Mr Paul Krugman in his book The Great Unraveling (W.W. Norton, New York, 2003) got ahead of the reality and in the cold clear light of the morning (NY Times columns, that is) he noticed repeatedly (more than 369 times, see below), while cooking his books, that Mr George W. Bush was called by the revolution- ary Devil to lead the nation out of the long national nightmare of peace and prosperity. Am I overstating the case? In fact, there’s ample evidence:

The book has 426 pages, in this imperfect world, but some of them are not guilty. When I exclude 20 empty pages in-between the chapters, 18 index pages, and 60 pages written before the year 2000 (when Krugman was ahead of the Asian curve and was busy consult- ing for Enron, the most celebrated company for its "aggressive accounting", the art form formerly known as fraud), and I include 15 preface pages (with Roman numerals), it comes to 343 relevant pages. On these 343 pages, Mr Bush, by his name,  is mentioned 369 times. Nor is even that the whole story: through these pages Mr Bush appears with roughly the same frequency under "president elect", "president", "the administration", or simply "he". Then, there are other crucial ingredients, like some dozen pages devoted to Dick Cheney who is not as bad as Mr Bush, but bad nevertheless.

The book is a compilation of the columns written for the NY Times between January 2000 and January 2003, plus some earlier Nobel Prize achievements. In the preface, Mr Krugman hopes that readers will find that the sum is more than the whole of its parts - that taken together these columns tell a coherent story. So, I did a sort of summary, above. And so it has turned out. I’m not sure that it is a coherent story, but I’m not sure that it isn’t.

started.) Mr Krugman knows that, and in his Acknowledgments he gives many thanks to "Eve Lazovitz who gently kept his logistics from spinning out of control". No, really? I’m sympathetic but not entirely convinced.