I have to say, I’m delighted to see someone as tenacious as Glenn Greenwald get in a scrape with Paul Krugman. Whatever you think of Greenwald, he’s not one to be intimidated by sloppy or tendentious arguments, regardless of the credentials or Olympian self-assurance of his interlocutor.

Krugman accuses me and others of “claiming that there’s a huge scandal” here and of conducting a “crusade against Gruber,” but I did no such thing. “Huge scandal” is just a rhetorical straw man to rail against. I didn’t even mention the Gruber matter until yesterday, and did so only because of its obvious relationship to the Sunstein scheme I was discussing. Ironically, the only reason the Gruber matter has received as much attention as it has is because Gruber’s defenders began aggressively attacking the people who uncovered, documented and objected to the undisclosed payments, as Krugman did when he equated the sober and cautious Marcy Wheeler with “the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals.” People can characterize the magnitude of the failings here however they want (“huge” or otherwise), but the indisputable fact is that Gruber was running around publicly and favorably commenting on the President’s health care plan — while the White House and its allies were centrally relying on him and characterizing him as an “objective” analyst – at exactly the same time that the administration, unbeknownst to virtually everyone, was paying Gruber many hundreds of thousands of dollars. The DNC alone sent out 71 emails touting Gruber’s analysis without even once mentioning the payments. Those are just facts.

Emphasis added. I was amused to see Greenwald identify a characteristic Krugman move. I have to say, Krugman is truly the most gifted polemicist working in America today — much “better” in his own way than his counterparts on the right at marginalizing and dismissing views he considers counterproductive.