Shrill and, as always, funniest when it tells the truth:
"Factual data presented in these publications indicates that Bush took little or no action on issues as widely varied as the stalled economy, increasing violence in post-war Iraq, and the lagging public education system," Rocklin said. "The newsprint documents also reveal huge disparities between the ways Bush claimed to have served Medicare patients, and what he actually did."
Yes, she is a member of the Order of the Shrill:
Poynter Online - Forums: 9/29/2004 2:58:10 PM
From: [Wall Street Journal reporter] Farnaz Fassihi
Subject: From Baghdad
Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest. Forget about the reasons that lured me to this job: a chance to see the world, explore the exotic, meet new people in far away lands, discover their ways and tell stories that could make a difference.
Little by little, day-by-day, being based in Iraq has defied all those reasons. I am house bound. I leave when I have a very good reason to and a scheduled interview. I avoid going to people's homes and never walk in the streets. I can't go grocery shopping any more, can't eat in restaurants, can't strike a conversation with strangers, can't look for stories, can't drive in any thing but a full armored car, can't go to scenes of breaking news stories, can't be stuck in traffic, can't speak English outside, can't take a road trip, can't say I'm an American, can't linger at checkpoints, can't be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling. And can't and can't. There has been one too many close calls, including a car bomb so near our house that it blew out all the windows. So now my most pressing concern every day is not to write a kick-ass story but to stay alive and make sure our Iraqi employees stay alive. In Baghdad I am a security personnel first, a reporter second.
It's hard to pinpoint when the 'turning point' exactly began. Was it April when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home to ten percent of Iraq's population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to 'imminent and active threat,' a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.
Iraqis like to call this mess 'the situation.' When asked 'how are thing?' they reply: 'the situation is very bad."
What they mean by situation is this: the Iraqi government doesn't control most Iraqi cities, there are several car bombs going off each day around the country killing and injuring scores of innocent people, the country's roads are becoming impassable and littered by hundreds of landmines and explosive devices aimed to kill American soldiers, there are assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings. The situation, basically, means a raging barbaric guerilla war. In four days, 110 people died and over 300 got injured in Baghdad alone. The numbers are so shocking that the ministry of health -- which was attempting an exercise of public transparency by releasing the numbers -- has now stopped disclosing them.
Insurgents now attack Americans 87 times a day.
A friend drove thru the Shiite slum of Sadr City yesterday. He said young men were openly placing improvised explosive devices into the ground. They melt a shallow hole into the asphalt, dig the explosive, cover it with dirt and put an old tire or plastic can over it to signal to the locals this is booby-trapped. He said on the main roads of Sadr City, there were a dozen landmines per every ten yards. His car snaked and swirled to avoid driving over them. Behind the walls sits an angry Iraqi ready to detonate them as soon as an American convoy gets near. This is in Shiite land, the population that was supposed to love America for liberating Iraq.
For journalists the significant turning point came with the wave of abduction and kidnappings. Only two weeks ago we felt safe around Baghdad because foreigners were being abducted on the roads and highways between towns. Then came a frantic phone call from a journalist female friend at 11 p.m. telling me two Italian women had been abducted from their homes in broad daylight. Then the two Americans, who got beheaded this week and the Brit, were abducted from their homes in a residential neighborhood. They were supplying the entire block with round the clock electricity from their generator to win friends. The abductors grabbed one of them at 6 a.m. when he came out to switch on the generator; his beheaded body was thrown back near the neighborhoods.
The insurgency, we are told, is rampant with no signs of calming down. If any thing, it is growing stronger, organized and more sophisticated every day. The various elements within it-baathists, criminals, nationalists and Al Qaeda-are cooperating and coordinating.
I went to an emergency meeting for foreign correspondents with the military and embassy to discuss the kidnappings. We were somberly told our fate would largely depend on where we were in the kidnapping chain once it was determined we were missing. Here is how it goes: criminal gangs grab you and sell you up to Baathists in Fallujah, who will in turn sell you to Al Qaeda. In turn, cash and weapons flow the other way from Al Qaeda to the Baathisst to the criminals. My friend Georges, the French journalist snatched on the road to Najaf, has been missing for a month with no word on release or whether he is still alive.
America's last hope for a quick exit? The Iraqi police and National Guard units we are spending billions of dollars to train. The cops are being murdered by the dozens every day-over 700 to date -- and the insurgents are infiltrating their ranks. The problem is so serious that the U.S. military has allocated $6 million dollars to buy out 30,000 cops they just trained to get rid of them quietly.
As for reconstruction: firstly it's so unsafe for foreigners to operate that almost all projects have come to a halt. After two years, of the $18 billion Congress appropriated for Iraq reconstruction only about $1 billion or so has been spent and a chuck has now been reallocated for improving security, a sign of just how bad things are going here.
Oil dreams? Insurgents disrupt oil flow routinely as a result of sabotage and oil prices have hit record high of $49 a barrel. Who did this war exactly benefit? Was it worth it? Are we safer because Saddam is holed up and Al Qaeda is running around in Iraq?
Iraqis say that thanks to America they got freedom in exchange for insecurity. Guess what? They say they'd take security over freedom any day, even if it means having a dictator ruler.
I heard an educated Iraqi say today that if Saddam Hussein were allowed to run for elections he would get the majority of the vote. This is truly sad.
Then I went to see an Iraqi scholar this week to talk to him about elections here. He has been trying to educate the public on the importance of voting. He said, "President Bush wanted to turn Iraq into a democracy that would be an example for the Middle East. Forget about democracy, forget about being a model for the region, we have to salvage Iraq before all is lost."
One could argue that Iraq is already lost beyond salvation. For those of us on the ground it's hard to imagine what if any thing could salvage it from its violent downward spiral. The genie of terrorism, chaos and mayhem has been unleashed onto this country as a result of American mistakes and it can't be put back into a bottle.
The Iraqi government is talking about having elections in three months while half of the country remains a 'no go zone'-out of the hands of the government and the Americans and out of reach of journalists. In the other half, the disenchanted population is too terrified to show up at polling stations. The Sunnis have already said they'd boycott elections, leaving the stage open for polarized government of Kurds and Shiites that will not be deemed as legitimate and will most certainly lead to civil war.
I asked a 28-year-old engineer if he and his family would participate in the Iraqi elections since it was the first time Iraqis could to some degree elect a leadership. His response summed it all: "Go and vote and risk being blown into pieces or followed by the insurgents and murdered for cooperating with the Americans? For what? To practice democracy? Are you joking?"
-Farnaz
Our base rituals and vile ceremonies are having the desired effect. Our chanting to the Black Dolphin has been heard. Our prayers to the Degenerate Bat have been answered. Our heinous sacrifice of Geddy Lee and a silver dog whistle to the demented Keening Blasphemy That Must Not Be Named has been received and looked upon with favor. Open your eyes, Ye Shrill Ones, and behold! The very fabric of space and time itself has been torn asunder, the immutable laws of and logic have been rendered void, and the universe has been corrupted and twisted by our malevolent ministrations until the cosmos itself seeths and pulses with irrational Bush-hatred. Matthew Yglasias notices, as he ululates psychotically to the dead, uncaring stars:
To read today's Wall Street Journal editorial page you'd think the CIA was trying to undermine the Bush administration CIA-style. Bugging BC04 campaign offices and giving the tapes to the DNC, arranging secret transfers of money to the Kerry campaign, engaging in select assassinations of key Republican figures, etc. In fact what they're doing is making factual claims about the situation in Iraq to members of the press. They've leaked some stuff, true, but they haven't leaked any information that one could properly call secret -- just the broad conclusions of analyses that the administration has obviously kept under wraps for political reasons. You've got to understand that there's something badly wrong with your candidate when making accurate descriptions of the present state of affairs in a foreign country is considered an efficacious way to torpedo your boy's reelection campaign. It's sort of like admitting that his whole presidency is based on a tissue of lies. Or worse -- delusions.All together now, and if you don't know the words just hum along: Aaaiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Krugman R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaiii! AAAAAAIIIIIIIII!!!!
Here at the Occult and Hermetic Order of the Shrill we have just wrapped up our annual Krugmania! summer membership drive, and we couldn't be more pleased with our success. As of midnight last night, everyone who A) might possibly have some idea what they are talking about, and B) isn't a Bush party apparatchik, is now officially an Initiate in our most chthonian and argute sect. First, Dana Priest and Thomas E. Ricks report that from the CIA through the rest of the US intelligence apparatus, there is a growing belief that "[the Bush Administration's policy in Iraq is] a disaster, and they're digging the hole deeper and deeper and deeper. ... There's no obvious way to fix it. The best we can hope for is a semi-failed state hobbling along with terrorists and a succession of weak governments."
But that's not all:
Today 50 former high- level diplomats, generals and admirals declared President Bush has made America less safe and called for his ouster. ...And it's not just people involved with national security and foreign relations who are joining up: we've got 30 Nobel-winning economists and scientists, and 80% of professional historians ready to pledge themselves to our dark order. And our international recruitment is going quite well, too.
The claim that we are safer is the biggest lie of this campaign season," states the group. "Now we are bogged down there in a quagmire with no solution in sight." ...
"The plain fact is that George W. Bush and his team have succeeded in making our country and our people less safe, and more vulnerable to new terrorist attacks, by an unnecessary war against a threat that did not exist."
"We have lost the hard-won respect and admiration that America enjoyed ... Some of these losses are irrecoverable and others will take decades to repair, a process we must begin immediately by electing a new administration."
The group also accuses the President of gross negligence, stating, "Prior to 9/11 Mr. Bush and his team ignored repeated warnings about the danger of terrorist attacks."
"The American people must surely not reelect someone presenting himself as a strong and resolute war leader who is responsible for such a sorry record of judgment and performance."
"Leadership in the wrong directions is not the leadership we need or want. We can have no trust in such leadership for the next four years. It is definitely time for a change."
"The Elder Shrill know the gate. The Elder Shrill are the gate. The Elder Shrill are the key and guardian of the gate. They know where the Shrill broke through of old, and where the Shrill shall break through again, differing in likeness from man's truest Eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Shrillness. They walk unseen in lonely places where Shrillness has been spoken and the Rites howled at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraven has heard their voices. Great Krugman is Their cousin. Aaaiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Krugman R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Iä! John Emerson! Andrew Sullivan! Yog-Sothoth! Seymour Hersh! Francis Fukuyama! Nyarlathotep! William Odom! Blind Azathoth! Iä! Mark Kleiman! Mark Kleiman! Mark Kleiman!"
Oh. I did not see you come in. Let me put this away...
We were simply transforming Mark Kleiman into one of the Elder Shrill, as this makes it clear he is:
Mark A. R. Kleiman: Rejoice!: "The Taliban is no longer in existence." You don't have to believe me; the President said it himself. Now that's what I call optimism; not only does he imagine good things that might happen in the future, he imagines good things as actually existing in the present.
What's strange is that the non-existent Taliban has enjoyed such a resurgence that Karzai is being forced to negotiate with them.
How much longer is this severely delusional character going to remain in power? Either four months, or fifty-six. It's up to you.
It is remarkable, is it not? A religio-military-political force no longer exists, yet our Afghan president must still carefully propitiate it. The Mad Scribe Alex tells us that this was foretold in guarded form the Krugmanomicon itself: "Iä! Crawfordath! Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold."
Here he is, driven not into but beyond shrill unholy madness by the total disconnection from reality of George W. Bush:
Mark A. R. Kleiman: Rejoice!: "The Taliban is no longer in existence." You don't have to believe me; the President said it himself. Now that's what I call optimism; not only does he imagine good things that might happen in the future, he imagines good things as actually existing in the present.
What's strange is that the non-existent Taliban has enjoyed such a resurgence that Karzai is being forced to negotiate with them.
How much longer is this severely delusional character going to remain in power? Either four months, or fifty-six. It's up to you.
Twelve years ago Richard Cheney was a shrill opponent of America's getting sucked into the Iraqi quagmire. Today?... Well, we all know. What has happened? Replaced by a fell servitor beast casting a hypnotic glamour? Controlled by his implants from afar by agents of Osama bin Laden? Or was his mind sucked out and replaced by the act of reading the dread Book of PNAC? One guess is shriller than the next:
CJR Campaign Desk: Archives: the Seattle Post-Intelligencer today offers up a little-noticed 1992 speech in Seattle by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, in which he warned of getting "bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."
"And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?" Cheney asked his audience. "And the answer is not very damned many."... In his 1992 remarks, writes Pope, "Cheney foreshadowed a future in Iraq that is remarkably close to conditions found there today, suggesting that it would be difficult to bring the country's various political factions together and that U.S. troops would be vulnerable to insurrection and guerrilla attacks" "I would guess if we had gone in there, I would still have forces in Baghdad today, we'd be running the country. We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home," Cheney said, 18 months after the [Gulf] war ended.
Another grownup Republican succumbs, and joins the shrill. John Eisenhower is spotted in the Manchester Union Leader:
The Union Leader and New Hampshire Sunday News - 29-Sep-04 - Another View: >Why I will vote for John Kerry for President: THE Presidential election to be held this coming Nov. 2 will be one of extraordinary importance to the future of our nation. The outcome will determine whether this country will continue on the same path it has followed for the last 3½ years or whether it will return to a set of core domestic and foreign policy values that have been at the heart of what has made this country great.
Now more than ever, we voters will have to make cool judgments, unencumbered by habits of the past. Experts tell us that we tend to vote as our parents did or as we “always have.” We remained loyal to party labels. We cannot afford that luxury in the election of 2004. There are times when we must break with the past, and I believe this is one of them.
As son of a Republican President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, it is automatically expected by many that I am a Republican. For 50 years, through the election of 2000, I was. With the current administration’s decision to invade Iraq unilaterally, however, I changed my voter registration to independent, and barring some utterly unforeseen development, I intend to vote for the Democratic Presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry.
The fact is that today’s “Republican” Party is one with which I am totally unfamiliar. To me, the word “Republican” has always been synonymous with the word “responsibility,” which has meant limiting our governmental obligations to those we can afford in human and financial terms. Today’s whopping budget deficit of some $440 billion does not meet that criterion.
Responsibility used to be observed in foreign affairs. That has meant respect for others. America, though recognized as the leader of the community of nations, has always acted as a part of it, not as a maverick separate from that community and at times insulting towards it. Leadership involves setting a direction and building consensus, not viewing other countries as practically devoid of significance. Recent developments indicate that the current Republican Party leadership has confused confident leadership with hubris and arrogance.
In the Middle East crisis of 1991, President George H.W. Bush marshaled world opinion through the United Nations before employing military force to free Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. Through negotiation he arranged for the action to be financed by all the industrialized nations, not just the United States. When Kuwait had been freed, President George H. W. Bush stayed within the United Nations mandate, aware of the dangers of occupying an entire nation.
Today many people are rightly concerned about our precious individual freedoms, our privacy, the basis of our democracy. Of course we must fight terrorism, but have we irresponsibly gone overboard in doing so? I wonder. In 1960, President Eisenhower told the Republican convention, “If ever we put any other value above (our) liberty, and above principle, we shall lose both.” I would appreciate hearing such warnings from the Republican Party of today.
The Republican Party I used to know placed heavy emphasis on fiscal responsibility, which included balancing the budget whenever the state of the economy allowed it to do so. The Eisenhower administration accomplished that difficult task three times during its eight years in office. It did not attain that remarkable achievement by cutting taxes for the rich. Republicans disliked taxes, of course, but the party accepted them as a necessary means of keep the nation’s financial structure sound...
