Richard Meirowitz | America was a 'stan' long before Trump

Paul Krugman et al conveniently forget that corruption, cronyism and contempt for the rule of law long predated Trump.

Apparently, for a host of "progressive" writers, American history began on November 8, 2016.
People and events before that notorious date have been forgotten or marginalised, in effect, to sanitise America's not-so-distant past in order to paint an apocalyptic picture of its not-too-distant future as US president-elect Donald Trump prepares for his inauguration.
These writers aren't principally seized by a lazy, predictable historical revisionism - although there's certainly an irritating dose of that, to be sure - but rather a wilful amnesia that has infected their thinking and writing like a synapsis-sapping virus.
Lately, that contagion has contaminated the thinking and writing of marquee New York Times columnist and "progressive" Paul Krugman.
Earlier this week, Krugman penned a piece suggesting that America - with Trump and his fellow feather-bedding "cronies" manning the state's cash register - is destined to morph quickly into one of those garish, "tin pot" "Central Asian" "regimes", or "stans" for short.
Krugman's satiric abbreviation was instantly and wildly popular with his fellow progressives as the derisive column ricocheted quickly and widely on social media.
But Krugman's column proves that even Nobel prize-winning economists can conveniently forget the past in the smug, grating service of American hubris and exceptionalism.

Americastan

Look, Trump is an unabashed reflection of what America is and will continue to be - whether Krugman and company are prepared to admit it or not. America was a "stan" long before the Manhattan megalomaniac was elected president by more than 62 million Americans chomping to install their "stan"-like version of a tin-pot "dictator" into the White House.
Still, I don't recall any of the other "stans" invading and subsequently destroying a sovereign nation and its people based on cooked-up "intelligence".

OPINION: America's flawed democracy

I don't recall the other "stans" setting up "black sites" across the globe where countless people were shipped like pieces of baggage to be tortured out of the Red Cross's sight or those pesky, irrelevant human rights conventions.
I don't recall the other "stans" secretly hauling Muslim and Arab men - many of them innocent - to a gulag at Guantanamo Bay without charge to rot, to be tortured, go mad or commit suicide.
I don't recall the other "stans" unilaterally ordering extrajudicial killings by way of remote drones and having to apologise repeatedly and pay compensation for massacring children, women and men who thought they were attending a wedding, not their summary executions.
I don't recall the other "stans" engineering the near collapse of the global financial system because of the insatiable avarice of mostly middle-aged, pinstripe suit-wearing con men on Wall Street.
I could go on, but you and, perhaps, Krugman get the point.

Forgetting inconvenient truths

Like other pedestrian polemicists, Krugman begins his oh-so-pithy column with the oh-so-pithy caricature of Turkmenistan's president cementing, as it were, his "cult of personality" with a gaudy, oversized sculpture of himself on horseback.
Turkmenistan's resident narcissist-in-chief could have carved, I suppose, a 60ft-high, granite likeness of himself into a mountainside as a permanent ode to his greatness like, say, presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln at Mount Rushmore. Read More.......... Richard Meirowitz