Paul Krugman stuck this little addendum to the end of his blog post yesterday about former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum’s departure from conservative think tank AEI reportedly over pressure from donors after Frum called the passage of health-care reform the GOP’s Waterloo: “I’m informed, by family members, that Frum is a distant cousin of yours truly.” Wait, Krugman is just finding out about this now? Sure, it’s not a big revelation or anything, since everyone is basically a distant cousin of someone noteworthy if you get distant enough, but we would have figured that one of Krugman’s family members would have mentioned this to him before, seeing as how he’s kind of interested in politics and all. And actually, they did.
From a 2003 post on Krugman’s now-defunct Princeton website:
According to a newsletter my parents receive, about families that came from a now-vanished shtetl, I am distantly related to David Frum.
It’s too bad Krugman evidently forgot about this fact between 2003 and yesterday. Just think how much more inappropriately tense political debate there could have been at Krugman-family Thanksgiving dinners these past few years if Frum had been there.
David Frum, AEI, Heritage And Health Care [Conscience of a Liberal/NYT]
