Paul Krugman, responding in part to Glenn Greenwald’s post today, writes:

Reading some of today’s news, it suddenly struck me: we’re living in the age of the anti-Cassandra.

Cassandra had the gift of prophecy — she saw, correctly, what was coming — but was under a curse: nobody would believe her.

Today, our public discourse is dominated by people who have been wrong about everything — but are still, mysteriously, treated as men of wisdom, whose judgments should be believed. Those who were actually right about the major issues of the day can’t get a word in edgewise.

What set me off was the matter of Alan Greenspan; as Dean Baker like to remind us, news analyses of the housing and financial crisis almost always draw exclusively on “experts” who first insisted that there wasn’t a housing bubble, then insisted that the financial consequences of the bubble’s bursting would remain “contained.”

It’s even worse, of course, on the matter of Iraq: just about every one of the panels convened to discuss the lessons of five disastrous years consisted solely of men and women who cheered the idiocy on.

Yep, this pretty much says it all.  I think this a great description of a horrendous problem on Krugman’s part. It’s a somewhat more PG version of the Dirty Fucking Hippy narrative bloggers have used over the last six years and is something that is worth pushing into discourse.  I hope Krugman considers devoting a full column to this subject; as the preeminent liberal political opinion writer in America, his platform can get this sort of meme noticed. The only way we can get this dynamic to change is by identifying it and forcing others to do the same.