This is no longer shrill. This is ultrasonic:
Discourse.net: Voting Republican This Year = Voting for Torture: It’s not enough that Rumsfeld and probably Bush not just tacitly condoned but actively encouraged studies of optimal torture regimes, creating a climate in which undeniable and disgusting torture was used against Iraqi civilians, including children. And at Guantanamo (more). Even they at least had the hypocrisy to attempt to do the Iraq torture planning under wraps. (Hypocrisy being “the tribute vice pays to virtue”.) Meanwhile, at home, being too delicate to torture domestically, the Administration quietly subcontracted the job to Syria. (See my post almost exactly a year ago, Maher Arar Affair: What is the Pluperfect of ‘Cynic’?.)
Comes now a group of Congressional Republicans who are pure vice, and are not even trying to hide it: they have proposed that US law be amended to remove protections against torture — ie to legitimate torture, to plan to torture — for people we label “terrorists” (modern unpersons). The full horrid details are at Obsidian Wings: Legalizing Torture. The key move would be to exclude “terrorists” from the protection of the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The “terrorists” could be held in secret unless they could somehow overcome (without lawyers or witnesses?) a presumption of guilt. When they failed to overcome this impossible burden they could be subject to “extraordinary rendition” which is bureaucrat for “being ported or transferred to a country that may engage in torture”—a deportation that currently would be a serious violation of US law.
Anyone who votes for people capable of supporting these policies has blood on their hands. Not to mention what they are doing to the image of the US as the ‘City on the Hill’, the beacon to mankind. Once we descend into the torture pit, we’re just arguing about circles in Hell.
I've said before that voting against George W. Bush is not a matter of partisanship but a matter of patriotism. But it is now clear that it is something more as well.
The career security professionals are shrill:
Growing Pessimism on Iraq (washingtonpost.com): A growing number of career professionals within national security agencies believe that the situation in Iraq is much worse, and the path to success much more tenuous, than is being expressed in public by top Bush administration officials, according to former and current government officials and assessments over the past year by intelligence officials at the CIA and the departments of State and Defense.
While President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others have delivered optimistic public appraisals, officials who fight the Iraqi insurgency and study it at the CIA and the State Department and within the Army officer corps believe the rebellion is deeper and more widespread than is being publicly acknowledged, officials say.
People at the CIA "are mad at the policy in Iraq because it's a disaster, and they're digging the hole deeper and deeper and deeper," said one former intelligence officer who maintains contact with CIA officials. "There's no obvious way to fix it. The best we can hope for is a semi-failed state hobbling along with terrorists and a succession of weak governments."
"Things are definitely not improving," said one U.S. government official who reads the intelligence analyses on Iraq.
"It is getting worse," agreed an Army staff officer who served in Iraq and stays in touch with comrades in Baghdad through e-mail. "It just seems there is a lot of pessimism flowing out of theater now. There are things going on that are unbelievable to me. They have infiltrators conducting attacks in the Green Zone. That was not the case a year ago."
This weekend, in a rare departure from the positive talking points used by administration spokesmen, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell acknowledged that the insurgency is strengthening and that anti-Americanism in the Middle East is increasing. "Yes, it's getting worse," he said of the insurgency on ABC's "This Week."...
Or, to use the new catch phrase, the CIA is filled with "pessimists and naysayers."
Growing Pessimism on Iraq | "...officials who fight the Iraqi insurgency and study it at the CIA and the State Department and within the Army officer corps believe the rebellion is deeper and more widespread than is being publicly acknowledged, officials say.At this rate, the Green Zone and the No Go Zones will overlap.People at the CIA "are mad at the policy in Iraq because it's a disaster, and they're digging the hole deeper and deeper and deeper," said one former intelligence officer who maintains contact with CIA officials. "There's no obvious way to fix it. The best we can hope for is a semi-failed state hobbling along with terrorists and a succession of weak governments."
"Things are definitely not improving," said one U.S. government official who reads the intelligence analyses on Iraq.
"It is getting worse," agreed an Army staff officer who served in Iraq and stays in touch with comrades in Baghdad through e-mail. "It just seems there is a lot of pessimism flowing out of theater now. There are things going on that are unbelievable to me. They have infiltrators conducting attacks in the Green Zone. That was not the case a year ago."
Alex of deformed.blogspot.com writes:
Alex: Did you notice that the Lone Star Iconoclast, Bush's home town paper, has joined the ranks of the Shrill? http://news.iconoclast-texas.com/web/Columns/Editorial/editorial39.htm Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Bush Crawford
About four years late, guys, but welcome:
The suggestion that terrorists support Sen. John F. Kerry for president is ugly, but basically silly. The suggestion that Kerry supports the terrorists is flat-out disgusting. President Bush has allowed surrogates to spread the former idea, but he himself has helped to promote the latter.... [T]he point here is not subtle: The right to criticize the policies of those in power is not just one of democracy's fringe benefits; it is essential to making the democratic machinery work. And questions of war and peace — dead young Americans, dead Iraqis, a radicalized Middle East, billions of dollars: Was it worth all this? — are the ones that need democracy the most....
Compared with Kerry, George W. Bush is a coward. This is not a reference to their respective activities during Vietnam. It refers to the current election campaign....
Very late to the party, guys. If you're going to show up this late, you need to bring a *lot* more refreshments:
The New York Times > Opinion > An Un-American Way to Campaign: When Vice President Dick Cheney declared that electing Mr. Kerry would create a danger "that we'll get hit again," his supporters attributed that appalling language to a rhetorical slip. But Mr. Cheney is still delivering that message. Meanwhile, as Dana Milbank detailed so chillingly in The Washington Post yesterday, the House speaker, Dennis Hastert, said recently on television that Al Qaeda would do better under a Kerry presidency, and Senator Orrin Hatch, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has announced that the terrorists are going to do everything they can between now and November "to try and elect Kerry." This... undermines the efforts of the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency to combat terrorists in America. Every time a member of the Bush administration suggests that Islamic extremists want to stage an attack before the election to sway the results in November, it causes patriotic Americans who do not intend to vote for the president to wonder whether the entire antiterrorism effort has been kidnapped and turned into part of the Bush re-election campaign.... Mr. Bush['s]... own campaign speeches... equally divisive and undemocratic.
It's a good thing for him that President Bush doesn't read the newspaper. Look how shrill they are in his hometown:
Tiny Crawford Newspaper Endorses Kerry | A weekly newspaper that bills itself as President Bush's hometown paper endorsed John Kerry for president, saying the Massachusetts senator will restore American dignity.So sayth the AP summary, which is shrill enough. Then check out the editorial for yourself, which opens:The Lone Star Iconoclast, which has a circulation of 425, said in an editorial dated Sept. 29 that Texans should rate the candidates not by hometown or political party, but by where they intend to take the country.
"Four items trouble us the most about the Bush administration: his initiatives to disable the Social Security system, the deteriorating state of the American economy, a dangerous shift away from the basic freedoms established by our founding fathers, and his continuous mistakes regarding Iraq," the editorial said.
The Iconoclast, established in 2000, said it endorsed Bush that year. It also said it editorialized in support of the invasion of Iraq, and publisher W. Leon Smith promoted Bush and the invasion in a British Broadcasting Corp. interview, believing Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
"Instead we were duped into following yet another privileged agenda," the editorial said.
The newspaper praised Kerry for "30 years of experience looking out for the American people" and lauded his background as "a highly decorated Vietnam veteran."
Few Americans would have voted for George W. Bush four years ago if he had promised that, as President, he would:Hint: it doesn't get any less shrill. Remember when it was unwise to lie to the press because they'd be sure to make you pay for it? It looks like they remember in Crawford, Texas.These were elements of a hidden agenda that surfaced only after he took office.
- Empty the Social Security trust fund by $507 billion to help offset fiscal irresponsibility and at the same time slash Social Security benefits.
- Cut Medicare by 17 percent and reduce veterans’ benefits and military pay.
- Eliminate overtime pay for millions of Americans and raise oil prices by 50 percent.
- Give tax cuts to businesses that sent American jobs overseas, and, in fact, by policy encourage their departure.
- Give away billions of tax dollars in government contracts without competitive bids.
- Involve this country in a deadly and highly questionable war, and
- Take a budget surplus and turn it into the worst deficit in the history of the United States, creating a debt in just four years that will take generations to repay.
The publishers of The Iconoclast endorsed Bush four years ago, based on the things he promised, not on this smoke-screened agenda.
David H. Hackworth is shrill and unbalanced:
In its micro way, the [Private Jessica] Lynch scam symbolizes the miasma of deception surrounding the invasion and the ugly unsolvable occupation already causing the direst consequences to our national security.But Vietnam isn't a desert. So it's different.
From post-9/11 to the present, the war too has been based on lies fanned by the same Pentagon propaganda machine busy doing everything possible – including the censorship of our troops in Iraq for “national security purposes” – to convince the American people that, as we sadly heard for eight bloody years in Vietnam, there’s “light at the end of the tunnel.”
We went to war because we were told Iraq had WMD that threatened our country’s security and that Saddam was a key player behind 9/11. Both have been proven to be super whoppers.
We were also told that liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk with few U.S. casualties and would cost no more than a billion bucks – which would quickly be repaid by Iraqi oil. Yet more duplicity.
So far I count 1,050 American dead, 7,750 combat wounded and about 30,000 non-battle casualties. And our war costs are already close to a cool $200 billion.
Meanwhile, Super Flack James Wilkinson, the reported Spielberg of the Lynch saga, has recently been shifted from desert duties to advising National Security Advisor Rice on how to further deceive the American people.
Like Vietnam, the cover-ups and distortions will continue until the press and the people wake up. Hopefully that will be before the count is 3,000 or 4,000 dead American soldiers.
In a Back-To-The-Future moment, it was revealed today that the National Intelligence Council predicted the quagmire in Iraq—in January 2003 before the invasion began. In shrill tones the NIC lays out the stark reality-to-be:
The same intelligence unit that produced a gloomy report in July about the prospect of growing instability in Iraq warned the Bush administration about the potential costly consequences of an American-led invasion two months before the war began, government officials said Monday.The estimate came in two classified reports prepared for President Bush in January 2003 by the National Intelligence Council, an independent group that advises the director of central intelligence. The assessments predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict.
One of the reports also warned of a possible insurgency against the new Iraqi government or American-led forces, saying that rogue elements from Saddam Hussein's government could work with existing terrorist groups or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare, the officials said. The assessments also said a war would increase sympathy across the Islamic world for some terrorist objectives, at least in the short run, the officials said.
The contents of the two assessments had not been previously disclosed. Last week, Mr. Bush dismissed the latest intelligence reports, saying its authors were "just guessing'' about the future, though he corrected himself later, calling it an "estimate.''
It's clearly un-American when guesses prove more true than the body rhetoric of a stong, decisive administration.
Mike Turner, ex-Pentagon planner, is shrill:
MSNBC - ‘Staying the Course’ Isn’t an Option: Like Vietnam, the military is again being asked to clean up the detritus of a failed foreign policy. We are nose-deep in a protracted insurgency, an occupying Christian power in an oil-rich, Arab country. That country is not now and has never been a single nation. A single, unified, democratic Iraq comprised of Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis is a willfully ignorant illusion at best.
Two thirds of America's combat brigades are now tied down in this war which, under present conditions, is categorically unwinnable. Having alienated virtually every major ally who might help, our troops are simply targets. If Bush is re-elected, there are only two possible outcomes in Iraq:
- Four years from now, America will have 5,000 dead servicemen and women and an untold number of dead Iraqis at a cost of about $1 trillion, yet still be no closer to success than we are right now, or
- The U.S. will be gone, and we will witness the birth of a violent breeding ground for Shiite terrorists posing a far greater threat to Americans than a contained Saddam.
To discern the truth about Iraq, Americans must simply look beyond the spin. This war is not some noble endeavor, some great struggle of good against evil as the Bush administration would have us believe. We in the military have heard these grand pronouncements many times before by men who have neither served nor sacrificed. This war is an exercise in colossal stupidity and hubris which has now cost more than 1,000 American military lives, which has empowered Al Qaeda beyond anything those butchers might have engineered on their own and which has diverted America's attention and precious resources from the real threat at the worst possible time. And now, in a supreme act of truly breathtaking gall, this administration insists the only way to fix Iraq is to leave in power the very ones who created the nightmare
Yes. In spite of his attempts to resist it (and possibly because of his reading of the Ledeen Texts) Kevin Drum has fallen into shrill unholy madness and joined the Order:
The Washington Monthly: VOTE FOR US OR DIE....Mark Kleiman complains today that while there are reasonable arguments on both sides of the debate about drug importation from Canada, there's a distinct difference between the debaters themselves: supporters of drug reimportation are at least making legitimate arguments and being truthful about their goals, while opponents are just making stuff up in order to scare people. Color me something less than shocked. After all, using scare tactics about terrorism in every imaginable situation has become practically a fetish among Republicans since 9/11. Consider:
Canadian drugs: In an interview in August, FDA commissioner Lester Crawford tells an AP reporter that re-importing Canadian drugs is a bad idea because "cues from chatter" indicate that terrorists might target imported drugs.
Civil service protection: During the debate on the creation of the Homeland Security Department, George Bush insisted that he would veto any bill that included normal civil service protections for workers in the department. Spokesman Ari Fleischer explained: "The president will be effectively prevented from making decisions based on national security no matter how urgent a crisis we find ourselves in."
Refugees from Haiti: A Haitian refugee named David Joseph has been imprisoned for two years. He has an uncle in Brooklyn and nobody suggests he is anything but harmless. John Ashcroft refuses to release him, claiming that it might encourage terrorists to use Haiti as a staging area.
Taxes: On the eve of the Iraq war, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay explains that "Nothing is more important in the face of war than cutting taxes."
I wonder how they expect the rest of us to take terrorism seriously when they themselves so transparently think it's nothing more than a trivial debating point?
Yes, Uggabugga is shrill:
Discourse.net: Shameless: Quoted from uggabugga:
Remember June 28? Here is how PBS' News Hour reported what happened that day: (emp add)The U.S.-led coalition in Iraq transferred sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government two days ahead of schedule, in an effort to avert possible insurgent attacks.
The unexpected handover ceremony came at mid-morning Baghdad time, the middle of the night in the U.S. The event was convened hastily and secretly inside Baghdad's heavily guarded green zone.Sounds grim, doesn't it? But here is what Bush had to say about it in today's radio address: (emp add)
We're making steady progress in implementing our five-step plan toward the goal we all want: completing the mission so that Iraq is stable and self-governing, and American troops can come home with the honor they have earned.
The first step was achieved on June 28th, not only on time, but ahead of schedule, when the coalition transferred full sovereignty to a government of Iraqi citizens.Not only was it "ahead of schedule" but it was done in such a manner that the people in Baghdad were not inconvenienced. Since the handover was performed "secretly", that meant no traffic jams or other problems that a public event would have caused. But somehow Bush failed to mention that this morning.
Is anyone prepared to defend this by arguing it depends on what the meaning of "lying" is?
From that bastion of shrillness, the Financial Times. Anatol Lieven says that the true name of today's Republican Party is the "National Americanist Party."
Is this a Godwin's Law violation?
FT.com site : US capitalism recreates Europe's mistakes. Anatol Lieven. 15 September 2004: Some of the greatest long-term damage done by the Bush administration to the unity of the west has come from US domestic policies. By so flagrantly favouring the American economic elites at the expense of fiscal integrity, social welfare and environmental security, President George W. Bush and his colleagues have strengthened the belief of many Europeans that the American form of capitalism, and the political culture that underpins it, are very different from - and morally inferior to - those of Europe....
