Tom Levenson, Driven into Shrillness by Tom Friedman Once More...

Dog Bites Man: Tom Friedman Mischaracterizes US Interventions. « The Inverse Square Blog: Atrios sent me in search of Tom Friedman’s latest, and, like its author, it’s a bizarre piece of work. Backstory:  back in the dawn of time, when giants still walked the earth (Mays in center field; McCovey at first base, Marichal on the mound), and humans preserved their communications in scratches on clay, Tom Friedman was a real reporter and a good one.  He spent time in country, he worked sources, he could write. Somewhere along the line, though, during the Clinton years, I believe, he seems to have convinced  himself that his wealth of experience had given him the key to all mythologies. Hence such trifles as his “argument” that we should invade Iraq to show that the US could punch somebody,[1] the endless iteration of “Friedman Units” and so on. And now, with the war in Iraq now in its Pilate phase... Friedman comes up with a column that captures so many of his deficiencies in one place.  There is the complete abandonment of the reportorial function. He doesn’t talk to folks, he tags along (his phrase) with US JCS Chairman Admiral McMullen.  Nice company, to be sure, but not that in which you will find unvarnished opinions being expressed. He doesn’t seem even interested in testing his assumptions against any possibility of contrary information anymore: >In the dining hall on the main base, I like to watch the Iraqi officers watching the melting pot of U.S. soldiers around them — men, women, blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics — and wonder: What have they learned from us? Wonder?  WONDER? You’re a journalist — or rather you used to be!  You don’t blow wonder through your ass.   You go find out what they have learned from us.  But no…that would be (a) heavy lifting and (b) dangerous... so much so that it might render this kind of conclusion not merely pathetic, but simply unsayable: >We left some shameful legacies here of torture and Abu Ghraib, but we also left a million acts of kindness and a profound example of how much people of different backgrounds can accomplish when they work together. Well, how much have we and they accomplished?  Some, I’m sure…... ut given this kind of news, buried in what used to be called the b section, but popping up with depressing regularity, perhaps not as much as Friedman’s breezy tour with the brass may indicate. And in any event — how is it possible that a Serious Foreign Policy Thinker™ no matter how burnt out, overly comfortable, and generally hackified could actually bring himself to write such a Hallmark Card notion:  that the events of the last six years (12 F.U.s, if you’re counting) are coming to rest in a satisfactory state because, hey, we can all work together? I guess there is a thread of naivete left to me.  I grew up thinking that there was something special about the New York Times. I met Tony Lukas when I was 18, Tony Lewis some time later — and people like that impressed me for the fire they had, that seemed to come from that newsroom.  You didn’t get comfortable there, it seemed to my juvenile eyes.  Even when you got big, you felt the pressure the place forcing you to make that last call to get it right. I know that’s a fantasy, and I’m sure it was never as true as I wanted it to be.   And even with the decline of the Times (Judith Miller, anyone... Ross freaking Douthat?) it’s still better than the whatever that other emblem of journalistic moxie, the Post has become.  But that’s kind of like saying that liver is better than spam… But still... Friedman could once actually do the job he mails in now.  It’s painful to watch.  He should pack it in.  Otherwise it’s just going to go ever further down hill.  For, in this column as in this post, he and I save the best/worst for last.  If Friedman hopes to hang on above Kristol territory, he has to find a way to stop writing stuff like this: >After we invaded and stabilized Bosnia, we didn’t just toss their competing factions the keys. Except, of course, we did not invade Bosnia.  The American led NATO intervention in the Bosnian War occured in 1995, just as Friedman was making his ultimately disastrous move to the NYTime’s Opinion pages, so he perhaps may have been distracted, but the military action taken by the US and its allies consisted of 3515 aerial sorties:  a hellacious bombing campaign. If this seems like a distinction without a difference, think again:  many DFHs without Friedman’s bully pulpit tried to suggest that the range of analogies being drawn to justify the Iraq War back in 2002-2003 were false.  Iraq wasn’t Japan in August 1945; Bagdad was not Berlin; displacing Saddam was more like witnessing Tito’s death and the start of the Yugoslav disintegration than it was our ratification of Balkan partition in 1995 — and not much like that either.  Friedman chose then not to know any historical complexity.  He still does.  And as he continues to scrabble to find justifications for his own disastrous cheerleading for the Iraq war,  he’s willing to get basic facts wrong to prevent the slightest dissonant fact from disturbing the eternal sunshine of his mind. If it were me, or any other mere blogger, or even one of the deranged commenters at Redstate thus deluded — who cares.  But despite the evident decline of even the flagship mass media organizations, the power that comes with the NYT platform and the inertial weight of Friedman’s own brand means that when he says stupid sh-t, he can get people killed.  And that’s why this matters. ---- [1] From Wikipedia: >In an interview with Charlie Rose in 2003, Friedman said: >>What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?” You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This.[23][24][25] ..We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth... >Similarly, in NPR’s Talk of the Nation, September 23, 2003: >>...and sometimes it takes a 2-by-4 across the side of the head to get that message.

