Nobel prize-winning economist and NYT columnist, Paul Krugman, pronounces The Geithner Plan economic "hocus pocus" and dead on arrival.

Why is this good news?

For all his erudition and acclaim, Krugman is too often a pompous and grandiloquent fool. And history, possessing a keen sense of irony, tends to seek out the most bombastic and definitive statements for singular embarrassment.

In short, Krugman is salivating at the possibility of a failure so huge that the only solution is complete government control (and I suspect he would also relish a turn running Treasury). But a successful private-public partnership does not further his agenda for nationalized banking and a planned economy.

This is not the first time Krugman has let his preferences get in the way of his judgment. He possesses a track record for pronouncements of doom that turned out to be nothing more than wishful thinking.

Krugman on the SURGE in Iraq (September 2007):

The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration — maybe even Mr. Bush himself — know this, too.

The Financial Crisis is Barack Obama's Iraq. Just as President Bush understood that Iraq (once engaged) was the one potential threat that could fundamentally alter American hegemony in the world, President Obama needs to understand that the potential Financial Meltdown possesses the same destructive capacity.

Just as the surge had to work to save us all, the Geithner Plan has the same scent of absolute necessity (and desperation).

I hope the "Krug" is just as wrong now as he was then.