In keeping with the reality of early morning, it’s always a heart-touching, easy embrace to read Nobel Prize-winner and NYT columnist Paul Krugman, especially on Mondays — in a quiet, peaceful pre-dawn it’s hard to believe the USA and the world is going to shit in a wire basket.

A lot of folks don’t like the guy, he’s a Democrat, which puts him on the same bus with Hitler, book-burners, mass-killers, and ah, let’s see, maybe Satan.
I’ve always enjoyed his work, though, sometimes he gets a bit technical and one-sided, but overall he seems to see the holes in the fabric of economic policy and all its side issues.
He said early on Obama’s financial stimulus package was way-too small, and sure-enough, now everybody seems to agree much-more cash-up-front was required way-back 18 months ago.
This morning, Krugman’s column is about the horror of the coming mid-term elections and the extreme-near future.

There’s concern about a nasty-mouthed, right-wing saying whatever ugly thought comes to its mind, i.e., asshole, fat-cheeked, Rush Limbaugh’s recent “Imam Hussein Obama” bullshit:

To get a sense of how much it matters when people like Mr. Limbaugh talk like this, bear in mind that he’s an utterly mainstream figure within the Republican Party; bear in mind, too, that unless something changes the political dynamics, Republicans will soon control at least one house of Congress.
This is going to be very, very ugly.

Yes, most indeed.

Frank Rich, Krugman’s stable-mate at the NYT, also had a Sunday piece on right-wing bullshit.
Money quote at the end:

When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely.
Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.”
When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”
And Obama?
So far, sadly, this question answers itself.

And at 4 a.m. that’s a real ugly, sad reality.