Fellow Kossack Mike Stark, the gadfly who frequently calls right-wing talk show hosts to debunk their talking points, has made Paul Krugman’s column tomorrow. Krugman, in a brilliantly-written piece, talks about how the story that Iraq had no WMD’s is so much like the fairy tale in which the emperor had no clothes.

Stark, writes Krugman, was the man who said the emperor had no clothes. Krugman points to O’Reilly’s response in which he screams he will stalk him by going to his house and surprising him:

I’ve laid my hands on additional material, which Andersen failed to publish, describing what happened after the imperial procession was over.

The talk-show host Bill O’Reilly yelled, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” at the little boy. Calling the boy a nut, he threatened to go to the boy’s house and “surprise” him.


Although Krugman does not mention him by name, I knew right away he was talking about Stark.

Krugman goes on to tell the story of the debunked WMD claims, substituting the emperor’s lack of clothes for the false WMD claims:

Fox News repeatedly played up possible finds of imperial clothing, then buried reports discrediting these stories. Months after the naked procession, a poll found that many of those getting most of their news from Fox believed that the emperor had in fact been clothed.

Imperial officials eventually admitted that they couldn’t find any evidence that the suit ever existed, or that there had even been an effort to produce a suit. They insisted, however, that they had found evidence of wardrobe-manufacturing-and-distribution-related program activities.

After the naked procession, pro-wardrobe pundits denied that the emperor was at fault. The blame, they said, rested with the C.I.A., which had provided the emperor with bad intelligence about the potential for a suit.

Krugman then goes on to take a swipe at fellow Liberals as well as fellow columnist Tom Friedman. He quotes a survey in which only one of eight Slate columnists admitted that he was wrong about the WMD’s; that one person had admitted he was wrong early on.

Then, he goes on to mention Helen Thomas, who was opposed to the wardrobe from the beginning and was “accused of being opposed to the broader war on nakedness.” He then portrays Howard Dean as another example of the boy saying the Emperor had no clothes, highlighting the fact that the media focused on The Scream instead of the facts.

And now, the swipe on Friedman:

The editor of one liberal but pro-wardrobe magazine admitted that he had known from the beginning that there were good reasons to doubt the emperor’s trustworthiness. But he said that he had put those doubts aside because doing so made him “feel superior to the Democrats.” Unabashed, he continued to denounce those who had opposed the suit as soft on sartorial security.

Here is what Friedman said in response to the firestorm of criticism of his article, in his blog:

Let me repeat that. It was my view that the Bush team was going to invade Iraq no matter who was against it — Congress, columnists or whoever. I am flattered that some people think my column was so influential that had I come out against the war, it would have made a difference. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that. It would have made no difference. Therefore, from a columnist’s point of view, I felt I had two choices: One was to come out squarely against the war and throw my body in the way. Many of my colleagues did that. I believe that was a noble position. I have nothing but respect for them. It’s where my own wife was. But I had different point of view.

My view was that the Bush people were going to launch this war no matter what I wrote. But because I believed that if this war were mounted in the right way for the right reasons, it could have a truly important outcome, I wanted to use my column to do what little I could to try to tilt the administration to fight the right war, the right way.

It is a fact of human nature that people who invest that much in an outcome will have a much harder time of it when they are confronted with the fact that the war was wrong to begin with. But Friedman, no matter how noble his motives, misses the point.

Change will not come in bits and pieces. That is because people will not notice any difference between two different plans. That is why John Kerry failed to win — people did not see any difference between his plan and Bush’s. Change in the South did not come by bits and pieces. It came through the Underground Railroad, through the rise of the Republican Party, and through Abraham Lincoln’s insistence that slavery was wrong.

Lincoln did not try to accomodate slavery; his goal was always to keep the union together and end slavery once and for all. And we should be figuring out how and when to get out of Iraq, not just if we should or not. Friedman misses the point.

And despite the indictment of Libby and the prospective unravelling of the Niger forgeries, the GOP continues to live in fairyland. Let’s have Krugman have the last word:

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee oversaw an inquiry into how the government had come to believe in a nonexistent suit. The first part focused on the mistakes made by career government tailors. But the second part of the inquiry, on the role of the imperial administration in promoting faulty tailoring, appeared to vanish from the agenda.

Two and a half years after the emperor’s naked procession, a majority of citizens believed that the imperial administration had deliberately misled the country. Several former officials had gone public with tales of an administration obsessed with its wardrobe from Day 1.

But apologists for the emperor continued to dismiss any suggestion that officials had lied to the nation. It was, they said, a crazy conspiracy theory. After all, back in 1998 Bill Clinton thought there was a suit.

And they all lived happily ever after – in the story. Here in reality, a large and growing number are being killed by roadside bombs.