Shuster Sad Krugman Didn't Call Conservatives 'Wingnuts'

October 15th, 2007 6:53 AM

This could be a first: someone accusing Paul Krugman of being insufficiently insulting to conservatives.

That someone is, unsurprisingly, David Shuster, the rabidly anti-conservative MSNBC "correspondent." Shuster is appearing on [was exiled to?] today's "Morning Joe." When it came time to share his "must-read" of the morning, Shuster eschewed Krugman's column, "Gore Derangement Syndrome," observing that "Gore is a little bit passé at this point."

Give Shuster credit for sensing that Americans have had enough of Al, thank you very much. But that didn't stop Mika Brzezinski from citing that same Krugman column as her must-read. Figures. And when she did, Shuster pouted that Krugman hadn't used the pejorative.

View video here.

Bubbles read with relish these Krugman lines [emphasis added]:

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.
The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right.

So "right," of course, that a British judge has ordered that every time British schoolkids are subjected to "An Inconvenient Truth," they must be alerted to the fact that in at nine least intances, Gore is . . . wrong.

But back to Shuster. He did have one beef with the liberal Times columnist:

My only disappointment in this column is that Paul Krugman doesn't refer to the "wingnuts." He just calls them the "right-wingers."

An understandable disappointment for the MSNBC "correspondent." But one that Shuster should have the opportunity to rectify in his next "report."