Well, Sullivan has done yeoman service esposing NYTimes's columnist Krugman as a paid shill for Enron - and one who attacks others for what he apparently is guilty of:
Friday, January 25, 2002 3:38 p.m. EST
Krugman and Enron
On Monday, we said we thought Andrew Sullivan
andrewsullivan.com
was going a bit overboard in his criticisms of Paul Krugman for benefiting from Enron largesse to the tune of $50,000. Sullivan's position looks much better today, after Krugman's stunningly dishonest and defensive column in response (link requires registration). Krugman resorts to the Hillary Clinton defense, that he's the victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy:
"A bizarre thing happened to me over the past week: Conservative newspapers and columnists made a concerted effort to portray me as a guilty party in the Enron scandal. Why? Because in 1999, before coming to The New York Times, I was briefly paid to serve on an Enron advisory board. . . .
It's tempting to take this vendetta as a personal compliment: Some people are so worried about the effect of my writing that they will try anything to get me off this page. But actually it was part of a broader effort by conservatives to sling Enron muck toward their left, hoping that some of it would stick."
Krugman is engaging in what psychologists call "projection." It was, of course, liberals and Democrats--Krugman included--who started "slinging Enron muck" at the Bush administration. And now Krugman responds to questions about his own conduct by slinging muck at conservatives.
Krugman's defense is that he complied "scrupulously" with the Times' conflict-of-interest rules, ending his relationship with Enron when he joined the paper, and disclosing it when he wrote about the company for the first time. This is fine as far as it goes, but it leaves him open to the charge of intellectual dishonesty: He wrote a puff piece on Enron while on its payroll, then vilified the company in anti-Bush polemics once he joined the Times. Maybe he changed his mind for intellectually defensible reasons--but if so, you'd think he'd hasten to say what they were.
Today's column adds lots of evidence to bolster the charge of intellectual dishonesty, giving Times readers--most of whom, we'd venture, are hearing about the dispute over Krugman's conduct for the first time--an appallingly one-sided account. Krugman doesn't identify the "conservatives" he says are persecuting him, which would be easy enough to do since it's mostly one man: fellow New York Times contributor Andrew Sullivan. But there's a problem: Even if Sullivan is a conservative, he has not been picking on Krugman alone. He's also been relentless in criticizing three conservative pundits who also served on Enron's advisory board: William Kristol, Lawrence Kudlow and Irwin Stelzer. Today he also blasts our Peggy Noonan for having done some speechwriting work for Enron in 1997.
As Sullivan notes, Krugman also does not mention the amount Enron paid him, saying only that it "was actually somewhat less than other companies were paying me at the time for speeches on world economic issues." Krugman leaves it to the reader's imagination whether this means a few hundred dollars, a few thousand or more. We suspect even the rich folks who read the Times would be surprised to learn Krugman earned $50,000 for what he says was very little work. (We disagreed with Sullivan when he faulted Krugman for not including the amount in his earlier, pro forma disclosures. Here, though, it is quite central to the subject about which Krugman is writing.)
One lesson from this whole episode is that complying with conflict-of-interest rules isn't the same thing as being honest. And indeed, such rules can end up serving as a license for dishonesty. Krugman defends himself on the letter of the law while evading the real issues his conduct raises. It's reminiscent of Bill Clinton's legalistic parsing of his own words in an effort to claim he didn't really lie under oath. It is telling that Krugman pooh-poohs the idea that the Enron scandal is "a reflection of Clinton-era moral decline." His own behavior is one bit of evidence that it is.
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