And...

we're back!

Shrillblog: The Israeli Edition

While we here at the Order generally focus our arts upon domestic shrillness, we are not without appreciation for such activity in far away lands--and especially so when it involves a country's leader gettin' all shrill and unbalanced his own bad self. Or: Ehud Olmert is shrill and unbalanced:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published on Monday that Israel must withdraw from nearly all of the West Bank as well as East Jerusalem to attain peace with the Palestinians and that any occupied land it held onto would have to be exchanged for the same quantity of Israeli territory.

He also dismissed as “megalomania” any thought that Israel would or should attack Iran on its own to stop it from developing nuclear weapons, saying the international community and not Israel alone was charged with handling the issue.

In an unusually frank and soul-searching interview granted after he resigned to fight corruption charges — he remains interim prime minister until a new government is sworn in — Mr. Olmert discarded longstanding Israeli defense doctrine and called for radical new thinking, in words that are sure to stir controversy as his expected successor, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, tries to build a coalition.

“What I am saying to you now has not been said by any Israeli leader before me,” Mr. Olmert told the newspaper Yediot Aharonot in the interview on the occasion of the Jewish new year, observed from Monday evening till Wednesday evening. “The time has come to say these things.”

There are some of us at the Order that believe this sort of shrillness may become a pattern of world leaders as they exit the stage, taking a strong adversarial stance agaist what they've been doing for the bulk of their political careers.

Works for us. We just like the shrill. We needs it.

Karl Rove is Shrill?

Um

No, Mr. Rove is not eligible for membership in the Order.

Republicans are Shrill!

Wait, what?

Barry Ritholtz Is Shrill!!

Barry Ritholtz, at The Big Picture:

The Big Picture | Really Bad Call: SubPrime Doesn't Matter, Buy Bear Stearns: What we are looking for is stupendous, horrific, jumbo money losing stupidity. Which brings us to Ben Stein.

know I swore off Stein a year ago, but I stumbled across this piece from 12 months ago, I had to remind you of exactly how myopic and, well, just plain incompetent the guy is: From August 2007 Ben Stein:

SubPrime Doesn't Matter, Buy Bear Stearns: The rate of loss in subprime mortgages keeps climbing. In time, perhaps it will double, maybe back to $67 billion. This is a large sum by absolute standards, and I would sure like to have it in my bank account. But by the metrics of a large economy, it is nothing. The total wealth of the United States is about $70 trillion. The value of the stocks listed in the United States is very roughly $15 trillion to $20 trillion. The bond market is even larger.

You can read it paragraph by paragraph and discover something wonderfully wrong in almost every sentence . . .

Really, why the hell does the NYT insist on publishing this guy? He is a political hack, a terrible economist -- and an enormous money loser. And thats this week's Really Really Bad Call...

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And here is the original from Ben Stein:

Chicken Little’s Brethren, on the Trading Floor - New York Times: THE job of an economist, among many other duties, is to put things into perspective. So, because I am an economist, among other duties, here is a little perspective on the recent turmoil in the stock and bond markets.

First, when the story of this turbulence is reported, the usual explanation mainly has to do with some new loss in the subprime mortgage world — the universe of mortgages and mortgage-backed instruments related to buyers with poor credit histories or none at all.

Here is the first instance in which proportion tells us that something is out of whack:

The total mortgage market in the United States is roughly $10.4 trillion. Of that, a little over 13 percent, or about $1.35 trillion, is subprime — certainly a large sum. Of this, nearly 14 percent is delinquent, meaning late in payment or in foreclosure. Of this amount, about 5 percent is actually in foreclosure, or about $67 billion. Of this amount, according to my friends in real estate, at least about half will be recovered in foreclosure. So now we are down to losses of about $33 billion to $34 billion.

The rate of loss in subprime mortgages keeps climbing. In time, perhaps it will double, maybe back to $67 billion. This is a large sum by absolute standards, and I would sure like to have it in my bank account.

But by the metrics of a large economy, it is nothing. The total wealth of the United States is about $70 trillion. The value of the stocks listed in the United States is very roughly $15 trillion to $20 trillion. The bond market is even larger.

