If we were to give Krugman the Krugman treatment, it’s not hard to see where we would attack Krugman: his attempts to write about conservatives.

First Krugman admits he doesn’t read conservatives: “Some have asked if there aren’t conservative sites I read regularly. Well, no.”

Fine. “Life is short,” Krugman writes. Then you would think life is too short to attack conservatives. But that seems to be Krugman’s favorite pastime. In fact, it’s pretty clear that part of his professional goal is to convince many liberals that conservative arguments are, per se, illegitimate. Unsurprisingly, Krugman attacks conservative arguments very poorly — as you would expect from someone who brags about not reading the topic he claims to be writing on.

In one of my favorite recent examples of Krugman not reading a conservative, that conservative was Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, where I am a visiting fellow. I assume Krugman accidentally caught a glimpse of Brooks’s op-ed because the op-ed ran on Krugman’s own editorial page.