Actually, those “noted” art critics who say George W. Bush’s paintings are good are right. Not all of Bush’s work is good, but he does have genuine talent. One of his portraits shows an egotistical, bloated Putin who’s also unnaturally pale and looks frightened. There’s a lot of truth in that. George W. Bush saw it.
Bush was a spoiled, irresponsible, privileged, and embarrassing president but he is (so far) a credible painter. Give him that.
Paul Krugman gets down to the nitty-gritty of the resentment the American wealthy feel towards those who criticize them.
There are definitely times when it seems that our winner-take-all society is also a whiner-take-all society; it’s really amazing how quick billionaires are to portray themselves as victims because some people say nasty things about them. One remarkable aspect of this whining is that the nasty things aren’t really all that nasty. Saying that the Koch brothers are using their wealth to promote a political agenda that will make them even wealthier is a substantive claim, not character assassination; it’s not at all the same as, say, suggesting that Hillary Clinton is a murderer. Yet the Kochs and Perkinses act as if this kind of thing were utterly vile, an attack on their liberty. …Krugman,blog
Noticed that lately? Krugman gets it right. The way to fight off critics is to cry “unfair”! To plead for pity! This tactic — this “aw, gee, don’t be so mean!” is much more dangerous that one might think.
Amy Davidson, writing in the New Yorker, describes the cries of “Kristallnacht!’ from the right.
Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, in which the Supreme Court struck down aggregate limits on campaign donations, offers a novel twist in the conservative contemplation of what Nazis have to do with the way the rich are viewed in America. In January, Tom Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, worried about a progressive Kristallnacht; Kenneth Langone, the founder of Home Depot, said, of economic populism, “If you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.”
Take Krugman’s warning seriously — he gets it right:
The thing is, I don’t think the crybaby thing is an act, put on for strategic purposes. I think it’s real. Billionaires really are feeling vulnerable despite their wealth and power, or perhaps because of it. And the apparatchiks serving the .01 percent are deeply insecure, culturally and intellectually, so that ridicule cuts deep.
It’s kind of sad, really – but also more than a bit scary: When great power goes along with fragile egos, seriously bad things can happen. …Krugman,blog