A couple of points need to be highlighted regarding Paul Krugman's opinion piece at New York Times today, "A Dangerous Dysfunction." (Via Memeorandum.)

The first is that the essay's a good indication of the outsized influence of unhinged radical bloggers have on people like Paul Krugman, a Princeton professor and Nobel prizewinner. For example, just last Saturday, Krugman cited America-basher Matthew Yglesias in a blog post about the progressive foundations of the ObamaCare legislation. (For the extremist context there, recall that last month Yglesias argued moral equivalence between GOP senators filibustering healthcare and first-degree murderers.) In his essay today, Krugman's recycling the months-long argument for killing the filibuster, a proposal most notoriously circulated by Ezra Klein at the Washington Post (who himself argued that Joseph Lieberman's threat of a filibuster would "cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people"), and distributed further by Yglesias et al.

But the second thing is perfectly related to the first. It turns out that last week Krugman announced, "By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy." And very oddly, in his essay today, after mentioning Tom Harkin and Joseph Lieberman in the same breath, Krugman inserts this passage in parentheses, "(Management wants me to make it clear that in my last column I wasn’t endorsing inappropriate threats against Mr. Lieberman.)"

WTF.

Seriously, what's that supposed to be? As Jennifer Rubin points out, "A more insincere apology would be hard to find." And she adds:

What is clear is that for all the Times’s snooty condescension about the blogosphere, the editorial pages of the Gray Lady are no better than the average netroot blog. Journalistic ethics? Puh-leez! Common decency? Fuggedaboutit!