The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the battle of the Pauls — Krugman versus Ryan — in a strong editorial:

“The flim-flam man” is what Paul Krugman called Mr. Ryan in a New York Times column last week that set a spleen-to-substance record even for him. Amid drive-by attacks on the Congressman’s ethics and integrity, Mr. Krugman savaged Mr. Ryan’s “roadmap”—his detailed, long-range proposal to equalize taxes and the size of government—as “a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future.”
This might be dismissed as a familiar primal scream, except it perfectly echoes the Democratic Party’s emerging election strategy. The bills for decades of unsustainable social commitments are now coming due, especially Medicare, even as Democrats have created a vast new liability in ObamaCare. Mr. Ryan has one of the few credible plans for rationalizing the federal fisc, and his critics are so vicious because his candor exposes Washington’s illusions about the entitlement state while offering a genuine alternative. Democrats hope that demagoguing his proposals will allow them to hang on to their majorities this fall.

National Review Online caught up with Ryan to get his take on the Krugman kerfuffle. “I’ve been around long enough to know that the oldest political trick in the book is to avoid a real debate; to impugn motives and character and try to win the debate by default,” he says. “I guess what’s bizarre about it is how personal and ad hominem his attacks are. That’s just weird.”

“Krugman could have called up [my staff] and gotten a very clear timeline, or at least tried to understand the scoring process, which I don’t think he understands,” Ryan says. “The whole point of our revenue thing was to hit revenue targets using the best information we had at the time. Is Brookings right or are we right? Nobody knows, but the point is that the plan is designed to hit revenue targets, not to write a tax-reform plan and then shoehorn or score it to fit that.”