Today NYT's Paul Krugman argues that President Obama shouldn't give Republicans an inch when it comes to budget negotiations. Better to go over the fiscal cliff, says the brilliant Nobel Prize winner.

Meanwhile, just the other day, the good professor was dismissing Red America as not being worthy of  liberal concern or consideration. Thomas Franks asked "What the matter with Kansas?" Krugman responds: Who cares? They're not like us.

James Taranto analyzes:

How do you unite a collection of groups that have disparate and often conflicting interests? By turning them against a common enemy. In an early-morning postelection blog post, former Enron adviser Paul Krugman revealed this ugly truth:

One big thing that just happened was that the real America trumped the "real America." And it's also the election that lets us ask, finally, "Who cares what's the matter with Kansas?"

For a long time, right-wingers--and some pundits--have peddled the notion that the "real America," all that really counted, was the land of non-urban white people, to which both parties must abase themselves. Meanwhile, the actual electorate was getting racially and ethnically diverse, and increasingly tolerant too. The 2008 Obama coalition wasn't a fluke; it was the country we are becoming.

And sure enough that more diverse and, if you ask me, better nation just won big.

The lack of self-awareness here is something to behold. Krugman identifies a racially defined out-group, excludes it from the "real America," and declares the in-group to be a "better nation" than the out-group (which is, in fact, part of the same nation). All this in the name of tolerance.