[Mb-civic] Krugman

[Mike Blaxill]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/110405I.shtml

Defending Imperial Nudity
    By Paul Krugman
    The New York Times

    Friday 04 November 2005

    Hans Christian Andersen understood bad
rulers. "The Emperor's New Suit" doesn't end with
everyone acclaiming the little boy for telling
the truth. It ends with the emperor and his
officials refusing to admit their mistake.

    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.

    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.

    Even a quick Web search shows that before the
procession, those same pundits had written
articles attacking C.I.A. analysts because those
analysts had refused to support strong
administration assertions about the invisible
suit.

    Although the imperial administration was
conservative, its wardrobe plans drew crucial
support from a group of liberal pundits. After
the emperor's nakedness was revealed, the online
magazine Slate held a symposium in which eight of
these pundits were asked whether the fact that
there was no suit had led them to reconsider
their views. Only one admitted that he had been
wrong - and he had changed his mind about the
suit before the procession.

    Helen Thomas, the veteran palace
correspondent, opposed the suit project from the
beginning. When she pointed out that the
emperor's clothes had turned out not to exist,
the imperial press secretary accused her of being
"opposed to the broader war on nakedness."

    Even though skeptics about the emperor's suit
had been vindicated, TV news programs continued
to portray those skeptics as crazy people. For
example, the news networks showed, over and over,
a clip of the little boy shouting at a party. The
clip was deeply misleading: he had been shouting
to be heard over background noise, which the
ambient microphone didn't pick up. Nonetheless,
"the scream" became a staple of political
discourse.

    The emperor gave many speeches in which he
declared that his wardrobe was the "central
front" in the war on nakedness.

    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.

    At the Radio and Television Correspondents'
annual dinner, the emperor entertained the
assembled journalists with a bit of humor: he
showed slides of himself looking under furniture
in his office, searching for the nonexistent
suit. Some of the guests were aghast, but most of
the audience roared with laughter.

    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.