If Europe has taken a different capitalist path from the US in recent decades, this is not only because of differences in economic structures on the two sides of the Atlantic. It is also because of the horrible consequences that stemmed from unrestrained capitalism in Europe in the decades before 1945. In their assumption of unrestrained rights to make and retain profits, to block higher taxation of higher incomes and to determine the political, economic and social policies of their country, powerful sections of the American capitalist elites of today resemble the European elites of 1914 more than they do the European elites of 2004. One aspect of this is the hatred directed by these groups against American leaders who seek to qualify these rights, even with the clear intention of strengthening the American capitalist system as a whole: Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s, Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
In Europe, this belief in an absolutist version of capitalism combined with the radicalism and dogmatism of the old European left to produce many of the great disasters of modern European history. Refusing compromise with moderate leftwing forces, capitalists in parts of Europe in the decades before 1945 preferred instead to make alliances with the forces of radical nationalism.... The unreconstructed nature of important strands of American capitalism is reflected in the contemporary character of the Republican party. If today one were to seek a name for the Republicans that would situate them accurately in a wider historical and international context, it would be the American Nationalist party.... [The] Republican political, social and economic mixture is reminiscent of the classic positions of past rightwing nationalist movements in Europe and elsewhere.... [B]y bringing American capitalism closer to the norms pursued elsewhere in the developed world, a Kerry administration could even help to restore the idea of the west.
Matthew Yglesias joins those of us tracking the shrill with grimoire and camera. Here he spots the newly-shrill ex-hawk George Packer hiding in the pages of the New Yorker. Yglesias stuns him, takes a blood sample, puts a tag in his ear, and releases him back in the wild. As Packer runs back into the thicket of perfume advertisements, his voice raised in shrill unholy madness echoes through the night:
Matthew Yglesias: Shrill:
George Packer is shrill: "The problem with making sausage the President's way--other than the fact that it deceives the public, precludes a serious debate, bitterly divides the body politic when war requires unity, exposes American soldiers to greater risk, substitutes half measures for thoroughgoing efforts, and insures that no one will be held accountable for mistakes that will never be corrected--is that it doesn't work." And he continues: "In refusing to look at Iraq honestly, President Bush has made defeat there more likely. This failing is only the most important repetition of a recurring theme in the war against radical Islam. . . ."
Another dissilusioned hawk and I ask, once again, where it is that all the dissilusioned doves have gone off to? Can it really be the case that all these former hawks are America-hating defeatests putting a pessimistic face on things in order to embolden the adversary.
U.S. Drug Officials: Afghans Boosted Poppy Crop | Afghans significantly increased their poppy crop in the past year, fueling a narcoticstrade that endangers U.S.-led efforts to stabilize the country, officials said Thursday.
A report expected in a few weeks from the CIA and United Nations is expected to show Afghans planted 100,000 hectares with the crop, up from 80,000 hectares last year, said assistant secretary of state Robert B. Charles, head of the Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.
"The past year witnessed record levels of poppy cultivation in areas previously not used for this purpose," Peter Rodman, assistant defense secretary for international affairs, said at a congressional hearing with Charles.
"We know that profits from the production of illegal narcotics flow into the coffers of warlord militias, corrupt government officials and extremist forces," Rodman said in a written statement for the House International Relations Committee hearing on the Oct. 9 Afghan elections.
Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., criticized the administration for not moving faster against a drug trade that threatens efforts to build a stable Afghan government. "The drug lords are getting stronger faster than the Afghan authorities are being built up," he said.
Ranking Democrat Tom Lantos of California repeated previous criticism of NATO for not contributing more troops, saying it threatens to turn Afghan's "potentially triumphant exercise of freedom" into "a tragedy with dozens of terror attacks against polling stations."
General citizens of Iraq are defying the unbending optimism of their selected leaders with these shrill and unhelpful comments:
"People are very naive if they think Baghdad is safe," said Falah Ahmed, 26, a cigarette vendor in center city. A nearby tailor, Hisham Nuaimi, 52, said Allawi "is either deceiving himself or the Americans.""What do you call a city with a car bomb every day?" he said. "Is this the security they are achieving?"
After his speech to a joint meeting of Congress on Thursday, Allawi described Baghdad as "very good and safe."
"When we leave home, we never know if we're going to return home alive or not," said Mohammed Kadhim, a taxi driver.
Why, one asks, do they hate freedom so much?
Wow. Faisal is right. Steve Clemons says that Pakistani Dictator Pervez Musharraf is really shrill:
The Washington Note Archives: Check out this interview with Paula Zahn posted by John Aravosis. The whole thing is worth reading, but here is just the first bit that says most of it:
ZAHN: Is the world a safer place because of the war in Iraq?
MUSHARRAF: No. It's more dangerous. It's not safer, certainly not.
ZAHN: How so?
MUSHARRAF: Well, because it has aroused actions of the Muslims more. It's aroused certain sentiments of the Muslim world, and then the responses, the latest phenomena of explosives, more frequent for bombs and suicide bombings. This phenomenon is extremely dangerous.
Aaaaiiii! Aaaaiiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Pervez Musharraf R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!
This is just the opening. Their account of why, despite having endorsed Bush against Gore, the Seattle Times now endorses Kerry takes off from here:
The Times endorses Kerry for President 9/9/04 | Four years ago, this page endorsed George W. Bush for President. We cannot do so again — because of an ill-conceived war and its aftermath, undisciplined spending, a shrinkage of constitutional rights and an intrusive social agenda. The Bush presidency is not what we had in mind. Our endorsement of John Kerry is not without reservations, but he is head and shoulders above the incumbent. The first issue is the war. When the Bush administration began beating the drums for war on Iraq, this page said repeatedly that he had not justified it. When war came, this page closed ranks, wanting to support our troops and give the president the benefit of the doubt. The troops deserved it. In hindsight, their commander in chief did not.
"My friend," he says, "I look at this projection of the national deficit, and I shudder before its enormity. Take heed, and stay clear. These peaks, and the entitlement spending--there in the distance are the mountains of madness. I beg you, believe my tale, do not come to this place and this time."
But he is wrong. These Mountains of Madness are not in the distance. They are here, right in front of us.
Pakistani President* Musharraf apparently hasn't read the Iraq meme memo:
Brokaw: Do you think the American war against Iraq was a mistake?
Musharraf: Well, I wouldn't comment on that. But I will certainly say that it has complicated the issue.
Brokaw: In your part of the world.
Musharraf: In the Islamic world. In the Iraqi region. In the Middle East.
Brokaw: Made it worse for America?
Musharraf: Yes."
Wow. Publius of Legal Fiction declares that, whatever Glenn Reynolds is, "patriotic American" is not part of the description. He awards Reynolds the Hermann Goering award:
Legal Fiction:
last thing, Glenn Reynolds wins the Hermann Goering Award today. If you’ll remember Goering’s famous line:Gilbert [the interviewer]: "There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."
Göring: "Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."And now, Glenn Reynolds:
This is behavior that is absolutely unacceptable coming from a Presidential campaign in wartime, and it's not an isolated incident but part of a pattern of such behavior. Joe Lockhart should apologize for these remarks, and Kerry should fire him. Otherwise you're going to hear a lot of people questioning Kerry's patriotism. And they'll be right to.
I for one am sick and tired of hearing attacks on those who attack failed policies that got our troops killed, destabilized the Middle East, and have been the biggest gift ever to militant Islam.
The Mad Reporter Dana Milbank claims another victim as Publius of Legal Fiction joins the Order of the Shrill:
Legal Fiction: Lately I’ve been trying hard to avoid shrillness. After reading Dana Milbank’s collection of quotes today, I’m convinced that shrillness is the only proper response.
Before I get to that, let’s start with the latest Glenn Reynolds/Andrew Sullivan outrage – Joe Lockhart’s disparaging comments about Allawi being a puppet. Sullivan is outraged by them – Reynolds is as well. Now, I will agree that under normal circumstances, the following comments would be irresponsible:The last thing you want to be seen as is a puppet of the United States, and you can almost see the hand underneath the shirt today moving the lips.
But these are not normal circumstances. Allawi was brought here – forty days from the election – as part of the Bush re-election strategy, and everyone knows it. This was supposed to be a victory lap, further solidifying the themes presented at the Republican Convention – until Kerry and reality intruded. Indeed, Allawi even adopted Bush talking points about how much progress Iraq was making, and that the terrorists were "getting more desperate." So, let’s dispense with the little charade about how this trip was beyond politics. It was entirely about politics.
Second, given that Bush is so radioactive in Iraq right now, I think that trotting out Allawi in the Rose Garden does little to help his legitimacy in the eyes of American-hating Iraqis. On this point, Lockhart is right on. The more Allawi is seen as a puppet of Bush (which was pretty much confirmed this week), the less chance of success he – and thus we – have. If I'm right, then Bush is sacrificing Allawi's legitimacy for the sake of his re-election.
I also want to address some of the despicable quotes listed in Milbank’s article today in which he describes the clearly coordinated attack that Kerry’s criticisms are hurting our troops and helping the enemy. Here are a few:Bush: “You can embolden an enemy by sending a mixed message. You can dispirit the Iraqi people by sending mixed messages. You send the wrong message to our troops by sending mixed messages.
Cheney: John Kerry is trying to tear down all the good that has been accomplished, and his words are destructive to our effort in Iraq and in the global war on terror.The surrogates were even more explicit. Milbank lists more. My favorite was Orrin Hatch: “[Democrats are] consistently saying things that I think undermine our young men and women who are serving over there.”
I’ll tell you what undermines our troops – getting troops killed undermines troops, Mr. Hatch – not criticizing the failed policies that got them killed in the first place. Bumbling an occupation and having no plan undermines troops. And Mr. Cheney, I’ll tell you what’s destructive to our effort in the global war on terror – your invasion of Iraq, which was Osama’s wet dream. And Mr. Bush, I’ll tell you how to embolden an enemy – invade the second-holiest land of Islam for no reason and then execute the war without a shred of competence. Lying about our progress also sends the wrong message to the people who are actually fighting your terrorist-aiding war. Let’s not forget that. We know exactly who – and what policies – have emboldened our enemies and undermined our troops. And it’s not John Kerry, or his criticisms of your failure. Nice try, though.
Kevin Drum is worried that if he reads many more articles by Dana Milbank, he will become shrill:
The Washington Monthly: Today, thanks to the fiendish intervention of Dana Milbank, Publius descends into shrillness. Can I be far behind?
Dana Milbank is not the author of the Krugmanomicon, but he will do. Aaaaiiii! Aaaaiiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Kevin Drum R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!:
Slate's Dahlia Lithwick is shrill:
Dahlia Lithwick: ... the government's claims in the Yaser Esam Hamdi case... some unstoppable, lethal killing machine, the Taliban's own Hannibal Lecter—a man so evil, he requires permanent warehousing down a bottomless hole. So the Bush administration's decision to release Hamdi is stunning, given that only months ago he was so dangerous that the government insisted in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and the world that he could reasonably be locked up for all time, without a trial or criminal charges. At oral argument before that court, Deputy Solicitor General Paul D. Clement insisted that "[n]o principle of the law or logic requires the United States to release an individual from detention so that he can rejoin the battle," especially, while we "still have 10,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan." A scant few months later Hamdi will be on a government jet, flying home to Saudi Arabia with an invisible "whoops" note pinned to his lapel...
And she brings with her a good two dozen of Republican foreign policy hands. Aaaaiiii! Aaaaiiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Laura Rozen R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!:
War and Piece: : This is almost unspeakably grim. Bush has turned Iraq into Lebanon, and he's running his election on this masking-taped Potemkin village of a liberated Iraq heading joyfully for elections that's all coming apart at the edges. Even if he manages to win reelection, I think any second administration would be set to soon collapse under the weight of the lies once people do wake up and realize what a disaster we have on our hands. You should hear the total condemnation of Bush's national security team I am hearing from Republican foreign policy hands I am interviewing for a forthcoming piece.
Some of you may already have heard that Brad DeLong is shrill. But did you know that he's also unbalanced? Well, by tactlessly pointing out that President Bush is in the habit of saying one thing whilst doing the opposite, he has revealed that it is so:
You see, George W. Bush *talks* about the importance of balanced budgets but does not *act*. Bush appears to know that he needs to talk about the importance of a balanced budget. But Bush appears not to know that it is important to balance the budget. Bush shows no sign of knowing that a reduction in current taxes coupled with a spending increase is not a tax cut, but is instead a tax shift and a tax *increase*--an increase in average taxes over the long run coupled with a shift in taxes from the present to the future.With apologies to Tim Dunlop, if DeLong were a 70's song that was later covered by that chick from The Fugees who isn't famous anymore, he would be "Shrilling Me Softly (With His Song)".
The Center for Strategic and International Studies took a look at the latest reports from the Bush administration about Iraq and wrote a little paper innocuously titled Inexcusable Failure that could only be described as shrill:
The fact remains, however, that the US-led coalition cannot be excused for its failure to reconstitute effective security forces and police, for trying to restrict the development of Iraqi armed forces to a token force to defend Iraq’s borders against external aggression, or for ignoring the repeated warnings from US military advisory teams about problems in the flow of equipment and in creating the necessary facilities. The US failed to treat the Iraqis as partners in the counterinsurgency effort for nearly a year, and did not attempt to seriously train and equip Iraqi forces for proactive security and counterinsurgency mission until April 2004 – nearly a year after the fall of Saddam Hussein and two-thirds of a year after a major insurgency problem began to emerge.In many ways, the Administration’s senior spokesmen still seem to live in a fantasyland in terms of its public announcements, talking about an insurgent force of 5,000 – when both Iraqi intelligence and US intelligence in Iraq quote figures of from 15,000 to 35,000. It still exaggerates the foreign threat and role of Al Qaida, in spite of the fact only a small fraction of detainees and those killed are foreign and Zarqawi’s ties to Al Qaida seem limited to loose affiliation. For example, only 50 men out of the 3,800 the 82nd Airborne apprehended in the Sunni triangle area were foreign.
The fact the status reports do even more to disguise the level of true progress is simply unacceptable. No single mission is more important than security, and no Iraqi popular desire is clearer than that this mission be done by Iraqis. The US has been guilty of a gross military, administrative, and moral failure. It seems to be finally taking steps to correct these mistakes, but its past history shows that detailed progress reporting is essential, and that the US military has been reluctant at best to come to grips with the need for an effective effort.
It's probably a good time to point out that any author that uses the word 'fantasyland' in the context of the Bush administration is immediately and automatically inducted into The Order.
Of all the forbidden, occult, and shrill texts in the world, none is more shrill, more occult, or more forbidden than the dread Krugmanomicon. It is so forbidden that none have read it, at least none who have lived to reveal the dark and chthonian political hate speech scribbled on its damned pages. Perhaps it is only a legend. Perhaps. But, were it real, I think it would have a very hard time being shriller than Digby, who is currently blogging at 30 octaves above completely irrational Bush-hating insanity:
It's quite clear that any criticism of the president's leadership in a time of war is sounding the siren of defeatism in the face of terrorism. It's another example of what Zell Miller decried at the Republican convention --- Democrats determined to bring down the commander in chief by contesting an election. What could be more antithetical to freedom and democracy than that?Use as much sarcasm as you like, dear Digby. It will neither disguise nor moderate your inner shrillness. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh and all that.
Eric Umansky reports:
Eric Umansky: Van Riper... was more pessimistic, and pissed. “I have no arguments with anything officers are doing in Iraq,” he said. “My problem is with the Pentagon and our political leadership.
“At some point there are no good military solutions. The military solutions were up front. With each passing day, the solution set has narrowed. So you get yourself in a corner. You’re going to have to bite the bullet sometime, and you are going to reap a whirlwind of negative publicity.
