Paul Krugman Quotes
The fact is that the two years or so after 9/11 were a terrible time in America – a time of political exploitation and intimidation, culminating in the deliberate misleading of the nation into the invasion of Iraq. It’s probably worth pointing out that I’m not saying anything now that I wasn’t saying in real time back then, when Bush had a sky-high approval rating and any criticism was denounced as treason. And there’s nothing I’ve done in my life of which I’m more proud.
Krugman, Paul. "The Years of Shame." The New York Times, 11 Sept. 2011.
He was referring to the kinds of questions and the assertions made by high administration officials prior to the Iraq War. Pillar was one of the officials responsible for the erroneous intelligence report that Iraq and Sadaam had nuclear weapons.
Ad hominum attacks are attacks against the person—not his views or arguments against them and not even what he has allegedly done or the consequences of what he has done to others. It is direct character assassination. This is much more effective than trying to argue what wrong has been done. It has been a very common tactic of the Right Wing Republicans and the Tea Party against liberals and supporters if desegregation, and has also been used by extreme leftists in attacking powerful industrialists. When Assange published thousands of State Department cables, many of which exposed the fact that Government officials had been lying to the public and Congress while under oath, there was a massive ad hominum attack on Assange casting aspersions on any information he might claim is real, but never once denying that any of the cables were genuine. The attacks claimed that Assange’s publication would cause American agents throughout the world to be exposed and killed, but even a year after these accusations, neither the State Department nor the intelligence agencies could point to a single case where an American agent had come to harm. The embarrassment was however profound, and some governments were outraged that their confidential dealings with the United State had been exposed to public scrutiny.
Paul Robin Krugman is an American economist who is the Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and a columnist for The New York Times. In 2008, Krugman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography. The Prize Committee cited Krugman's work explaining the patterns of international trade and the geographic distribution of economic activity, by examining the effects of economies of scale and of consumer preferences for diverse goods and services.
