The lamps are going out all over the world. Deliberately this time.

But Paul Krugman may have hurdled it — his dumbest statement yet:

Democrats had a lot of harsh things to say about former President George W. Bush — but you’ll search in vain for anything comparably menacing.

I guess he didn’t get out much. But it doesn’t matter, because…you know…assassination threats and wishes against George Bush weren’t racist. And hateful.

[Saturday morning update]

Paul Krugman always gets the memo.

What a tool.

Charles Murray dishes the dirt on his departure yesterday, and defends the AEI against what he calls Frum’s false charges.

[Late afternoon update]

Mark Steyn weighs in. With (not unexpectedly) a lot of weight:

So, by David’s own account, AEI should have been happy to go on giving him a hundred grand to do stuff he would have been doing anyway and for which he was already being paid. I mean, The National Post of Canada pays him to write for The National Post of Canada. It’s hard to see why AEI should also chip in. As for his other stated contribution to the cause, I’m not sure that hitherto I’ve ever heard the term “landed” applied to Canadian cabinet ministers. No disrespect – many likable chaps on the team – but I gave a speech last year and “landed” half the Canadian cabinet without even trying, never mind invoicing anyone a six-figure sum for the accomplishment.

I’ve never been that impressed by David Frum. Nothing about this episode has increased my respect.

[Late evening update]

Tunku Varadarajan has more, to confirm Murray’s account.

It looks like David Frum has been canned from the American Enterprise Institute.

I watched this last night, and didn’t know whether to be amused or appalled:

Apparently you need to water board him to get him to admit that the IRS is going to be involved in the individual mandate. And maybe he’d even stand up to that.

I’ll be generous, and assume that Jim Lehrer simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about, rather than deliberately lying to slander Republicans. But the media does this all the time. It’s all about the narrative, not the truth.

[Early afternoon update]

We report, you shut up.

The media remain lap dogs of the left, and the Democrats (to the limited degree those things are different these days).

Plus, thoughts on Steny Hoyer’s (latest) sanctimonious hypocrisy.

And more thoughts from John Hindraker:

In large part, the current focus on threats of violence is aimed at the tea partiers, just as they were accused, apparently falsely, of racism. It is not hard to understand the Democrats’ motives; the tea parties are the most vital force, and likely the most popular force, in American politics, so smearing them is mandatory. But anyone who has attended a tea party rally will consider laughable the idea that the movement somehow tends toward violence. . . . The fact is that, unlike conservatives, modern liberals have had little quarrel with political violence. This is best demonstrated by their support for card check legislation, the entire point of which it to abolish the secret ballot so that union goons can use the threat of violence to extend union power and thereby enrich the Democratic Party. . . . The beating of Kenneth Gladrey by union goons–more specifically, the lack of any interest in it by anyone in the Democratic Party, the media, or on the Left generally–shows how hypocritical the Democrats’ current pacifism is. If the day ever comes when conservative groups start hiring goons, we can take the liberals’ purported fears of violence more seriously.

And speaking of death threats, Glenn Beck says that James Cameron should lay off them. Hey, it’s what thugs do.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Roger Simon to Steny Hoyer:

…in the grand tradition of totalitarian regimes everywhere, you employed “any means necessary” to make sure your ends were achieved, bribing and threatening your fellow Congressmen and women, etc. It is small wonder that our people are angry. It would be amazing if it were otherwise.

You have reaped a whirlwind by subverting a democracy. Now you must deal with it. The Democratic Party is no longer “progressive” or “liberal.” It is reactionary. And you and your cohorts have forever defined yourselves as reactionary politicians.

And this mob action in supposedly “tolerant” Canada seems to be part of the bigger picture as well. From Mark Steyn, who knows more than a little bit about Canadian soft fascism.

[Mid-morning update]

More thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson:

Socialism and totalitarianism are tough charges from the hard right, but they seem to me about as (or as not) over-the-top as Al Gore screaming “digital brown-shirts” or John Glenn comparing the opposition to Nazis. When 3,000 were murdered in Manhattan, and Michael Moore suggested Bin Laden had wrongly targeted a blue state, I don’t think that repulsive remark prevented liberal politicians from attending his anti-Bush film premiere. Yes, let us have a tough debate over the role of government and the individual, but spare us the melodrama, the bottled piety, and the wounded-fawn hurt.

Like it or not, between 2001 and 2008, the “progressive” community redefined what is acceptable and not acceptable in political and public discourse about their elected officials. Slurs like “Nazi” and “fascist” and “I hate” were no longer the old street-theater derangement of the 1960s, but were elevated to high-society novels, films, political journalism, and vein-bulging outbursts of our elites. If one were to take the word “Bush” and replace it with “Obama” in the work of a Nicholson Baker, or director Gabriel Range, or Garrison Keillor or Jonathan Chait, or in the rhetoric of a Gore or Moore, we would be presently in a national crisis, witnessing summits on the epidemic of “hate speech.”

It’s getting impossible to take these people seriously. As Glenn Reynolds notes in this interesting interview with Jonah Goldberg, they’re not elites. Elites have to be actually talented, and accomplished, at something other than pious hypocrisy and faux charm. They’re simply a parasitic ruling class. Fortunately, at least for the media “elites,” we’re on to them, and cutting off their food supply of the body politic.