“All of our focus is on temporary, tactics and procedures: how to stop IEDs, for example. This is a war, and there ought to be a strategy. If there is one I haven’t heard it. It’d be like WWII where you launched planes out into the Pacific and hope they run into the enemy.”
Michigan history professor Juan Cole employs a shrill tone as he asks what it would be like if America were Iraq right now (reprinted in its entirety because it's so damn good):
What would America look like if it were in Iraq's current situation? The population of the US is over 11 times that of Iraq, so a lot of statistics would have to be multiplied by that number.Thus, violence killed 300 Iraqis last week, the equivalent proportionately of 3,300 Americans. What if 3,300 Americans had died in car bombings, grenade and rocket attacks, machine gun spray, and aerial bombardment in the last week? That is a number greater than the deaths on September 11, and if America were Iraq, it would be an ongoing, weekly or monthly toll.
And what if those deaths occurred all over the country, including in the capital of Washington, DC, but mainly above the Mason Dixon line, in Boston, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco?
What if the grounds of the White House and the government buildings near the Mall were constantly taking mortar fire? What if almost nobody in the State Department at Foggy Bottom, the White House, or the Pentagon dared venture out of their buildings, and considered it dangerous to go over to Crystal City or Alexandria?
What if all the reporters for all the major television and print media were trapped in five-star hotels in Washington, DC and New York, unable to move more than a few blocks safely, and dependent on stringers to know what was happening in Oklahoma City and St. Louis? What if the only time they ventured into the Midwest was if they could be embedded in Army or National Guard units?
There are estimated to be some 25,000 guerrillas in Iraq engaged in concerted acts of violence. What if there were private armies totalling 275,000 men, armed with machine guns, assault rifles (legal again!), rocket-propelled grenades, and mortar launchers, hiding out in dangerous urban areas of cities all over the country? What if they completely controlled Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Denver and Omaha, such that local police and Federal troops could not go into those cities?
What if, during the past year, the Secretary of State (Aqilah Hashemi), the President (Izzedine Salim), and the Attorney General (Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim) had all been assassinated?
What if all the cities in the US were wracked by a crime wave, with thousands of murders, kidnappings, burglaries, and carjackings in every major city every year?
What if the Air Force routinely (I mean daily or weekly) bombed Billings, Montana, Flint, Michigan, Watts in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Anacostia in Washington, DC, and other urban areas, attempting to target "safe houses" of "criminal gangs", but inevitably killing a lot of children and little old ladies?
What if, from time to time, the US Army besieged Virginia Beach, killing hundreds of armed members of the Christian Soldiers? What if entire platoons of the Christian Soldiers militia holed up in Arlington National Cemetery, and were bombarded by US Air Force warplanes daily, destroying thousands of graves and even pulverizing the Vietnam Memorial over on the Mall? What if the National Council of Churches had to call for a popular march of thousands of believers to converge on the National Cathedral to stop the US Army from demolishing it to get at a rogue band of the Timothy McVeigh Memorial Brigades?
What if there were virtually no commercial air traffic in the country? What if many roads were highly dangerous, especially Interstate 95 from Richmond to Washington, DC, and I-95 and I-91 up to Boston? If you got on I-95 anywhere along that over 500-mile stretch, you would risk being carjacked, kidnapped, or having your car sprayed with machine gun fire.
What if no one had electricity for much more than 10 hours a day, and often less? What if it went off at unpredictable times, causing factories to grind to a halt and air conditioning to fail in the middle of the summer in Houston and Miami? What if the Alaska pipeline were bombed and disabled at least monthly? What if unemployment hovered around 40%?
What if veterans of militia actions at Ruby Ridge and the Oklahoma City bombing were brought in to run the government on the theory that you need a tough guy in these times of crisis?
What if municipal elections were cancelled and cliques close to the new "president" quietly installed in the statehouses as "governors?" What if several of these governors (especially of Montana and Wyoming) were assassinated soon after taking office or resigned when their children were taken hostage by guerrillas?
What if the leader of the European Union maintained that the citizens of the United States are, under these conditions, refuting pessimism and that freedom and democracy are just around the corner?
Sweet Jesus! It's good to know that shrill comments like these just can't be accurate in the face of overwhelming optimism from the puppetinterim government of Iraq. Who apparently get their talking point from Karl Rove as well.
Or, as longtime member Johshua Marshall quips, "Is President Allawi actually part of the Bush campaign? Or is he registered as a 527?" Only the FEC can know.
Mark A.R. Kleiman finds some very bad news: elements of the U.S. military are now modeling their behavior on that of villains in Robert Heinlein novels:
Mark A. R. Kleiman: "Cardiac arrest of unknown etiology": In a chilling scene in Heinlein's Between Planets, a torturer trying to extract information from the young hero tells him that his uncle has died of a heart attack. He then adds that since everyone dies when his heart stops beating, every death can be described as a heart attack. I suppose I should be glad to know that whoever was filling out the death certificates for the Abu Ghraib victims knew his Heinlein, but I'm really not. I'm really, really, really not. "Cardiac arrest of unknown etiology" on a victim who has been beaten to death? Pah!
(The rest of the story is even more chilling: it asserts that the case involved an innocent family held up back a blackmailer. But that part can't easily be verified. The part about the condition of the body and what's written on the death certificate can be verified, and apparently was verified by the Guardian.)
Or maybe it's hopeful news: in Heinlein novels (as opposed to, say, S.M. Stirling novels) the villains always lose in the end. But I don't think they are very realistic. I see no sign around me of the highly-intelligent super-scientist dragons from the swamps of Venus who arrive in the nick of time to save the day in Between Planets.
Former Maine Governor Angus King is shrill:
Political Wire: Independent Streak: Former Maine Gov. Angus King, an independent who voted for George W. Bush in 2000, has endorsed Sen. John Kerry. According to the Portland Press Herald, King has not publicly endorsed a presidential candidate in the past quarter century, but this year he says "the case for change is overwhelming."
<nasal tone="like a Parasaurolophus">Ayuh! Ayuh! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Angus King Ah'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Ayuh!</nasal>
Even Republican Senators can't ignore that Iraq is a growing disaster. Gentleman, we welcome you to the Order of the Shrill. Extra bonus points: this was carried in the Washington Times, which isn't exactly what you'd call liberal media. Highlights:
Senators urge Bush to rethink policies in Iraq | [Senate Foreign Relations Committee] chairman, Sen. Richard G. Lugar, noted that Congress appropriated $18.4 billion a year ago this week for reconstruction. No more than $1 billion has been spent. "This is the incompetence in the administration," Mr. Lugar, Indiana Republican, said on ABC's "This Week."
"The fact is a crisp, sharp analysis of our policies is required. We didn't do that in Vietnam, and we saw 11 years of casualties mount to the point where we finally lost," said Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam War veteran who is co-chairman of President Bush's re-election committee in Nebraska.
"We made serious mistakes right after the initial successes by not having enough troops on the ground, by allowing the looting, by not securing the borders," Mr. McCain said. "Airstrikes don't do it; artillery doesn't do it. Boots on the ground do it," Mr. McCain told "Fox News Sunday." Mr. McCain said Mr. Bush was not being "as straight as we would want him to be" about the situation.
Britain's ambassador to Italy says Al Qaeda hopes to help elect its best recruiting sergeant, George W. Bush:
MSNBC - U.K. envoy: Bush the best recruiter for al-Qaida: Britain’s ambassador to Italy described President Bush as “the best recruiting sergeant” for al-Qaida, Italian media reported on Monday. The comment, made at a closed-door conference at the weekend, was denounced by one leading Italian newspaper editor, who issued an open letter snubbing the veteran ambassador, Sir Ivor Roberts. Roberts was quoted as telling an annual Anglo-Italian gathering in Tuscany, “If anyone is ready to celebrate the eventual re-election of Bush, it’s al-Qaida.” Corriere della Sera newspaper said Roberts also told the meeting of British and Italian policy-makers, “Bush is al-Qaida’s best recruiting sergeant.”
Aaaaiiii! Aaaaiiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Sir Ivor Roberts R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!
Jeebus, this is shrill! This is perfect shrillness: shrillness shriller than which none can be conceived. Seymour Hersh is our new Grand Heresiarch. Via Laura Rozen:
War and Piece: : Seymour Hersh, speaking with Salon's Mary Jacoby, on George W. Bush's national security team:
Jacoby: Is there someone who is the Henry Kissinger in this administration?
Hersh: Oh, believe me, I pray for one [clasps his hands and looks beseechingly upward]. Wouldn't it be great if the reality was that they were lying about WMD, and they really didn't believe that democracy would come when they invaded Iraq, and you could go to war with 5,000 troops, a few special forces, a few bombs and a lot of American flags, and Iraq would fold, Saddam would be driven out, a new Baath Party would emerge that's moderate? Democracy would flow like water out of a fountain. These guys believe it. They believe WMD. There's no fallback with these guys. These guys are utopians. They're like Trotskyites. They believe in permanent revolution. They really believe. They believe that they could go in with few forces. They believed that once they went in it would happen quick. Iran would get the message. What they call occupied Lebanon would get the lesson. Even the Saudis would change.
Jacoby: They thought it would happen quickly?
Hersh: Very quickly. I don't have any empirical basis for it, but if I had to bet, the plan was to go right into Syria. That's why the fourth division was hanging for so long in the desert out there right on the border with Syria. In the early days of the war, before this government figured out how much trouble they were in -- which took them a long time -- they would drive practice runs... that amounted to the distance from the border to Damascus. It's my belief... that the real reason [Paul] Wolfowitz and others were mad at [Gen. Eric] Shinseki when he testified before the war about [the need for] 200 or 300 [thousand] troops -- it wasn't about the numbers -- was, "Didn't he get it? What had he been listening to in the tank? Didn't we explain to him...?... Shinseki just didn't get it! It wasn't about the numbers. He wasn't a member of the clan. He didn't join the utopia crowd....
Jacoby: With Kissinger, there were lies, and he knew exactly what he was doing ...
Hersh: Yes, one of his aides was assigned -- literally assigned on one of the secret flights they made to China -- to keep track of the lies ... But these guys, do you realize how much better off we would be if they really were cynical, and they really were lying about it, because, yes, behind the invasion would be something real, like support for Israel or oil. But it's not! It's not about oil. It's about utopia. I guess you could call it idealism....
Jacoby: So you don't think that this is some Machiavellian, cynical, manipulative ...
Hersh: I used to pray it was! We'd be in better shape.... I think these guys in their naiveté and single-mindedness have been so completely manipulated by -- not the Israelis -- but the Iranians. The Iranians always wanted us in. I think there's a lot of evidence that Iran had much to do with [Ahmed] Chalabi's disinformation [about nonexistent Iraqi WMD].... I think Iran was very interested in getting us involved. We get knocked down a peg; they become the big boys on the block.... I think Chalabi thought he could handle the Iranians. They were helping him all along with disinformation and documents he could give to the White House. Don't forget, once the neocons decided to go to Iraq in the face of all evidence, they were like a super-reverse suction machine, and anything in the world that furthered the argument that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was hot. I call it stove-piping, because it's a technical work of art. But it was much more than that. It was anything -- vavoom! -- into the president's [office]. It was so amateurish, it was comical. How hard was it to get some crapola into the White House about WMD without the CIA looking at it?
The Guardian talks to one of Abu Ghraib's female inmates:
As Iraq lurches from disaster to disaster, from kidnapping to suicide bombing, from insurgency towards civil war, from death to death, what does she think of the Americans now? "I hate them," she says.
Yes, John Kerry is shrill:
The administration told us we’d be greeted as liberators. They were wrong. They told us not to worry about looting or the sorry state of Iraq's infrastructure. They were wrong. They told us we had enough troops to provide security and stability, defeat the insurgents, guard the borders and secure the arms depots. They were wrong. They told us we could rely on exiles like Ahmed Chalabi to build political legitimacy. They were wrong. They told us we would quickly restore an Iraqi civil service to run the country and a police force and army to secure it. They were wrong. In Iraq, this administration has consistently over-promised and under-performed. This policy has been plagued by a lack of planning, an absence of candor, arrogance and outright incompetence. And the President has held no one accountable, including himself. In fact, the only officials who lost their jobs over Iraq were the ones who told the truth.
And when you think that this was someone who *supported* the attack on Iraq:
matthew: Stop the world: It looks to me like The Washington Post's decided it's time to start getting off the Bush bandwagon. If it makes people feel better to insist that the administration has demonstrated "courage in setting goals and steadfastness in sticking to them" before they concede that there's been "extraordinary recklessness and incompetence in execution," I suppose I'll have to let that stand. What we've actually seen is rule by an extraordinarily vicious and corrupt group of people who don't have any genuine concern for anything other than the perpetuation of their own grasp on power and the enrichment of their cronies.
Joe Klein is one of the shrill:
TIME.com: Bush's Iraq: A Powerful Fantasy: But all three CIA scenarios [for Iraq] were awful, I pointed out. The best case was "tenuous stability," a continuation of the sapping insurgency we're seeing now. McClellan began to read from talking points. The "pessimists and naysayers" had been wrong, he said, about the Iraqi people's ability to establish a transitional government, a national council and a transitional law. The "Iraqi people" had little to do with establishing any of those, but McClellan plowed on. A reporter asked if McClellan was saying that the CIA was filled with "pessimists and naysayers," but McClellan wouldn't bite....
Scott McClellan is beginning to sound like Baghdad Bob, the infamous spokesman for Saddam who announced hallucinatory Iraqi victories as the American troops closed in on Baghdad.... Bush told his crowds.... Saddam was a threat. The world is a safer place now that he's in jail. We must attack the terrorists before they attack us.... [Bush's] argument is tight, concise and, so far, impregnable. It is also a clever distortion of reality.... [W]e are facing a far more dangerous world than existed before the war. Many intelligence and military experts now believe that al-Qaeda has rebuilt its leadership structure and metastasized; that the U.S. military is overburdened and its leaders are likely to tell the next President that they lack the resources necessary to regain control in Iraq; that the U.S. government has lost the credibility to lead the world into action against future threats from, say, Iran or North Korea; that Iraq itself seems in danger of splitting into three chaotic regions, which—in the NIE's worst-case scenario—may lead to civil war....
It isn't just the powerful and famous. Vets fresh from the front lines are joining in droves. Blogger buggieboy is one them, and now one of us:
This U.S. Army website discusses terrorism in a realistic manner, showing that Al Queda is not the only enemy we face and that 9/11 "changed the world" only for the uninformed. Any national security professionals that didn't realize the danger of terrorism before 9/11 are incompetent and should not be given responsibility for our defense. This includes the entire Bush administration team.His resume lists the 101st Airborne Division, the Second Infantry Division, and the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. Does it list the Shrill Vote Veterans for Competence?
Not everyone is called to the ancient and hermetic Order of the Shrill. Some join the Order of the Shill -- those courageous individuals who throw off their own sense of integrity in order to shill for the executive branch. The Order of the Shill is not open to your Aunt Edna who believes Iraq was behind the 9/11/01 attacks. No, the Order of the Shill is far too exclusive to accept just any poor deluded fool. It is restricted to those who clearly know better, yet make the obligatory rounds to the media in support of the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, or simple disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration. Members of the Order of the Shill occasionally show their dual membership in the Order of the Shrill which, if nothing else, makes for good theater.
Today we introduce an anchor member of the Order of the Shill: Colin Powell.
