HOW DIRE IS GWYNNE?

Kate has some cute photo work at smalldeadanimals.

It suggests that Gwynne Dyer is a Canadian morph of America's Michael Moore and the UK's Robert Fisk.

It's cute. There are striking resemblances.

I'm a bit saddened by it though. I haven't seen or read much of Dyer since leaving Canada. Based on what little I have read, I would say he hasn't yet touched Fisk or Moore levels of lunacy. Still, with his frequent railing against the 'neo-cons,' I fear that he has caught a case of a Anti-Bush-Rage-Dementia (ABRD).

I hope Dyer can pull himself out of it. I do recall a time only a decade ago that I read and usually enjoyed his stuff. That was back in the cheerful post-Cold War and pre-War-on-Terror days of the mid-1990s. He seemed a pretty sharp guy with a moderately leftish view of the world. He also had a fairly broad range of interests, opining on Asia, Africa and the Balkans. He was closer to a Canadian version of the NYT's Nick Kristof than of the current incarnation of Michael Moore.

I admit that my liking of Dyer then was based in part on hometown pride. It was nice to see a fellow St. John's lad make a decent career for himself in international media. I was in j-school at the time and had hoped to follow suit.

I met Dyer once after a speech he gave at my undergrad university. It was 1992/93 and he railed briefly against the pro-Soviet left-wing ideologies that dominated a number of faculties on campus back then. That was a pretty brave thing to do at the time - although brave only in that it meant he risked being hit with a high-velocity Boston-cream donut or other pastry. (Not at MUN, of course, but I assume he was giving the same speech at little-red-schoolhouses like York.)

I hope Dyer will return to his more-balanced self after end of the Bush presidency. I'd hate to permanently lose another another pundit to ABRD. Witnessing the great unravelling of Paul Krugman's mind was depressing enough.

I've accepted long ago that Krugman, a pundit I had formerly enjoyed, had likely caught a fatal case.

Only a few years ago, I used to often cite Krugman when making arguments. He was an ardent supporter of free trade, a master of exchange-rate theory, and an upholder of Western values against arguments that Asian (totalitarian) values were superior. The stuff Krugman wrote in the mid-1990s was nicely captured in his book Pop Internationalism, which could still sit comfortably against Milt Friedman on a libertarian's bookshelf. It does on mine (metaphorically, of course, I do alphabetize by author).

His deconstruction of the Asian Miracle was and remains a favorite essay - I would still recommend it to anyone who fears Chinese or Indian economic growth.

But now, Krugman's endless anti-Bush rants have pushed him beyond recovery. Even in his economic writing - where he could be making solid arguments against Bush on a number of failures (weakness on free trade, the deficit, the energy bill) – his polemicist tirades weaken otherwise decent arguments.

The Economist (subscription required) noted in November last year:

increasingly, people are asking whether Mr Krugman's success as a journalist is now coming at the expense of, rather than as the result of, his economics. For while he has had some journalistic coups during his time as a columnist - most notably in recognising, long before most other commentators, that market manipulation played a role in the California energy crisis - perhaps the most striking thing about his writing these days is not its economic rigour but its political partisanship.

Lyinginponds.com, a website that tracks partisanship among American political columnists, rates Mr Krugman second in the overall partisan slant of his columns, behind only Ann Coulter, a fiercely (and often incoherently) conservative polemicist. As the site documents exhaustively, the vast majority of Mr Krugman's columns feature attacks on Republicans; almost none criticise Democrats. Unsurprisingly, this has made him a sort of ivory-tower folk-hero of the American left—a thinking person's Michael Moore.

It continues:

A glance through his past columns reveals a growing tendency to attribute all the world's ills to George Bush. Regarding California's energy crisis, for example, he berated the Bush administration and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for not imposing price caps sooner—but found no room to mention Bill Clinton, who presided over a similarly inactive FERC for the first part of the crisis, nor to attack California's then Democratic governor Gray Davis for his disastrous refusal to allow consumer prices to rise. After Mahathir Mohamad, the prime minister of Malaysia, recently gave an anti-Semitic speech, Mr Krugman argued that the Bush administration's ham-fisted foreign policy had forced Dr Mahathir to make the remarks in order to shore up domestic political support—most unlikely, given that he was about to step down.

Even his economics is sometimes stretched. A recent piece accused conservatives of embracing the “lump of labour fallacy”, the mistaken claim that there is a fixed quantity of work which governments must strive to allocate equitably. In fact, the paper he cited did not commit the lump of labour fallacy. He used game theory to argue that, by criticising North Korea but not attacking it, and then going after Iraq instead, Mr Bush is “probably” encouraging North Korea to become a more dangerous nuclear power. This probably did not convince most game theorists. Overall, the effect is to give lay readers the illusion that Mr Krugman's perfectly respectable personal political beliefs can somehow be derived empirically from economic theory.

It would be nice to get the old Paul Krugman back. I also hope that when I return to Canada I'll be able to enjoy Dyer.

For now, I'll content myself with the fact that I've gained Christopher Hitchens.