories, that the story itself, the sin itself if you will, undermines what the politician stands for necessarily. Mark Sanford's Libertarian/traditional views are right or wrong on their own. Um..I must say I've been thinking about Clinton a lot and it seems to me that in the Clinton era, during that famous story, a new devilishness was unleashed, especially in the media where a new meanness took style.

And I feel like in every one of the scandals of the past few months, and we've had so many of them, the political sex scandals, the level of meanness of the response, publicly, and on cable and the newspapers, gets meaner each time. It seems to me that we are coming, we are reacting as almost as a nation, but certainly in the media as kind of Puritans without faith, which is the worst of both worlds. To be Puritanical and not even have faith.

I'm sorry Peggy, but the treatment any of the Republicans of late have gotten in the press pales in comparison to what the media did to Bill Clinton. And the media are not the ones being Puritans. The Republicans are the ones who have held themselves out there as the party of virtue and family values. The press didn't invent that.

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Joe Scarborough attacks Paul Krugman for his op-ed The Big Hate:

Scarborough: I’m just gonna say it. As somebody that has to sort through a lot of hate mail, a lot of hate email, a lot of viciousness. Paul Krugman’s name is attached to a lot of those emails. They use Paul Krugman as their shield for their left-wing hate. This is because Paul Krugman, like a lot of extremists on the right, they only see their side. They have a closed-minded world view. Paul Krugman uses this tragedy, uses this death to try to knock down his opponents on the right.

Unbelievable. Project much Joe?

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On This Week Paul Krugman pointed out the Republican's hypocrisy on military spending:

Krugman: What's so wonderful is watching Republican congressmen saying "but this will cost jobs". The very same Republican congressmen who were denouncing the stimulus plan saying government spending never creates jobs but, cutting defense spending costs jobs. It's wonderful.

Hmmmmm...why does that sound familiar? Oh yeah..Barney Frank predicted it on Meet the Press in February.

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Frank: Well, two things. First, watch this face, David, because some of the arguments you've been hearing now about how government spending never helps the economy, you're going to hear the absolute reverse when military spending comes up. We have an airplane, the F-22, that is designed to defeat the Soviet Union in a war, and I think we can save billions. The defense budget has gone way up under George Bush. But somehow to my Republican friends enormous amounts for the war in Iraq--which I thought was a mistake--hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars for weapons to fight the Cold War, they don't count those. But you're going to hear an argument about how important military spending is for the economy.

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Rachel talks to Paul Krugman about the public optomism on the economy and whether it's founded or not. Krugman lays out what the policies should be going forward for the economy to truly recover such as reregulating the financial markets.

Paul Krugman yesterday on ABC's This Week, reacting to the song Hey Paul Krugman (A song, A plea).

Quite the week for the Nobel laureate too, as he becomes the MSM's new darling and the loyal opposition to the Obama administration's economic recovery plans. That Paul Krugman is filling the void when no credible republican could be found is quite telling.

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From the Newshour with Jim Lehrer March 23, 2009. Paul Krugman is not impressed with the idea of buying these toxic assets.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, Paul Krugman, you wrote critically of the plan this morning. Now you've heard Lawrence Summers. Are you persuaded?

PAUL KRUGMAN: No. You know, I wish Larry the best; I hope he's right. But this is a plan that treats a fairly minor symptom of the problem.

You know, that maybe some of these toxic assets -- I guess they're now toxic legacy assets, whatever -- are being under-priced in the market. And maybe there's a problem there.

But the fact of the matter is that the banks made a huge bet. They made a bet that the housing bubble was nonexistent, that, you know, historically unprecedented levels of consumer debt were not a problem. They lost that bet.

And this plan does almost nothing to rescue them from the consequences of that bad debt. So I'm kind of saddened. It's kind of a punt. They've decided to sort of not really take on the critical issue of fixing the banks and instead hope that a little bit of rearranging of the financial furniture will solve the problem.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, you heard Larry Summers in our interview. He used the phrase "vicious cycles turn into virtuous circles," that this would get the banks lending again. So you just don't see that enough is done here?

PAUL KRUGMAN: It's a very poorly targeted instrument. What you have is banks that have taken huge losses. And those are real losses. They're not just because the markets aren't working so well in toxic paper.

And to get the markets, to get capital flowing, to get credit flowing to the real economy, you actually need to make the banks sound again. It would take a huge increase in these prices. It would take a tremendous -- basically, you'd have to convince people that all these bum mortgages are actually pretty good in order to make the banks secure enough to start, you know, a lot of new lending.

This is not going to do that. It's going to help a little bit, maybe. Certainly it's -- you know, basically the plan hands out gold-plated toasters to anybody who participates. It's a very sweet deal for the investors. And it's going to push up the prices, but a lot of the benefits will go to financial institutions that are actually not in any trouble. A fair bit of the benefits will go to people who are not in the financial industry at all.

Only a little bit of it is going to trickle to the really critically injured banks. So it's just not -- it's a plan that kind of mistakes the nature of the problem that we face.

Who knew that Paul Krugman would become a YouTube darling?

March 09, 2009 MSNBC

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Keith Olbermann and Paul Krugman break down some of Bobby Jindal's speech and the distortions and outright lies that were told in it. Krugman pretty well hits the nail on the head here:

Uh, I don't think there was much of an argument there. You really have, you know I've said it was Beavis and Butthead. They find things that sound silly if you don't actually know anything, so gosh, volcano monitoring. Why would you want to monitor a volcano? Because it might erupt and kill a lot of people. Uh, but they're basically reduced to just picking out a few things or in some cases just making stuff up. The salt marsh mouse thing on the stimulus and saying this is stupid. See government is stupid. Cut taxes. It's not much of an argument.

Amen brother. Nate's got more on the volcano monitoring comment. As I already noted in "Bill Adair shot down the mouse nonsense on Morning Joe", much to their dismay. There's a good diary up on the boat story over at Daily Kos.

I got to listen to a great deal of this today and saw the one of the good folks over at Firedoglake posted it in its entirety. If you've got forty or so minutes to spare Krugman does a great job as always.

Part 1.

Part 2.

Part 3.

Part 4.