Secretary of State Colin Powell disputed U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's assertion that the U.S.-led war in Iraq was illegal and said in an interview published on Friday the comment was "not a very useful statement to make at this point."Illegal war? Bah! Why talk about that now? Look, a bird! Aaaaiiii! Aaaaiiii! N'ppeakkeeth hynd c'rtainnn! Powell sssh'rt timm'rr! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!"What does it gain anyone? We should all be gathering around the idea of helping the Iraqis, not getting into these kinds of side issues," Powell said in an interview with The Washington Times.
Neoconservative darling and British Army Colonel Tim Collins is one of us now:
Salon.com News | "A form of common assault": Col. Tim Collins, celebrated for a rousing speech to his troops on the eve of the invasion, said America and Britain were suffering the consequences of toppling Saddam Hussein without thinking about what to put in his place. That failure raised questions about the reason for going to war, suggesting it was to vent anger at Saddam rather than to liberate oppressed Iraqis.... "The evidence would show, in hindsight, that the preparations for a free and fair Iraq weren't made. Therefore one must question the motivation of the powers that went to attack it." He added: "The simple fact is that nature abhors a vacuum and so does politics. If you knock something down, you must be prepared to put something in its place or live with the consequences of that which fills the vacuum.".... [H]e said that if the war was ordered to liberate Iraq, the coalition was guilty of gross incompetence. But there was reason to think it was a "cynical war that was going to happen anyway, to vent some anger at Saddam Hussein's regime with no regard to the consequences on the Iraqi people. In which case it is a sort of form of common assault -- and the evidence would point towards the latter," he said.
A year and a half ago, Tim Collins was the darling of the hard-line Bush supporters of the Weekly Standard:
Battlefield speeches: Britain has its first hero of this war, Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins of the Royal Irish Regiment. Collins is heralded not yet for his feats on the battlefield, but for the stirring address to his troops, the regiment's 1st Battalion, on March 19, with battle imminent. As Sarah Oliver of the Mail on Sunday reported that night, Collins was "wearing his kukri, the Gurkha blade he is entitled to carry as a Gurkha commander. He spoke to his 800 men, an arm of Britain's 16 Air Assault Brigade, at Fort Blair Mayne, their desert camp just 20 miles from the Iraqi border." The British have not lost their knack for battlefield eloquence:
>It is my foremost intention to bring every single one of you out alive, but there may be people among us who will not see the end of this campaign. We will put them in their sleeping bags and send them back. There will be no time for sorrow.
The enemy should be in no doubt that we are his nemesis and that we are bringing about his rightful destruction. There are many regional commanders who have stains on their souls, and they are stoking the fires of hell for Saddam. He and his forces will be destroyed by this coalition for what they have done. As they die they will know their deeds have brought them to this place. Show them no pity.
We go to liberate, not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people, and the only flag that will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Show respect for them.
There are some who are alive at this moment who will not be alive shortly. Those who do not wish to go on that journey, we will not send. As for the others, I expect you to rock their world. Wipe them out if that is what they choose.
But if you are ferocious in battle, remember to be magnanimous in victory. It is a big step to take another human life. It is not to be done lightly. I know of men who have taken life needlessly in other conflicts. They live with the mark of Cain upon them.
If someone surrenders to you, then remember they have that right in international law, and ensure that one day they go home to their family. The ones who wish to fight? Well, we aim to please.
Hundreds of soldiers from the 3rd Brigade--some of whom are Iraq veterans--have been threatened with transfer to Iraq if they do not voluntarily re-enlist. This has forced these brave, patriotic citizens towards shrilldom:
"They said if you refuse to re-enlist with the 3rd Brigade, we'll send you down to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which is going to Iraq for a year, and you can stay with them, or we'll send you to Korea, or to Fort Riley (in Kansas) where they're going to Iraq," said one of the soldiers, a sergeant.The second soldier, an enlisted man who was interviewed separately, essentially echoed that view.
"They told us if we don't re-enlist, then we'd have to be reassigned. And where we're most needed is in units that are going back to Iraq in the next couple of months. So if you think you're getting out, you're not," he said.
But some soldiers presented with the re-enlistment message last week believe they've already done their duty and should not be penalized for choosing to leave. They deployed to Iraq for a year with the 3rd Brigade last April.
"I don't want to go back to Iraq," said the sergeant. "I went through a lot of things for the Army that weren't necessary and were risky. Iraq has changed a lot of people.''
The enlisted soldier said the recruiters' message left him troubled, unable to sleep and "filled with dread."
Curious how actual combat changes your perspective on war.
Professor THIDWICK will not meet his class in "Modern American Politics" this morning, or indeed any morning. In partial explanation we offer this note, written by him in the pre-dawn hours:
I begged the Dean not to make me teach "Modern American Politics" this semester. I knew that in order to teach it properly I would have to delve into the secrets of the Bush administration. I knew that I would learn THINGS THAT HUMANS (as we say in these post-sexist times) ARE NOT MEANT TO KNOW. I feared that this would drive me insane--into shrill unholy madness. And so it has.
But up until now I have still able to teach my course. I am proud of that. Far gone in shrill unholy madness as a result of the incompetence, mendacity, malevolence, and disconnection from reality that I am, I could still communicate with my students in English and. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Krugman R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aiiiiiii!!!
Apologies. The fits come and go. They come more quickly now. By proper effort of will I can sometimes. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh. Stop them. There. But I fear that tonight I have taken another step, and will no longer be able to intelligibly communicate with humanity. I have learned more. So shrill as to be inaudible to human hearing. But the dogs will still hear me, for a while at least.
While preparing tomorrow's lecture I came across this: a letter from Michael Scheuer, the head of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit from 1996-1999:
Michael Scheuer: In the CIA's core, U.S.-based Bin Laden operations unit today there are fewer Directorate of Operations officers with substantive expertise on al-Qaeda than there were on 11 September 2001. There has been no systematic effort to groom al-Qaeda expertise among Directorate of Operations officers since 11 September. Today, the unit is greatly understaffed because of a "hiring freeze," and the rotation of large numbers of officers in and out of the unit every 60-to-90 days--a process in which experienced officers do less substantive work and become trainers for officers who leave before they are qualified to support the mission. The excellent management team now running operations against al-Qaeda has made repeated, detailed, and on-paper pleas for more officers to work against the al-Qaeda--and have done so for years, not weeks or months--but have been ignored.
Fewer officers with substantive expertise on al-Qaeda than on September 11. Aaaiii! Nyarlathotep! Aaaiii! No systematic effort to groom al-Qaeda expertise since 11 September. Aaaiii! I can see them approach! Yog-Sothoth! Paul Wolfowitz! Aaaiii! The al-Qaeda unit understaffed because of a "hiring freeze," Aaaiii! They are here! All of them! Shrub-Crawfordath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young! Donald Rumsfeld! Aaaiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Krugman R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aiiiiiii!!! Rotation of large numbers of officers in and out of the unit every 60-to-90 days. The trans-dimensional door! The Opener of the Gate! Richard Cheney! Aaaiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Krugman R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aiiiiiii!!! The Keymaster! Gozer! The Lesser Shoggoths! Experienced officers do less substantive work and become trainers for officers who leave before they are qualified to support the mission. The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man! Drowned R'lyeh surfaces! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Krugman R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aiiiiiii!!! Sigourney Weaver! He Who Must Not Be Named! Richard Perle! The Young of Shrub-Crawfordath! Why do they hate America so? Rand Beers tried to warn us! Condi Rice! Eldest of All the Shrill, save us!!
Professor THIDWICK's disability leave is expected to be of indefinite duration.
The member-elected leader of the United Nations and broker of world peace, Kofi Annan, waxes shrill:
In the interview, Mr. Annan was asked whether he felt that the United States "is becoming an unrestrainable, unilateral superpower?"There had been "painful lessons" from the war in Iraq, Mr. Annan replied. "I think in the end, everybody is concluding that it is best to work together with our allies and through the U.N."
Then the secretary general added, "I hope we do not see another Iraq-type operation for a long time."
That was when he was asked about the legal authority for the war.
"Well, I'm one of those who believe that there should have been a second resolution," he said, because "it was up to the Security Council to approve or determine" what the "consequences should be" for Iraq's noncompliance with earlier resolutions.
"I have stated clearly that it was not in conformity with the Security Council — with the U.N. Charter," Mr. Annan replied to a further question about the legal authority.
And when asked pointedly, "It was illegal...if you wish," Mr. Annan said first, adding, "from our point of view, and from the charter point of view it was illegal."
He has said that it was not in "conformity" with the United Nations Charter. He has "raised questions about the legitimacy" of the action by the United States and Great Britain to go to war without specific authority from the Security Council.
The French subsequently threw in their own hat into the ring but are disqualified from the Order as they are institutionally shrill:
France issued no formal comment on Mr. Annan's remarks, but a spokeswoman for President Jacques Chirac said Mr. Annan's view conformed with the French view. "We consider the action as illegitimate," she said, "and illegitimate it certainly is, since it was done without a Security Council decision."
Noting that the Army Reserve has sustained the highest casualties since the Korean War in the 1950's, Lieutenant Genenral James Helmly reluctantly flirts with shrillness on the subject of military preparedness:
"We're at war, this is a hard war and we, frankly, inside the Army Reserve have been not properly prepared for it." Many members of the Army Reserve, like their fellow part-time soldiers in the National Guard, are not used to being mobilized for the kind of long and dangerous duty they face in Iraq."Every time I visit a unit I take about 45 minutes to an hour and try to talk to all of them and explain to them every initiative we have underway to properly prepare ourselves and bring the institution to a wartime footing, but it's hard," Helmly said in an interview with a group of reporters.
For years the conventional wisdom among members of the Army Reserve was that they were unlikely to get mobilized, and if they did it would be for non-combat duty in a secure rear area, far from the fighting. The war in Iraq, where no soldier is immune from attack, has shattered that belief.
Too often, Helmly said, he hears that members of a newly mobilized Reserve unit respond to the news of their activation by saying, "I didn't think it was going to happen to us," and they are not prepared.
"I frankly have started to put a boot up some people's fannies about getting everyone ready," he said.
As an example of the mindset he is working to change, Helmly described the reaction he got from the 98th Division, whose main mission is training other U.S.-based Army units, when it was told that about 800 members will be mobilized and sent to Iraq in October to help train the Iraqi army.
"I've gotten cards, letters, e-mails (saying), `How can you do that?"' he said.
In the 45 years since the 98th Division became part of the Army Reserve it has never deployed abroad, according to spokesman Steve Stromvall, although it did occupation duty in Japan in 1945-46 as an active-duty infantry division. It is scheduled to spend 12 months in Iraq.
Give him another few months of increasingly poor management of the occupation. The shrill shall have his soul.
We are broadcasting from our studio high in the tall steel-and-glass building that is the Hermetic Arts Tower here at Miskatonic University in picturesque Arkham, Massachusetts. Down the hall we have one laboratory where graduate students are trying to make hands of glory out of pigeons feet. If we look down into the courtyard we can see the unholy creations that have escaped from the Mechatronic Lab shamble off into the hills. And we? We are here in the small suite of offices that make up the world headquarters of the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill, here to answer your questions about the Order:
Q: Is Pat Buchanan a member of the Order of the Shrill?
A: No. The Order of the Shrill is limited to those who were once sane, fair, and balanced, but who have been driven into shrill unholy madness by one or more of the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, or simple disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration. Pat Buchanan was mad back when George W. Bush was sniffing cocaine.Q: Is Susan Estrich a member of the Order of the Shrill?
A: To the best of our knowledge, she is not. We are aware that she has called on others to be shrill. We are not aware of anything that makes it clear that she herself has been driven into shrill unholy madness by the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, or simple disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration.Q: Is Charles Krauthammer a member of the Order of the Shrill?
A: While there is little doubt that Charles Krauthammer is clinically insane, he was not driven insane by the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, or simple disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration. He, too, was mad back when George W. Bush was sniffing cocaine. He is not a member of the Order of the Shrill.Q: Is Dan Rather a member of the Order of the Shrill?
A: No. There is a minimal IQ cutoff, which Rather does not make.Q: Is Colin Powell a member of the Order of the Shrill?
A: There were reports that he was--that he had been driven into shrill unholy madness by the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, or simple disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration and was roaming around Europe telling high officials of European governments that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz were "f***ing crazy." But Powell has admitted under pressure that such reports were lies--that his staff was spreading them in a pathetic attempt to boost his reputation.Q: Is Andrew Sullivan a member of the Order of the Shrill?
A: Yes, definitely. Although he was a late convert, there is no doubt that Andrew Sullivan has been driven into shrill unholy madness by the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, or simple disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration. Indeed, he was once our Grand Heresiarch--although he has been displaced from that high post by Francis Fukuyama.Q: What is this about ranks and positions, anyway? What is the organization of the Order of the Shrill?
A: We are those who were once sane, fair, and balanced, and who have been driven into shrill unholy madness by the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, or simple disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration. And you expect coherence? Consistency? Stable ranks and grades? A table of organization? George W. Bush was much more likely to get his request for a ToE of Al-Qaeda accurately answered than you are likely to get a correct and consistent description of ranks and orders in the Order of the Shrill.Q: But something must be known?
A: Well, yes. It is clear that Paul Krugman is the Eldest of the Shrill. It is clear that Andrew Northrup was once Grand Heresiarch, but was displaced from that post when Andrew Sullivan finally cracked and descended into the deepest depths of shrill unholy madness. And Anderw Sullivan was recently displaced from the post and replaced by Francis Fukuyama when Fukuyama began raving about the Big Lie that was the Republican National Convention.Q: But what I really want to know is: how can I rise higher in the Order of the Shrill?
A: Diligently study the words and deeds of George W. Bush and his administration. Fifteen minutes a day, and you'll find that you will have transformed yourself into a Greater Shoggoth in notime!Q: I am shrill, but I am a right-wing libertarian, and I am uncomfortable associating with left-wing and centrist shrill. Is there a place in the Order of the Shrill for me?
A: Yes! Tyler Cowen is the Greater Shoggoth in charge of the right-wing libertarian subchapter.Q: I am shrill, but I am a right-wing Oakeshottian, and I am uncomfortable associating with left-wing and centrist shrill. Is there a place in the Order of the Shrill for me?
A: Yes! Andrew Sullivan is the Greater Shoggoth in charge of the right-wing Oakeshottian subchapter.Q: I am shrill, but I am a right-wing world domination and democratization hawk, and I am uncomfortable associating with left-wing and centrist shrill. Is there a place in the Order of the Shrill for me?
A: Yes! Although Francis Fukuyama has risen far above the rank of Greater Shoggoth, he has volunteered to remain in charge of the right-wing world domination and democratization hawk subchapter.
Mary Jacoby in Salon brings us the story of Yoshi Tsurumi, professor at the far-left Harvard Business School, a man well acquainted with the 20-something George W. Bush, and a man who has recently become possessed of a shrillness which passeth all understanding. People looking for measured criticism delivered in dulcet tones are advised to turn away from their computer screen now.
For 25 years, Yoshi Tsurumi, one of George W. Bush's professors at Harvard Business School, was content with his green-card status as a permanent legal resident of the United States. But Bush's ascension to the presidency in 2001 prompted the Japanese native to secure his American citizenship. The reason: to be able to speak out with the full authority of citizenship about why he believes Bush lacks the character and intellect to lead the world's oldest and most powerful democracy.Or, to put it another way: Aaaaiiii! Aaaaiiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Tsurumi R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!
"I don't remember all the students in detail unless I'm prompted by something," Tsurumi said in a telephone interview Wednesday. "But I always remember two types of students. One is the very excellent student, the type as a professor you feel honored to be working with. Someone with strong social values, compassion and intellect -- the very rare person you never forget. And then you remember students like George Bush, those who are totally the opposite." ...
