To his enemies in the conservative media, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is a "sanctimonious twit" and a "pretentious charlatan" and an apostle of "neoliberal condescension" whose writings are "drearily predictable" and "delusional poppycock." Krugman, they say, is unbalanced and irrational in his hatred of George Bush and the Republican Party. He is the most prominent exemplar of a liberal minority gone mad with an apoplectic rage born of electoral impotence.

To judge by Krugman's current bestseller, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century, they are right about the rage part. Krugman is angry, yes, and he sure does hate George Bush and the Republican ideologues who advise him. But is it a pure hatred born of reasoned assessment, or simply the product of a febrile emotionalism?

In early 2000, the Times thought it was hiring a mild-mannered (if exceedingly self-congratulatory) Princeton economics professor--touted for a Nobel Prize for his expertise in the morphology of Third World currency crises--to explicate the wonders of the ever-rising New Economy. That in three short years a free-market, pro-globalization advocate not much given to political pronouncements evolved into liberal America's most beloved Bush basher says much about the political tenor of the times (and, its critics would say, of the Times).

Krugman described his political transformation in a recent phone conversation as a gradual process over the months of the 2000 presidential campaign. He came to see, he said, "that these people were lying... the sheer awfulness and dishonesty sunk in. I got more and more forthright about saying we've got some very bad people here."

And if there is one thing you can be sure of after reading Krugman's book--he also packed Town Hall last week as part of Foolproof Performing Arts' American Voices series--Krugman is not about to stop relentlessly, mercilessly, fanatically criticizing what he sees as the mendacity, artifice, and doublespeak of the current administration, and he will not do it, as his colleagues in the mainstream press tend to, in prose that is nuanced, or restrained, or politely encoded.

The unifying theme of Krugman's Times column--made explicit in the introduction to his book--is that the Bush administration is a "revolutionary power" that does not accept the legitimacy of existing democratic and social institutions. Its ultimate goal, he contends, is to launch a radical reactionary effort to dismantle the New Deal social welfare state.

Others have said similar things--Krugman's argument isn't much of an insight to liberal policy thinkers--but it is the blunt, even impolite, way he says this that garners so much polarizing attention. His critics, and they are legion, disparage him as probably the most partisan mainstream newspaper columnist in America, one obsessed, if not consumed, with a passionate antipathy to all things Bush. His fans, and they are legion, love him because they know that not only does he hate the Bushies' ideas, he hates the cloak of lies through which those ideas are foisted on a disengaged public. And he hates that such seemingly evident lies are too rarely challenged. At Town Hall, he half-jokingly told the audience, "I miss Reagan... I miss Richard Nixon." He missed them, he said, because they were relatively honest about their agenda.

Krugman is a funny speaker--a sort of Billy Crystal for the liberal intelligentsia, full of semi-self-deprecating asides ("I scare them but I do sell papers," he said of his Times employers). His book, which is largely a collection of Times columns, could have used some of that humor. To read these pieces back to back is like waking from a deep sleep to the relentless pounding drone of a jackhammer. Individually, his columns are punchy and cogently argued; read back to back, however, they often pound home the same points over and over. As National Review Online pointed out several years ago, during the 2000 campaign Krugman wrote no less than 14 separate columns attacking either the Bush tax cut or his Social Security privatization plan (or both).

Still, Krugman's critique, if repetitive and rabid and often lacking in subtlety, carries a serious implication: that our extant political culture, built on deceiving most of the people most of the time, is deeply, deeply sick. Take your pick: Either Paul Krugman is totally crazy or the world is. Or--and this is the most unpleasant thought of all--maybe both have gone a little bit around the bend simultaneously.