Matt Yglesiaswrites:

STRANGE NEW RESPECT. Now that Larry Summers is suddenly garnering strange new respect from conservatives, I can’t help but wonder if his new friends on the right will start paying attention to his views in his actual areas of expertise. Social Security, for example. It seems to me that when he talks about that stuff, the wingnuts don’t much care for him. But he really is an economist and not a biologist. Just saying.

Despite the cutsey tone — or maybe because of it — this strikes me as profoundly lame. If Summers agreed with the privatization crowd, he would be treated as the right’s pet Harvard hack and conservative support would be written off as Popular-Frontism. But since Summers opposes privatization, Yglesias insinuates, conservatives must be hypocrites for coming to his defense. Yglesias surely knows how cheap and lame this point would be if put in the form of serious argument, so he does it with a light touch, perhaps to make it sound more clever than it really is.