Paul Krugman
After Jared Lee Loughner shot and wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killed six people in January at one of Giffords’s meet-and-greets in Tucson, Ariz., there was plenty of finger-pointing as well as calls for an end to uncivilized and downright dangerous political discourse. But the New York Times’s Paul Krugman was the first to blame the right wing for the increasingly “eliminationist” and “toxic” rhetoric that had led to what he characterized as an inevitable event. Some felt that Krugman making the problem worse by unfairly blaming members of the right for the nation’s increasingly divisive mood while attributing little responsibility to the left. Still, there were many who agreed with Krugman’s analysis, which dated the beginnings of the right’s “political hatred” back to Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, even connecting that rise in toxic rhetoric to the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995. Meanwhile, Mark Bauerlein at The Chronicle of Higher Education questioned Krugman’s right to comment on this topic at all, pointing out a 2009 column by the Times writer which began: “A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy.”