"[Bush] showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I challenged him." When asked to explain a particular comment, said Tsurumi, Bush would respond, "Oh, I never said that." A White House spokeswoman did not return a phone call seeking comment.
In 1973, as the oil and energy crisis raged, Tsurumi led a discussion on whether government should assist retirees and other people on fixed incomes with heating costs. Bush, he recalled, "made this ridiculous statement and when I asked him to explain, he said, 'The government doesn't have to help poor people -- because they are lazy.' I said, 'Well, could you explain that assumption?' Not only could he not explain it, he started backtracking on it, saying, 'No, I didn't say that.'" ...
Students who challenged and embarrassed Bush in class would then become the subject of a whispering campaign by him, Tsurumi said. "In class, he couldn't challenge them. But after class, he sometimes came up to me in the hallway and started bad-mouthing those students who had challenged him. He would complain that someone was drinking too much. It was innuendo and lies. So that's how I knew, behind his smile and his smirk, that he was a very insecure, cunning and vengeful guy." ...
"I used to chat up a number of students when we were walking back to class," Tsurumi said. "Here was Bush, wearing a Texas Guard bomber jacket, and the draft was the No. 1 topic in those days. And I said, 'George, what did you do with the draft?' He said, 'Well, I got into the Texas Air National Guard.' And I said, 'Lucky you. I understand there is a long waiting list for it. How'd you get in?' When he told me, he didn't seem ashamed or embarrassed. He thought he was entitled to all kinds of privileges and special deals. He was not the only one trying to twist all their connections to avoid Vietnam. But then, he was fanatically for the war."
Tsurumi told Bush that someone who avoided a draft while supporting a war in which others were dying was a hypocrite. "He realized he was caught, showed his famous smirk and huffed off."
Tsurumi's conclusion: Bush is not as dumb as his detractors allege. "He was just badly brought up, with no discipline, and no compassion," he said.
Richard Buley informs us that Senators Charles Hagel and Richard Lugar joined the shrill yesterday:
MSNBC - U.S. intelligence pessimistic on Iraq future: Senate Republicans and Democrats on Wednesday denounced the Bush administration’s slow progress in rebuilding Iraq, saying the risks of failure are great if it doesn’t act with greater urgency. “It’s beyond pitiful, it’s beyond embarrassing, it’s now in the zone of dangerous,” said Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., referring to figures showing only about 6 percent of the reconstruction money approved by Congress last year has been spent.
Foreign Relations Committee members vented their frustrations at a hearing where the State Department explained its request to divert $3.46 billion in reconstruction funds to security and economic development.... Hagel said the shift in funds “does not add up in my opinion to a pretty picture, to a picture that shows that we’re winning. But it does add up to this: an acknowledgment that we are in deep trouble.”
Hagel, Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and other committee members have long argued — even before the war — that administration plans for rebuilding Iraq were inadequate and based on overly optimistic assumptions that Americans would be greeted as liberators. But the criticism from the panel’s top Republicans had an extra sting coming less than seven weeks before the presidential election in which President Bush’s handling of the war is a top issue. “Our committee heard blindly optimistic people from the administration prior to the war and people outside the administration — what I call the ’dancing in the street crowd,’ that we just simply will be greeted with open arms,” Lugar said. “The nonsense of all of that is apparent. The lack of planning is apparent.”...
Aaaaiiii! Aaaaiiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Hagel Lugar R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!
Today's example of someone once fair and balanced who has been driven into shrill unholy madness by the incompetence, mendacity, malevolence, or sheer disconnection from reality of the Bush administration is "Ogged." Remember Yasser Hamdi? The Taliban terrorist so dangerous that he had to be detained indefinitely in solitary confinement, with no trial and no counsel? The Bush administration is releasing him. Either they are letting a dangerous terrorist go so that he can kill and murder, or they have been lying through their teeth for three years about what Yasser Hamdi really is.
Unfogged:
is there any bad thing you can say of the Bushies that won't turn out to be true? That dread villian, Yasser Hamdi, the American citizen detained without charges, is about to be...released.The agreement to free Yaser Esam Hamdi represents a stunning reversal for the Bush administration, which argued for more than two years that the former Taliban fighter was potentially so dangerous that he had to be detained indefinitely in solitary confinement with no access to counsel and no right to trial.
But in a landmark ruling last June, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered that Hamdi, an American citizen, be allowed to consult with his lawyer and challenge the basis for his imprisonment. This pushed the case back into federal court and forced the Justice Department to mount a hasty retreat.
The result, officials say, is a highly detailed agreement that is expected to be made public later this week. It will result in Hamdi being flown back to Saudi Arabia on a U.S. military aircraft without ever being charged with any terror-related activity....
If you hold someone incommunicado in solitary for years because they are an Enemy of the State, they had better turn out to be a serious Enemy of the State--not a guy who you release, saying merely "don't come back, and don't get into any more trouble out there." Aaaaiiii! Aaaaiiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Ogged R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!
Oblivious to the serious issues of disco-era typography currently facing the country, generals and war college professors insist on keening insanely about the so-called "hopeless situation" in Iraq, and implying that this somehow reflects poorly on George W. Bush. They are going to feel very stupid indeed when things turn the corner! Before reading this, you may wish to purchase a good pair of earplugs and place any glassware in a sound-proof chamber, because things are going to get very shrill very quickly.
"Bring them on!" President Bush challenged the early Iraqi insurgency in July of last year. Since then 812 American soldiers have been killed and 6,290 wounded, according to the Pentagon. Almost every day in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about how we are "winning" in Iraq. "Our strategy is succeeding," he boasted to the National Guard convention on Tuesday.And what, pray tell, does this have to do with kerning?
But according to the U.S. military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost.
Retired Gen. William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse -- he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He added: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving [Osama] bin Laden's ends."
Retired Gen. Joseph Hoare, the former Marine commandant and head of the U.S. Central Command, told me: "The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong."
"I see no ray of light on the horizon at all," said Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College. "The worst case has become true. There's no analogy whatsoever between the situation in Iraq and the advantages we had after World War II in Germany and Japan."
"I don't think that you can kill the insurgency," said W. Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, the top expert on Iraq there. According to Terrill, the anti-U.S. insurgency, centered in the Sunni triangle, and holding several key cities and towns, including Fallujah, is expanding and becoming more capable as a direct consequence of U.S. policy. "We have a growing, maturing insurgency group," he told me. "We see larger and more coordinated military attacks. They are getting better and they can self-regenerate. The idea there are X number of insurgents and when they're all dead we can get out is wrong. The insurgency has shown an ability to regenerate itself because there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed. The political culture is more hostile to the U.S. presence. The longer we stay, the more they are confirmed in that view."
Nicholas Kristof has a joke for you.
NK: Knock-knock.
You: Who's there?
NK: Ph'nglui.
You: Ph'nglui who?
NK: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Rather R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aiiiiiii!!!
There's no doubt that Mr. Bush benefited from favoritism. The speaker of the Texas House has acknowledged making the call to get Mr. Bush into the National Guard.
Does any of this matter? What troubles me is less Mr. Bush's advantage three decades ago and more his denial today. Mr. Bush's own route to avoid the draft underscores the disparities in America, yet his policies seem based on a kind of social Darwinism in which the successful make their own opportunities. His tax cuts and entire outlook seem rooted in ideas not of noblesse oblige, but of noblesse entitlement.
He goes on.
How many non-liberal editorialists do we need in the order before we are shrillimitable?
Yet another shrill critic of the Bush administration: Max Sawicky. He writes about George W. Bush and his "Disownership Society":
MaxSpeak, You Listen!: THE ECONOMY AND THE DEFICIT:
AN UPDATE: New report from the Congressional Budget Office on the "cyclically-adjusted and standardized budget measures."... [F]or Fiscal 2002-2004 inclusive, total deficits are projected at $955 billion... $204 billion [of which is due] to the crummy economy. For FY2004, the projected deficit is $422 billion, of which just $47 billion is due to the business cycle....Homeland security is not a big piece of the puzzle. It's about $36 billion, in a $2.3 trillion budget. Defense by contrast is huge. One could justify borrowing for unforeseen defense and security contingencies, but once they are foreseen there is no such excuse. So Bush's excuses for the deficit -- the economy, the war on terror, and Iraq -- don't wash.
Given the sad progress of the economy since the official end of the recession in 2001, in and of themselves the 02-04 deficit numbers do not reflect bad policy. You need deficits to juice employment growth. The wonder is in how weak the effect has been, which points to the inadequacy of the composition of the deficits -- the reliance on tax cuts, and the targeting of those cuts to higher-income persons.... [T]he tax side [is] doing all the work of "automatic stabilization." This is a critical shortcoming, since even if politicians endeavor to respond to the recession, it tends to be later than optimal.
The most useful ways to make spending more sensitive to the business cycle (go up in bad times, down in good), would be through unemployment benefits, public assistance, and revenue sharing for state and local governments. The first was not well-oiled over the past three years. "Reformed" welfare... is not responsive to recession conditions.... The Federal government, Republicans in particular, did not take the economic slowdown seriously, except as an opportunity to enrich themselves and their donors.... Failure to alleviate recession destroys family wealth. Call it the Disownership Society.
Max is just the latest to succumb to shrill unholy madness: Aaaaiiii! Aaaaiiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Sawicky R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!
George W. Bush's embrace of Vladimir Putin has driven neoconservative hawk Robert Kagan into unbalanced shrillness:
Stand Up to Putin (washingtonpost.com): Putin's decision on Monday to end the system of direct popular election of Russia's governors, and to have the Russian parliament elected on the basis of slates chosen by national party leaders he mostly controls, is an unambiguous step toward tyranny in Russia.... Putin is imposing dictatorship the old-fashioned way, in the manner of a Ferdinand Marcos, an Anastasio Somoza or a Park Chung Hee. He claims that he needs to strengthen the state to face its enemies. So did they. Russia does need to fight terrorism. But eliminating elections and quashing Putin's political opponents has nothing to do with that fight.
The question now: Does President Bush care about the fate of democracy in Russia? Ever since Sept. 11 he has proclaimed a grand strategy of promoting democracy worldwide. [But]... the Bush administration has turned a blind eye to anti-democratic trends in Russia.... A great deal is riding on whether President Bush can muster the will to denounce the man he has regarded as an ally in the war on terrorism. Some will argue, and Bush may feel, that Putin is "with us."...
Failure to take sides with democratic forces in Russia will cast doubt on Bush's commitment to worldwide democracy. A White House official commented to the New York Times that Putin's actions are "a domestic matter for the Russian people." Really?.... If the Bush administration holds to that line... those hostile to democracy in the Middle East will point to the glaring U.S. double standard; those who favor democracy in the Middle East will be discredited....
There is an even more fundamental reality that the president must face: A Russian dictatorship can never be a reliable ally of the United States. A Russian dictator will always regard the United States with suspicion, because America's very existence, its power, its global influence, its democratic example will threaten his hold on power.... Did the United States help undo Soviet communism only to watch as tyranny takes its place? Is that the legacy President Bush wants to leave behind?...
Republican senator Chuck Hagel edges towards the white cliffs of shrill:
Another Republican committee member, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, was blunter in his criticism. First, he praised the two State Department officials, Ronald Schlicher, the deputy assistant secretary for Iraq, and Joseph Bowab, the deputy assistant secretary for foreign assistance, for the "directness and the honesty" they were showing in asking for the fund diversion.Mr. Hagel said the State Department request was "a clear acknowledgment that we are not holding ourselves hostage to some grand illusion that we're winning."
Mr. Hagel went on to say that the request for reprogramming the money "does not add up, in my opinion, to a pretty picture, to a picture that shows that we're winning. But it does add up to this, an acknowledgment that we are in deep trouble."
Hagel's colleague Joseph Biden is already a full-fledged member of the order:
The committee's ranking Democrat, Senator Joseph R. Biden of Delaware, was far more outspoken. "The window's closing, the window of opportunity," Mr. Biden said. "I think it's about ready to slam shut."Mr. Biden has been among the harshest critics of President Bush's policies toward Iraq, so his remarks were hardly unexpected.
"The president has frequently described Iraq as, quote, `the central front of the war on terror.' " Mr. Biden went on. "Well, by that definition, success in Iraq is a key standard by which to measure the war on terror. And by that measure, I think the war on terror is in trouble."
"I'm from Delaware," Mr. Biden said a moment later. "Dover Air Force Base is the place that every single coffin out of Afghanistan and Iraq sets on U.S. soil first. We owe it to those young women and men to get this right."
Biden to Hagel: "You don't know the power of the shrill side. You must feel the shrill flowing through you!"
He writes:
INTEL DUMP - : My father served in the Army Reserve during the early 1960s as a way to pay for college; it was then, and is now, an honorable way to serve. But you can't compare service then in the Guard with service now, because of the policy changes adopted by the military which made the National Guard an integral part of America's warfighting force.
Moreover, there are much bigger issues at stake than decades-old questions about the president's war record. Our nation has sent its reservists into harm's way in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we have not done a good job of preparing them for the hazards there. It took us more than a year to field up-to-date Interceptor body armor to the force. Many of our Guardsmen still shoot, move and communicate with gear that's older than they are. They make do with inadequate pre-deployment training, because the Pentagon continues to delude itself that 39 training days a year is enough to sustain individual and collective proficiency at warfighting. (It's not!) And yet, when our Guardsmen go downrange, they fight the same fight as their active-duty brethren -- just with less resources, older equipment, and older soldiers (on the average).
If we are going to send our Guard and reserve units into combat, we owe it to them to set them up for success. That means investing in their short-term readiness, and investing in long-term structural reforms (such as recapitalization of the Guard's vehicle fleet) to ensure they're fit to fight. Sending American soldiers into harm's way with anything less than the best is derelict. And unfortunately, that's exactly what we have done.
Leading neoconservative Francis Fukuyama is shrill. He is not only shrill, he is our new Grand Heresiarch as he asks the Bush administration, "Just what part of ph'nglui mglw'nafh Fukuyama R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn don't you understand?"
FT.com / Fukuyama: The Bush administration's failure to plan adequately for Iraq's postwar reconstruction was a big failure of policy, one that will greatly limit future US policy choices. The recent escalation in violence, with US deaths passing the 1,000 mark, underlines just how insecure the country is. But the real debate should not focus on assigning blame for this mess, but on concrete strategies to help the US recover from it.... The long-term plan laid out by the Bush administration since the June handover of sovereignty in Iraq is straightforward.... Anyone who thinks this scenario will materialise is living in fantasyland....
Allawi's government faces dual insurgencies... Moqtada al-Sadr... Fallujah, now a base for religious extremists, seems but one of a number of areas where coalition forces cannot go. The US has, in other words, permitted the establishment of a new terrorist haven in central Iraq....
Equally serious is the lack of state capacity on the part of the new government.... If elections are postponed, leaving de facto power in the hands of militias, the next US president will face a critical choice: continue pressing for a unified Iraqi state, or seek a power-sharing arrangement based on agreement by the Kurdish and Shia communities, in which stability rather than democracy is the goal....
Heavy fighting and more casualties lie ahead, and US force posture in other troublespots such as Korea is under strain. Washington can maintain current US troop levels in Iraq only through a covert draft of National Guard and reserve forces, the very people whose families form Mr Bush's political base....
The Republican convention outrageously lumped the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq war into a single, seamless war on terrorism - as if the soldiers fighting Mr Sadr were avenging the destroyers of the twin towers... mismanagement of the war has created a new Afghanistan inside Iraq.... The Bush administration has made any number of foreign policy errors, particularly over Iraq.... But if Mr Bush is returned... the administration will have got away a Big Lie about the war on terrorism and will have little incentive to engage in serious review....
