Ezra Klein addresses the Gruber disclosure in a thoughtfully and professionally. I disagree with him pretty strongly on the issues, but he’s done us all a tremendous service by becoming a one-man clearinghouse for information relating to the health reform debate. Paul Krugman, in contrast, is Paul Krugman.

I’ll add that Krugman misrepresents John Cochrane’s remarks to John Cassidy of The New Yorker in another post, but that’s to be expected. He follows with this:

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Chicago just turned inward on itself circa 1982, and stopped paying attention either to the world or to anyone not of its tribe. And now it finds that the rest of the world is returning the favor.

One could argue that Krugman has turned outward from the academy and his intellectual engagement now consists primarily in serving as the curmudgeonly ideological enforcer of a large echo chamber of left-of-center public intellectuals from other disciplines, opinion journalists, and a small number of like-minded economists, an even smaller number of whom have the standing to challenge him on the basis of their professional accomplishments. Those who do have the standing to challenge him and do are dismissed, rather amusingly, as ideologues.

If I didn’t love irony, I’d be banging my head against a wall right now. But I do!