Much more to the point, the fears and terrors about subprime mortgages have helped knock off 6.7 percent of the stock market’s value in recent weeks. This amounts to about $1.1 trillion, or more than 30 times the losses so far in the subprime market. In other words, these subprime losses are wildly out of all proportion to the likely damage to the economy from the subprime problems.

The disconnect goes even further. The Dow Jones industrial average has been heavily moved by fears about the subprime market. But how are most of the Dow 30 affected by subprime mortgages in any meaningful way? No Dow company is short of liquidity, and consumer spending is still strong.

Foreign stocks, especially in developing countries, have been hard hit, and this is supposedly connected with a “repricing of risk,” which in turn is connected with subprime mortgages. But how are the risks in Thailand or Brazil or Indonesia intrinsically related to problems in a housing tract in Las Vegas? The developing countries are fantastically strong and liquid. Why should problems at a mortgage company in Long Island have anything to do with them?

European stocks have also been hard hit, and this has to do with relatively small amounts of subprime in some European banks. On a global scale, the numbers in Germany and France are minuscule for subprime exposure. For European markets to fall on subprime issues makes no sense.

News last Thursday that a small amount of unpriceable subprime mortgages was in a BNP Paribas fund in France sent the markets in Europe and the United States sharply lower. Why? The losses in France are at most in the single billions, while the losses in United States markets alone were in the hundreds of billions on the BNP news.

Then there is the supposed “drying up” of credit for private equity deals because of fears of risk. But this is also puzzling. I can’t think of a single recent major private equity deal in which the bonds have defaulted.

More to the point, suppose that all private equity deals were stalled for a year. Why should this affect the Dow? None of companies in the Dow 30 is having trouble raising cash. And suppose that all private equity deals went away for good. Taken together, they are not all that big a piece of the United States economy. Why should they put the markets of the richest nation in the world, as well as all of the world’s other markets, into turmoil?

Then let’s take a peek at Bear Stearns. This venerable and clever financial house has taken some major hits on subprime mortgages lately. That is sad for the stockholders (I am a very small stockholder), and the price of Bear Stearns stock has tumbled.

A little over a week ago, news about Bear Stearns’ liquidity issues lowered the its market value by about more than $1 billion in one day. That is a big hit to a single company, to be sure, but then came the shocker: that news also helped wipe out hundreds of billions off the total value of United States stocks.

MY point is this: I don’t know where the bottom is on subprime. I don’t know how bad the problems are at Bear. Yet I do know that the market reactions are wildly out of proportion to the real problems that have been revealed. Maybe there is some giant thing hiding in the closet that might rationalize the market’s fears. But if it’s hidden, how can the market be reacting to it in the first place?

More will be revealed, as the saying goes. But recently, investors have been selling out of all relation to what we know. Reassurances in word and deed from Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, helped calm the markets on Friday. But recent events are a disturbing commentary on the power of fear.

This economy is extremely strong. Profits are superb. The world economy is exploding with growth. To be sure, terrible problems lurk in the future: a slow-motion dollar crisis, huge Medicare deficits and energy shortages. But for now, the sell-off seems extreme, not to say nutty.

Some smart, brave people will make a fortune buying in these days, and then we’ll all wonder what the scare was about.

"He Doesn't Seem Like a Serious President"

Andrew Sullivan has a shrill moment:

How Shitty Was McCain?, by Andrew Sullivan: Yes, the last couple of weeks of the campaign, even from my remote perch, were pretty uninspiring on the GOP side. Here's my brief take, for what it's worth. ... The arrogant-celebrity meme is a variation on the usual Rovian fare: empty of actual policy substance but evocative of playground loyalties and resentments. Basically, McCain called Obama a girl, to appeal to the jocks, and then called him arrogant to flatter the nerds. Paris Hilton is a two-fer. Choosing a female celebrity is integral to the usual attempt to feminize the Democrat. I could see nothing racist whatever in the message, mind you, but it was, as Weaver noted, pretty asinine.

Less asinine was McCain's two-pronged lie that Obama would rather lose a war than a campaign and that he snubbed injured troops in Germany. The former is repulsively low-life and you can tell McCain knows it because he has a weird habit of saying it and then grinning broadly and humming a little to himself as a semi-laugh. He doesn't own the statement even as he says it. The statement itself is about as uncivil as it is possible to be, close to calling him treasonous, right? And the troop snub jibe is simply, demonstrably untrue, as the McCain camp was forced to semi-concede. So McCain's main moves these past two weeks have been either childish or disgusting, and both times he has signaled he didn't really believe his own message. He doesn't seem like a serious president to me.