...and lately most of them seem to be about the white-text-on-green-background thing. So we're trying a new template. Let us know what you think.
Gary Farber Deserves a Promotion
Gary Farber's shrillness has won him a promotion to a higher rank in the Order of the Shrill. He has been driven to his higher and even shriller state of madness by the Bush administration's coddling of Latin American terrorism:
MORAL CLARITY. So, here's the deal. We've got these terrorists -- we'll change their names, and the mentioned locations, for security reasons. There's Abdul, Mohammed, Said, and Achmed.
[Achmed] is an escapee from a prison in [Jordan], where he was incarcerated for blowing up an Air [Jordanian] passenger plane in 1976, killing 73. He also admitted plotting six hotel bombings in [Amman] that killed one tourist and injured 11 others in 1997.
[...]
[Mohammed] once fired a bazooka at the U.N. building; in February 1979, he was convicted and sentenced to 40 years for conspiracy in the 1976 assassination of former [Israeli Ambassador X] and his American colleague, [John Smith], in Washington. (His conviction was subsequently vacated on a legal technicality.) [Abdul] was convicted and imprisoned in [Egypt] in 1977 for murdering a [Saudi Arabian] consulate official; he was released by authorities in 1983. [Said] received a 10-year sentence in 1986 for conspiring to kill Kuwait's ambassador to the United Nations in 1980. These are violent men. [Israeli] prosecutors said they had planned to detonate 33 pounds of explosives while [Mubarak] was speaking at a university in [Kuwait]. Had they not been intercepted by the authorities, the blast not only would have killed the [Egyptian] president but quite possibly hundreds of others gathered to hear him speak during the [Middle East] summit.
Achmed is now in hiding in another country, having entered with a false U.S. passport. So when the other three terrorists attempted to fly into [major U.S. airport], they were quickly arrested, right?
No, they were welcomed by U.S. officials, at the direct instructions of the Bush Administration! They were met by a cheering crowd, whose votes President Bush seeks! This will help his election! They are freedom fighters! Moral clarity! Strength! Leadership! A firm line against terrorism!
Gary Farber is hereby revealed to be Yog-Sothoth. Aaaaiiii! Aaaaiiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Farber R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!
Syndicated columnist and spy outer Robert Novak gets shrill about...Robert Novak:
On the CNN panel show, "Capital Gang," Novak expressed grave doubts about the CBS documents, then said: "I'd like CBS, at this point, to say where they got these documents from. They didn't get them from a CIA agent. I don't believe there was any laws involved. I don't think we'll have a special prosecutor, if they tell. I think they should say where they got these documents because I thought it was a very poor job of reporting by CBS ...."Fellow panelist, Al Hunt, from the Wall Street Journal, then replied: "Robert Novak, you're saying CBS should reveal its source?"
The transcript continues:
NOVAK: Yes.
HUNT: You do? You think reporters ought to reveal sources?
NOVAK: No, no. Wait a minute.
HUNT: I'm just asking.
NOVAK: I'm just saying in that case.
HUNT: Oh.
NOVAK: I think -- I think it's very important. If this is a phony document, the American -- the people should know about it.
HUNT: So in some cases, reporters ought to reveal sources.
NOVAK: Yes.
HUNT: But not in all cases.
NOVAK: That's right.
HUNT: OK. Mark Shields, what's the relevance of all this?
SHIELDS: A point well taken, Al.
Reading the New Republic drives Joshua Micah Marshall over the edge and into the Order of the Shrill:
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: September 12, 2004 - September 18, 2004 Archives:...the 'fly paper' analogy. Gregg Easterbrook.... "What if the invasion of Iraq is having the unintended consequence of drawing terrorists and killers to that country, where our army can fight them on our terms?," he asks.
The only thing complicated about this argument is calibrating a hierarchy of all the levels of foolishness it embodies. Logically it is nonsensical; strategically it is moronic; morally it is close to indefensible.
The key fallacy, as so many have pointed out, is the notion that there are a finite number of 'terrorists' who we can kill and be done with.
Added to this, is the idea -- as antiquated as it is ridiculous -- that fighting 'the terrorists' in Iraq prevents them from hitting us in the United States.... Killing those already bent on suicide missions againt the US is undeniably a good thing. But doing so in a way that is guaranteed to replace them with ten new volunteers is the most foolish way to go about it. It is the classic case of dousing the fire with gasoline.
Of course that leaves untended the fact the guerillas we're blowing up in Iraq aren't the folks running the safe houses in Karachi and Peshawar who constitute the real threat. Adrift as well is the straightforward matter that turning Iraq into a killing field isn't really compatible with making it into a redoubt of democracy, prosperity and western values.
Knocking holes in this argument is really too easy and after a bit beside the point. The real problem with this argument is its proponents -- folks who seem inclined to put insipid wordplay above the lives of American soldiers and marines, indeed, above against the future security of the country itself.
As I've said, this election is no longer a matter of partisanship but of patriotism. Love of country and excuses for the George W. Bush administration are no longer compatible--if they ever were. Anyone who is still engaged in finding excuses for them and in minimizing the strategic defeats they have inflicted on this country needs to take a *long* look in the mirror.
Mainstream magazine TIME gets shrill on the subject of leaky borders:
The next time you pass through an airport and have to produce a photo ID to establish who you are and then must remove your shoes, take off your belt, empty your pockets, prove your laptop is not an explosive device and send your briefcase or purse through a machine to determine whether it holds weapons, think about this: In a single day, more than 4,000 illegal aliens will walk across the busiest unlawful gateway into the U.S., the 375-mile border between Arizona and Mexico. No searches for weapons. No shoe removal. No photo-ID checks. Before long, many will obtain phony identification papers, including bogus Social Security numbers, to conceal their true identities and mask their unlawful presence.The U.S.'s borders, rather than becoming more secure since 9/11, have grown even more porous. And the trend has accelerated in the past year. It's fair to estimate, based on a TIME investigation, that the number of illegal aliens flooding into the U.S. this year will total 3 million—enough to fill 22,000 Boeing 737-700 airliners, or 60 flights every day for a year. It will be the largest wave since 2001 and roughly triple the number of immigrants who will come to the U.S. by legal means. (No one knows how many illegals are living in the U.S., but estimates run as high as 15 million.)
Who are these new arrivals?. . .
Indeed. And all this after huge budgets and much fanfare. It it me, or is it getting shrilly in here?
No wonder Marine General Conway is shrill:
washingtonpost.com: Key General Criticizes April Attack In Fallujah Conway arrived in Iraq in March pledging to accelerate reconstruction projects as a way to subdue Anbar province, dominated by Sunni Muslims. But on March 31 he was confronted in Fallujah with the killing of four U.S. security contractors, whose bodies were mutilated or burned by a celebrating mob. Conway said he resisted calls for revenge, and instead advocated targeted operations and continued engagement with municipal leaders.
"We felt like we had a method that we wanted to apply to Fallujah: that we ought to probably let the situation settle before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge," he said in an interview with four journalists after the change-of-command ceremony. "Would our system have been better? Would we have been able to bring over the people of Fallujah with our methods? You'll never know that for sure, but at the time we certainly thought so."...
"When we were told to attack Fallujah, I think we certainly increased the level of animosity that existed," Conway said.... [S]enior U.S. officials in Iraq have said the command originated in the White House.
"We follow our orders," Conway said.... The Marine assault on Fallujah in April ended abruptly after three days. Conway expressed displeasure at the order he received from Sanchez to cease offensive operations.... "When you order elements of a Marine division to attack a city, you really need to understand what the consequences of that are going to be and not perhaps vacillate in the middle of something like that," he said. "Once you commit, you got to stay committed."... "We were quite happy with the progress of the attack on the city. We thought we were sparing civilian lives everywhere and anywhere that availed itself to us. We thought we were going to be done in a few days. That's the Monday morning quarterbacking."... Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, brought a handful of former Iraqi army generals to Camp Fallujah, the Marines' base. The generals offered to set up a force of more than 1,000 former soldiers from Fallujah who would control the city and combat the insurgents, including a cluster of non-Iraqi Islamic militants. In exchange, the Marines pledged to withdraw from the city.... Eventually, the 800 AK-47 assault rifles, 27 pickup trucks and 50 radios the Marines gave the brigade wound up in the hands of the insurgents....
Martin Sieff is one of the shrill:
Salon.com | Today Iraq, tomorrow Iran: What are all these wrong [neoconservative] predictions, which are now at risk of being relegated down the memory hole as Orwellian nonhistory that never happened? There are at least 21:
First, that the Iraqi army would instantly collapse as soon as U.S. forces crossed their border in a "cakewalk."
Second, that Ahmed Chalabi, now charged by our own puppet Iraqi government with money laundering and counterfeiting, would quickly emerge as the popular natural leader of Iraq once President Saddam Hussein was toppled.
Third, that because no serious anti-American guerrilla operations could ever get established Iraq, only a small number of U.S. troops would have to remain after the fall of Saddam.
Fourth, that strong links between Saddam and al-Qaida would be found following our occupation.
Fifth, that overwhelming evidence of weapons of mass destruction would quickly be uncovered by U.S. troops.
Sixth, that the U.S. occupation of Iraq would discredit and weaken al-Qaida throughout the Arab and wider Muslim world.
Seventh, that Iraq would quickly develop a stable democracy after the fall of Saddam.
Eighth, that Sunni and Shiite forces would never find common cause against U.S. forces.
Ninth, that reconstruction in Iraq would occur quickly and easily (disproving the State Department's far more cautious assessment of how difficult it would be).
Tenth, that NATO didn't matter and we could safely ignore it in occupying Iraq.
Eleventh, that the United Nations didn't matter and that we could safely ignore it as well.
Twelfth, that we could put together a militarily significant "coalition of the willing" -- which recalcitrant allies like France and Germany would quickly regret not joining and thus finally be prevailed upon to send in troops to ease the burden on our own forces in Iraq.
Thirteenth, that leaders of countries such as Japan, Spain and Poland who took the plunge and sent forces to Iraq would not suffer enfeebling electoral or political losses as consequences of doing so.
Fourteenth, that Iraq's oil could be made to flow again on a lucrative scale within a few months of the invasion, and pay for everything from conquest to reconstruction.
Fifteenth, that the occupation of Iraq and opening up of its oil fields would rapidly cause global oil prices to drop back into the range of $20-$25 a barrel, if not even lower -- breaking the cartel power of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries led by Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Sixteenth, that the toppling of Saddam would demoralize the Palestinians and break the back of the second Palestinian intifada, thereby ending the wave of suicide-bombing massacres of Israeli civilians.
Seventeenth, that the occupation and remaking of Iraq would quickly boost the prospects for stable, pro-American democracies throughout the Middle East. (The prophets at the American Enterprise Institute, home to Lynn Cheney and, since he left the Pentagon, Perle, were particularly hot to trot on that one.)
Eighteenth, that the CIA and other primary elements of the U.S. intelligence community who could not be bullied or manipulated by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz and their acolytes in the Pentagon could be ignored forever.
Nineteenth, that L. Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority (heavily staffed by neocons, almost all of whom have since prudently fled back to suburban Washington) could ignore the intelligence assessments and policy recommendations of the U.S. Army on the ground.
Twentieth, that last spring's crackdown on Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr would be quickly and easily carried out and that he would enjoy no significant support from the wider Iraqi Shiite community.
Twenty-first, that any insurgency in Iraq would be carried out solely by embittered old Saddam loyalists and evil outside agents, none of whom would be able to operate for long because they would find no significant support among the wider Iraqi community. (Krauthammer was particularly enthusiastic about that one.)
Some liberal hawks, such as Joshua Micah Marshall, David Remnick, Michael O'Hanlon, Kenneth Pollack and even Thomas Friedman, have actually had the grace to admit they were mistaken. But none of the stalwarts of the Washington Post editorial page has yet done so. The Post has published no editorial accounting of how it allowed itself to be misled by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and others on WMD and everything else involving the war until its conscience awoke over Abu Ghraib. The newspaper's editorial board cannot shake its Stockholm syndrome, perhaps because it is a voluntary hostage. And naturally, not a single neocon has confessed error.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Sieff R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!
About four years late, the New York Times editorial board finally joins the ranks of the shrill:
The New York Times > Opinion > Preventive War: A Failed Doctrine: If facts mattered in American politics, the Bush-Cheney ticket would not be basing its re-election campaign on the fear-mongering contention that the surest defense against future terrorist attacks lies in the badly discredited doctrine of preventive war. Vice President Dick Cheney took this argument to a disgraceful low last week when he implied that electing John Kerry and returning to traditional American foreign policy values would invite a devastating new strike.
So far, the preventive war doctrine has had one real test: the invasion of Iraq. Mr. Bush terrified millions of Americans into believing that forcibly changing the regime in Baghdad was the only way to keep Iraq's supposed stockpiles of unconventional weapons out of the hands of Al Qaeda. Then it turned out that there were no stockpiles and no operational links between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda's anti-American terrorism. Meanwhile, America's longstanding defensive alliances were weakened and the bulk of America's ground combat troops tied down in Iraq for what now appears to be many years to come. If that is making this country safer, it is hard to see how. The real lesson is that America dangerously erodes its military and diplomatic defenses when it charges off unwisely after hypothetical enemies.
Before the Iraq fiasco, American leaders rightly viewed war as a last resort, appropriate only when the nation's vital interests were actively threatened and reasonable diplomatic efforts had been exhausted. That view always left room for pre-emptive attacks; America is under no obligation to sit and wait, if it is clear that some enemy is actually preparing to strike first. But it correctly drew the line at preventive wars against potential foes who might, or might not, be thinking about doing something dangerous. As the administration's disastrous experience in Iraq amply demonstrates, that is still the wisest course and the one that keeps America most secure in an increasingly dangerous era.
Bear in mind that there are a substantial number of people who are sober, calm, fair, and balanced in public, but who still write things like "Obviously these guys have been a total f****** disaster" in private.
In other words, the lurkers are shrill in email!"
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Lurkers R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!
Michael Froomkin used to believe that the dynamic tension of the American two-party system was a good thing. But he is one of us now!
Discourse.net: CBS Documents - Worst Case Hypothesis: There I was thinking that the worst case was the [CBS News] documents were forged. No, silly me. The worst case is that the documents are real and the ‘forgery’ story is the GOP slime machine in action.
Mwuhahahahahaha! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Froomkin R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!
Novelist and hard-line Republican Mark Helprin is really shrill:
WSJ.com - Three Years On: Three years on, that is where we stand: our strategy shiftless, reactive, irrelevantly grandiose; our war aims undefined; our preparations insufficient; our civil defense neglected... a hapless and incompetent administration that in a parliamentary system would have been turned out long ago...
Colin Powell is not a member of the Order of the Shrill. Under pressure yesterday, he denied that he had known and said that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz were "f------ crazies." He remained unaware and unshrill, in spite of seeing things with his own eyes the mere hearing of has driven strong men (and women) out of their minds and into shrillhood.
It must be extremely bitter for Powell to admit that he was so clueless and so out-of-the-loop to have remained balanced and unshrill. This is, I think, the last nail in the coffin of his now-buried reputation:
New York Daily News - Daily Dish &38; Gossip - Lloyd Grove's Lowdown: Pardon his French!:
Pardon his French!
Colin Powell
U.K. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw
Did Secretary of State Colin Powell tell his British counterpart two years ago that the U.S. government's three top hawks were "f--g crazies"?
