Krugman, Gruber and non-disclosure issues

Glenn Greenwald - In the midst of my lengthy discussion yesterday of Cass Sunstein's proposal to "cognitively infiltrate extremist groups" by employing covert agents and secretly paying so-called "independent" analysts to tout the government line, I noted the recent controversy surrounding MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber. Specifically, Gruber was receiving large, undisclosed payments from the Obama administration at exactly the time when the Obama White House (and Gruber himself) were holding him out as an "objective" expert endorsing various parts of the President's health care plan. Consistent with Sunstein's view that certain actions may be wrong when done by Bad People but acceptable when done by those who are "well intentioned" and trying to "improve social welfare," I noted that many Democrats who strenuously objected to non-disclosure scandals during the Bush years have been minimizing the conduct at issue in the Gruber matter, and cited Paul Krugman as an example. Krugman responded last night on his blog, and I want to discuss a few of the points he makes because I think they have significance beyond the Gruber issue.

Krugman accuses me and others of "claiming that there’s a huge scandal" here and of conducting a "crusade against Gruber," but I did no such thing. "Huge scandal" is just a rhetorical straw man to rail against. I didn't even mention the Gruber matter until yesterday, and did so only because of its obvious relationship to the Sunstein scheme I was discussing. Ironically, the only reason the Gruber matter has received as much attention as it has is because Gruber's defenders began aggressively attacking the people who uncovered, documented and objected to the undisclosed payments, as Krugman did when he equated the sober and cautious Marcy Wheeler with "the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals." Read more.