Paul Krugman doesn’t like Republicans very much. This is not a recent development. However the extent of his loathing often takes him along truly unique rhetorical paths. Such as the notion that Republicans are dooming America into non-existence, just like what happened to Poland a couple of centuries ago.

Lest you think I’m taking his words out of context, here’s how Krugman says it himself:

Instead of fraying under the strain of imperial overstretch, we’re paralyzed by procedure. Instead of re-enacting the decline and fall of Rome, we’re re-enacting the dissolution of 18th-century Poland.

A brief history lesson: In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Polish legislature, the Sejm, operated on the unanimity principle: any member could nullify legislation by shouting “I do not allow!” This made the nation largely ungovernable, and neighboring regimes began hacking off pieces of its territory. By 1795 Poland had disappeared, not to re-emerge for more than a century.

Today, the U.S. Senate seems determined to make the Sejm look good by comparison.

What this comes down to (surprise, surprise) is that cursed forty-first vote Republicans picked up in the Senate with the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts to fill the former “Ted Kennedy seat.” Apparently once this happened Republicans devised a clever new scheme, never attempted before by any other Senatorial minority, to use to their advantage a bizarre and little understood Senatorial procedure called… get ready for this, it’s a pretty obscure one… the “filibuster.”

Oh wait… I think maybe I actually have heard of this “filibuster” thing previously. I think i might recall it as a hugely contentious issue back when the Democrats were in the minority and the Republicans proposed removing the filibuster when it came to judicial nominations only. What’s more I seem to recall the left freaking the hell out about the proposed change, starting yet another wave of fury about “RepubliKKKan tyranny!” and the like. In the end the left won the debate, the filibuster was preserved intact, and things moved on…

They moved on right up to the point where Democrats lost the Senate super-majority needed to deprive the opposition of the ability to filibuster when Massachusetts elected Republican Scott Brown to the Senate. Suddenly hardcore partisan lefties like Paul Krugman don’t like the filibuster so much any more. Previously the ability to filibuster up down judicial nomination votes was some kind of bedrock preventing the tyranny of the majority. Now it’s… well even worse when the left is arguing the opposite case. Check out some more of Krugman’s histrionics:

The truth is that given the state of American politics, the way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government. Senators themselves should recognize this fact and push through changes in those rules, including eliminating or at least limiting the filibuster. This is something they could and should do, by majority vote, on the first day of the next Senate session.

Nice going, Massachussetts! Couldn’t elect another lefty rubber-stamper like always, could you? Noooo! You had to go and reduce the number of Senate Democrats from 60 to 59 and thereby break the whole flipping government!!!

Also Mr. Krugman seems to be advocating a Senate rule change by a simple majority vote. When Republicans advocated this it was characterized as the “nuclear option,” to emphasize how HUGE and UNTHINKABLE such a partisan act would be. Now that the filibuster is holding up lefty laws instead of “Rethuglican” judicial nominees, it’s an unremarkable procedure you can just do whenever… hardly worth mentioning.

Krugman is on the same page as I am in some aspects though. For instance he says:

As it is, Democrats don’t even seem able to score political points by highlighting their opponents’ obstructionism.

It should be a simple message (and it should have been the central message in Massachusetts): a vote for a Republican, no matter what you think of him as a person, is a vote for paralysis.

Yeah, I’d really like to see the Democratic Party make that the central theme of the next election too… “Vote for Republicans only if you want to see the Democrats stopped from implementing all the great ideas they’ve been trying to ram down your throat for the past year.” It’s kind of catchy. Run with that.

And then, because he’s so convinced his metaphor is pitch perfect, we’re back to Poland…

After the dissolution of Poland, a Polish officer serving under Napoleon penned a song that eventually — after the country’s post-World War I resurrection — became the country’s national anthem. It begins, “Poland is not yet lost.”

Well, America is not yet lost. But the Senate is working on it.

Got that? An America in which the Senate retains a filibuster rule is at least as screwed up if not more so than Poland was after being entirely dissolved and absorbed by the Prussian, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires in 1795.

It’s that kind of prudent caution and careful policy framing context which has the American people chomping at the bit to elect cool headed Democrats more like Paul Krugman. What an odd lesson to take when your Senate super-majority was just canceled by Massa-flippin-chusetts.