Unfit to Print.

The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century, by Paul Krugman (Norton, 320 pp., $25.95)

It is fitting that the first words in this collection of Paul Krugman's New York Times columns offer thanks to disgraced former Times executive editor Howell Raines. Krugman's meteoric rise -- he is now one of America's most influential political columnists -- could not have happened without the New York Times, and it could not have happened without the New York Times of Howell Raines.

Krugman's columns are blisteringly, bitterly, and relentlessly partisan. The column, which he started in 2000, quickly evolved from coverage of business and markets to pure politics -- and not a single column has ever either praised Republicans or criticized Democrats. Krugman's attacks on President Bush are intensely personal. Any Bush statement that differs from Krugman's views is, ipso facto, a lie. Krugman compares Bush to Caligula and Captain Queeg, and mocks him for being a recovering alcoholic. His columns are also sloppily researched -- often a grab bag of out-of-context factoids from obscure websites and leftist think tanks. And they frequently contain errors, distortions, and misquotations so egregious that they must be assumed to be intentional.

Yet on the pages of the New York Times, Krugman's columns are devastatingly effective, providing talking points for liberal pundits and politicians that resonate in the media echo chamber for months after Krugman issues them (" . . . according to Paul Krugman in the New York Times . . ."). In part this is because they are written with a tone of supreme self-assurance, developed over Krugman's years as an Ivy League economics professor; mostly, though, it's because they are printed in the prestigious and authoritative pages of "the newspaper of record." Krugman is right to thank Howell Raines for allowing him to exploit the power and the glory of the Times to lend credibility to what would otherwise be little more than partisan jeremiads.

Krugman's work represents a new Rainesian paradigm for newspaper columns: opinions presented as fact, supported by evidence often drawn from dubious sources far less credible than the Times, yet granted the authority of the Times by virtue of being published there.

The new book -- and the promotional blitz that inevitably accompanies it -- may seem to be Krugman's moment of greatest triumph. Yet this is a risky venture for Krugman, because it requires that his columns stand on their merits at a distance from the imprimatur of the Times, and that columns originally written as ad hoc potshots at partisan targets of opportunity be knitted together into a coherent worldview.

Krugman's basic argument is that the Bush administration represents a "revolutionary power," a "radical political movement" whose goal is to "destroy much of what is best in our country" and "possibly" make it a place "in which elections are only a formality." In the mathematics of Krugmanomics, disagreement = lie, and two disagreements = conspiracy. That may well resonate with leftists seeking words to match their inchoate feelings of loathing for the president; but the reality of the columns in the book is that they are little more than extremely effective demonstrations of the obvious -- that Krugman's idea of "what is best in our country" is different from that of George W. Bush.

Removed from the prestige-brand aura of the Times, however, Krugman's columns lose their punch. The qualities that work in newsprint don't work in the book: The columns' relentlessness seems mere repetition, and their breeziness just superficiality. The book is also an exercise in revisionism and selective memory. Of course, a collection of Krugman's columns purged of all that contained errors, distortions, and misquotations would have a page-count of zero; this book was obviously edited with an eye toward keeping the very worst ones stuffed far down the memory hole.

For example, twice in the book's prefatory material Krugman mocks the press for "lauding" Enron. He chooses not to mention, nor to include in the book, his own May 1999 article for Fortune in which he lauded Enron as an exemplar of the New Economy, witnessing its operations firsthand as a paid member of the company's advisory board. He also fails to include the December 2001 Times column in which he chided the press -- his example is Fortune! -- for not heaping blame for the Enron fiasco on the consultants who advised the company. Enron is mentioned in the book many times -- always in the most harshly critical tones -- but Krugman's own involvement is not disclosed until the very end, and then only en passant as part of a jeremiad about how the conservative media used it to discredit him. He protests that it was "back when I was a college professor, not an Op-Ed columnist, and in no position to do the company any favors." How about that Fortune article? (What article? I don't see any article!)

Gone, too, are the warnings of this crisis and that crisis, none of which ever materialized. Where's the April 2002 column in which he predicted a third oil crisis? How about the April 2003 column in which he worried that the worldwide spread of SARS would destroy the global economy? (At least he had the good sense to hedge a bit, admitting that it "doesn't look like a civilization-killer.") Also gone are the columns in which Krugman's partisan zeal got in the way of the facts, or of checking the veracity of sources: Where's that July 2002 column in which Krugman claimed that Bush's stake in the Texas Rangers amounted to "a group of businessmen, presumably with some interest in government decisions," giving "a sitting governor a $12 million gift"? As those businessmen explained in a letter to the Times, Bush's stake was awarded in 1989 -- five years before he became "a sitting governor." Krugman admitted the error on his personal website, but never made a retraction in the Times.

Experienced Krugman-watchers will not be surprised to learn that the notorious "Jobs, Jobs, Jobs" from last April is not included. There, Krugman, who endlessly accuses the president of lying about the impact of his tax policies, wrote that Bush's proposed tax cuts of $726 billion were intended to create 1.4 million new jobs. He wrote, "The average American worker earns only about $40,000 per year; why does the administration, even on its own estimates, need to offer $500,000 in tax cuts for each job created? If it's all about jobs, wouldn't it be far cheaper just to have the government hire people?" This analysis involves several statistical sleights of hand that add up to one big lie. The $726 billion in tax cuts were to be spread over ten years, while the 1.4 million jobs were only those forecasted to be created in the first 18 months; and the $40,000 is just a single year's salary. Krugman squirmed for weeks when I pointed this out on National Review Online in my "Krugman Truth Squad" column, and posted a series of lame explanations on his personal website; the Times never ran a correction or explanation.

A couple of truly embarrassing columns are included. Considering the comparison -- in the book's introduction -- of the Bush administration to "totalitarian regimes in the 1930s," it was a slip to include the October 2002 column in which Krugman blasted Republicans for using "the Hitler analogy" against Democrats. And, considering Krugman's claim in the preface that "I thought stock prices were way out of line" at the top of the market in 2000, he shouldn't have included the February 2000 column in which he wrote, "I'm not sure that the current value of the Nasdaq is justified, but I'm not sure that it isn't." Apparently he's sure now.

Krugman's book is, in a sense, a correction: a special kind of no-more- tears correction, in which the columnist has the luxury of eliminating for posterity the things he's sorry he said, and adding the things he wishes he'd said. Yet this self-serving deportation of troublesome past columns to some literary gulag is, at its heart, a great confession of weakness -- and weakness is the one thing that must never be confessed by anyone who would hurl thunderbolts from the Olympus of the New York Times. Howell Raines was banished from that mountain. How long will Paul Krugman dwell there?