Respected Brit journalist James Naughtie reports that in private talks with Foreign Secretary Jack Straw before the war in Iraq, a deeply frustrated Powell used just those words to describe Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Powell's chief rivals in the Bush administration.
Yesterday, Powell - through a spokeswoman - predictably denied Naughtie's account, which appears in a new book, "The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency."
"This is nonsense," Powell said. "I never said anything like that to Jack, nor him to me. Anyone who says I did is wrong."
Likewise, after fevered consultations between the State Department and the Foreign Office Wednesday night and yesterday, a British official E-mailed me: "These allegations are without foundation. Secretary Powell has never used these words to the Foreign Secretary."
But Naughtie - a well-known BBC radio personality whose contacts in the British government are deep and wide - refused to back off.
"I did not use these words lightly," he told me yesterday. "I had information which convinced me utterly that they had been used. Whatever the statements issued from the two offices concerned, I stand by the quote."
Naughtie declined to discuss his sources, but he is known to enjoy a longstanding close relationship with Straw, who teamed with Powell in the United Nations in a foiled attempt to prevent military action in Iraq.
The politically embarrassing quote comes at an especially bad time for Powell, who has publicly tried to show loyalty to President Bush in the heat of the reelection campaign.
But privately, according to numerous press accounts, Powell opposed the timing of the war against Saddam Hussein and has since lamented its cost in money and lives.
Powell's spokeswoman, Emily Miller, dismissed Naughtie's account: "Someone's just trying to sell a book."
The Eldest of All the Shrill manifests himself in the New York Times. He talks about Bush's "Dishonesty Thing," and about all our new members: the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Stanley Collender, Goldman Sachs, Bruce Bartlett, and Alan Sloane. Truly our name is Legion:
The New York Times &38;38;gt; Opinion &38;38;gt; Op-Ed Columnist: The Dishonesty Thing: By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: September 10, 2004:
It's the dishonesty, stupid... [the] pattern of lies: his assertions that he fulfilled his obligations when he obviously didn't, the White House's repeated claims that it had released all of the relevant documents.... It's the same pattern of dishonesty, this time involving personal matters that the public can easily understand, that some of us have long seen on policy issues, from global warming to the war in Iraq. On budget matters, which is where I came in, serious analysts now take administration dishonesty for granted.
It wasn't always that way. Three years ago, those of us who accused the administration of cooking the budget books were ourselves accused, by moderates as well as by Bush loyalists, of being "shrill." These days the coalition of the shrill has widened to include almost every independent budget expert.
For example, back in February the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities accused the Bush administration of, in effect, playing three-card monte with budget forecasts. It pointed out that the administration's deficit forecast was far above those of independent analysts, and suggested that this exaggeration was deliberate.
"Overstating the 2004 deficit," the center wrote, "could allow the president to announce significant 'progress' on the deficit in late October - shortly before Election Day - when the Treasury Department announces the final figures."
Was this a wild accusation from a liberal think tank? No, it's conventional wisdom among experts. Two months ago Stanley Collender, a respected nonpartisan analyst, warned: "At some point over the next few weeks, the Office of Management and Budget will release the administration's midsession budget review and try to convince everyone the federal deficit is falling. Don't believe them."
He went on to echo the center's analysis. The administration's standard procedure, he said, is to initially issue an unrealistically high deficit forecast, which is "politically motivated or just plain bad." Then, when the actual number comes in below the forecast, officials declare that the deficit is falling, even though it's higher than the previous year's deficit.
Goldman Sachs says the same. Last month one of its analysts wrote that "the Office of Management and Budget has perfected the art of underpromising and overperforming in terms of its near-term budget deficit forecasts. This creates the impression that the deficit is narrowing when, in fact, it will be up sharply."
In other words, many reputable analysts think that the Bush administration routinely fakes even its short-term budget forecasts for the purposes of political spin. And the fakery in its long-term forecasts is much worse.
The administration claims to have a plan to cut the deficit in half over the next five years. But even Bruce Bartlett, a longtime tax-cut advocate, points out that "projections showing deficits falling assume that Bush's tax cuts expire on schedule." But Mr. Bush wants those tax cuts made permanent. That is, the administration has a "plan" to reduce the deficit that depends on Congress's not passing its own legislation.
Sounding definitely shrill, Mr. Bartlett says that "anyone who thinks we can overcome our fiscal mess without higher taxes is in denial." Far from backing down on his tax cuts, however, Mr. Bush is proposing to push the budget much deeper into the red with privatization programs that purport to offer something for nothing.
As Newsweek's Allan Sloan writes, "The president didn't exactly burden us with details about paying for all this. It's great marketing: show your audience the goodies but not the price tag. It's like going to the supermarket, picking out your stuff and taking it home without stopping at the checkout line to pay. The bill? That will come later."
Longtime readers will remember that that's exactly what I said, shrilly, about Mr. Bush's proposals during the 2000 campaign. Once again, he's running on the claim that 2 - 1 = 4.
So what's the real plan? Some not usually shrill people think that Mr. Bush will simply refuse to face reality until it comes crashing in: Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, says there's a 75 percent chance of a financial crisis in the next five years.
Nobody knows what Mr. Bush would really do about taxes and spending in a second term. What we do know is that on this, as on many matters, he won't tell the truth.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Krugman R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!<
Clay Risen of the New Republic observes the spectacle of small-government market libertarians driven mad by the mendacious and incompetent George W. Bush administration:
The New Republic Online: Tanked: I1997, Cato Institute President Ed Crane flew to Austin, Texas, to have dinner with George W. Bush.... Crane wanted to make sure he had the governor's support for... Social Security privatization... Bush telling Crane, "This is the most important policy issue facing the United States today." Four years later, Bush's 2001 budget speech to Congress strongly emphasized Social Security privatization.... Tanner had even more reason to celebrate when Bush named five Cato scholars and affiliates to the 16-member Commission to Strengthen Social Security....
Oh, how things can change in three years.... From its deficit spending to its regulatory record to the Iraq war, the Institute charges that the administration has betrayed conservative values, bankrupted the government, expanded federal programs, and made the world less safe.... Cato staffers and scholars are so fed up with Bush that many say they will sit out the election--or even vote for John Kerry. "Most people at the Institute have no plans to vote for the president this time," said one member of the Cato policy staff who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "There will be some votes for Kerry inside the Cato Institute this year."...
[I]ts antipathy is indicative of a growing belief among the GOP's fiscally conservative constituencies--not just libertarian ideologues, but big-business executives, small-business owners, virtually any voting bloc concerned with fiscal restraint--that Bush has been an abject failure.... Cato... [is] squarely within the Republican camp.... [I]t greeted Bush's win with optimism.... But, by late 2002, people at the Institute began to sour... Social Security commission had done almost nothing... Bush was cutting taxes while increasing deficit spending, a double sin in Cato's eyes.... Niskanen even declared Bush's 2005 budget "a fraud" concocted by "borrow and spend Republicans."... [S]pending was only one of Cato's grievances... civil liberties... violation of the First Amendment... steel tariffs... Iraq. As early as December 2001, Institute scholars were writing op-eds urging the administration not to go to war against Saddam Hussein; when it did, Cato was one of the first think tanks to warn that the lack of postwar planning would doom the reconstruction effort. In October 2003, several Cato foreign policy experts joined the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, co-organized by its director of foreign policy studies, Christopher Preble....
Don Pedro of Kautilyan is driven into the ranks of the shrill by R. Glenn Hubbard:
Kautilyan: Glenn Hubbard: Economist, Weaver of Straw, or Just Hack?: ...an argument built on not just one straw man, but a whole platoon's worth of straw men stacked one on top of another, he concludes that Kerry would be bad for jobs:
Economy.com recently stated in a review of policy developments that, "If monetary and fiscal policy had remained unchanged during the Bush presidency, the recession that began in early 2001 and ended later in the year, would have likely instead lasted through much of 2003. The economy would still be shedding jobs."
So on the demand side, one would have to conclude that the Kerry tax hikes would harm job creation.
Hubbard reads into this alternative reality--one where Alan Greenspan has taken up pot smoking and bongo drums and left the Fed on autopilot, and tax and spending policy has remained right where it was at the end of the Clinton era--and divines that Kerry would be bad for jobs. Fine, except that Greenspan's not a stoner. And no one was suggesting NO changes to fiscal policy in 2001. The Democrats were pushing for modest, *temporary* tax cuts targeted to the poor and middle income households who would spend the cash, combined with extending unemployment benefits and fiscal relief for the states. All that would have added up to a stimulus package with a lot more bang for the buck--62% more according to analysis by Economy.com, the group Hubbard cites with such glee...
Having falsely asserted yesterday that Gideon Rose was a Republican, I'll further tempt fate today by saying that Fareed Zakaria sounds like a Republican--or sounded like one, until the mendacity, incompetence, and disconnection of the Bush administration drove him too into the Order of the Shrill:
COMMENT: Bush eloquently lays out his vision while ignoring reality : September 8, 2004 BY FAREED ZAKARIA
Bush's speech had a powerful central theme: the connection between the United States and the progress of liberty worldwide. He celebrated that link and rejoiced in its successes.... The idea that the United States should stand for something in the world and pursue broad goals has a distinguished Democratic pedigree. Virtually every Democratic president over the last 100 years has made this case. The problem with the president's speech was not the lofty goals he outlined, but the fact his policies are not moving us closer to achieving them. It's true that a democratic Afghanistan and Iraq would be powerful, progressive forces in the Muslim world. But... [w]e do not help democracy in Afghanistan by ceding large parts to warlords and drug dealers... [help] Iraq by destroying the old order with no idea of what to do next.
On Iraq... [Bush was] disconnected... as if it were May 2003... no recognition that... Iraq are not going well... widening insurgency... deepening hostility.... Support for the United States, which was around 70 percent at the start of the occupation, is now under 5 percent.... If... [Bush] really thinks that Iraq today looks like Germany in 1946 -- an advanced industrial country with a long liberal tradition, centuries of experience with capitalism, the rule of law and a defeated population that fully cooperated with American occupation -- then he's in for a rude surprise....
Bush's attitude... stubbornly insisted that there was no insurgency, that no more troops were necessary, that the Governing Council had widespread support... could not accept the inconvenient facts... "empirical evidence doesn't matter for him. . . . Like all religious visionaries, he simply asserts that his own faith will conquer reality. It won't."...
[A]fter World War II... the United States adopted a series of wise, generous policies and a conciliatory style that made it much loved in the countries we were trying to help. Spreading democracy requires allies, particularly among the targets of one's affection.
The picture could not be more different today. Bush does not seem aware that the intense hostility toward him in every country in the world (save Israel) has made it very difficult for the United States to be the agent of freedom. In every Arab country that I have been to in the last two years, the liberals, reformers and businessmen say, "Please don't support us. American support today is the kiss of death."
The Republican convention had two alternating approaches toward foreigners. On the one hand, it repeatedly ridiculed them. The cheapest applause lines in New York last week were ones that ended in "the French," "Paris" or, worst of all, "the United Nations," which was probably meant to conjure up images of envious Third Worlders plotting against America. On the other hand, Republicans constantly declared they were going to deliver the blessings of liberty to the far corners of the world. This is the party's dilemma -- it wishes to spread liberty to people whom it doesn't really like.
somewhere out there Daniel Drezner is wondering whether the "excellence" of the Bushies "grand strategy" outweighs their incompetence on the ground. I think Peter Galbraith has already answered this question:
The New York Review of Books: Iraq: The Bungled Transition: ...How did the Bush administration invest so much in the T[ransitional ]A[dministrative ]L[aw] and then find itsel forced to abandon it? It appears that Bremer never realized that his decrees would no legally outlast the occupation. It was a rookie's mistake caused, as with so many othe CPA failures, by the lack of expertise on the part of his staff. The TAL was largel the responsibility of two of Bremer's assistants (dubbed "the west wingers"), one a extremely capable but relatively junior Foreign Service officer and the other a youn political appointee from the Pentagon's stable of neoconservative nation-builders Imbued with grand ideas such as remaking the Iraqi judiciary with a US-styl Supreme Court, they apparently neglected to consult an international lawyer
The Bush administration's recruitment of staff for the CPA is one of the great scandals of the American occupation, although it has so far received little attention from the press. Republican political connections counted for far more than professional competence, relevant international experience, or knowledge of Iraq. In May, The Washington Post ran an account of three young people recruited for service in the CPA by e-mail, without interviews, security clearances, or relevant experience. They ended up responsible for spending Iraq's budget; because they knew little about the country or about financial procedures, they did so slowly. The failure to spend money was of course the source of enormous frustration to jobless Iraqis and undoubtedly produced recruits for the insurgency. According to the Post, the threesome, who included the daughter of a prominent conservative activist, had never applied to go to Iraq and could not figure out how they were selected. Finally they realized that the one thing they had in common was that they had applied for jobs at the conservative Heritage Foundation, which had kept their resumes on file.
In some cases, the quest for political loyalists meant dismissing qualified professionals who had already been recruited. In the June 20 Chicago Tribune, the reporter Andy Zajac described how, in April of 2003, the Bush administration replaced the chief CPA health official, Dr. Frederick Burkle, a medical doctor with close working relationships with humanitarian organizations and long experience in conflict zones, with James Haveman, a political crony of Michigan's Republican former governor. Unlike Dr. Burkle, who for months had been planning the restoration of Iraq's health care system and who was ready to put a program in action as soon as Baghdad fell, Haveman did not arrive in Iraq until June 7, 2003. Although he had never worked in a post-conflict environment, Haveman strongly denied that he lacked international experience, apparently considering his travel to twenty-six foreign countries (as he told the Chicago Tribune) a relevant qualification.
The privatizing of Iraq's economy was handled at first by Thomas Foley, a top Bush fund-raiser, and then by Michael Fleisher, brother of President Bush's first press secretary. After explaining that he had got the job in Iraq through his brother Ari, he told the Chicago Tribune—without any apparent sense of irony—that the Americans were going to teach the Iraqis a new way of doing business. "The only paradigm they know is cronyism."
Haveman, according to the Tribune, ignored Iraq's private health care system (which meets half the country's needs) and wasted huge amounts of money by refusing to collect data on the existing clinics....
Bush's attempt to remake Iraq is the centerpiece of his foreign policy and, almost certainly, will be the defining event of his administration. The invasion and occupation were highly ideological decisions reflecting the philosophy of the President and his closest aides. What is astonishing is that the conduct of this venture was not left to the military and civilian professionals most qualified to make it work but rather to those most committed to a fuzzy vision of a transformed Iraq. In too many cases, these were people with no knowledge of Iraq, with no experience in dealing with post-conflict environments, with limited experience in making the US bureaucracy produce results, and with little or no expertise in the substantive matters (i.e., finance, trade) for which they were responsible. It is not surprising that so many gave up after relatively short periods in Iraq.
I participated in what became a major effort of the Clinton administration—bringing peace to Bosnia. While our efforts lacked the ideological fervor of Bush's nation-building in Iraq, the outcome was important both for the Balkans and for President Clinton's prospects for reelection in 1996. In finding people to fill key jobs in the international administration in Sarajevo as well as the US embassy there, the Bosnia peace negotiator, Richard Holbrooke, scoured the Foreign Service, the military, and the civilian bureaucracy for experts who knew the Balkans, who could speak the local language, and who could do the jobs for which they were recruited. The outcome in Bosnia—where no American has died in hostile action in the nine years since the Dayton Peace Accords went into effect—could not be more different from that in Iraq. Professionalism is at least part of the reason.
The most important judgment of the American occupation must be that of the peoples of Iraq. A US government poll conducted just before the handover showed that only 11 percent of Arab Iraqis had confidence in the CPA—down from 47 percent in November. It is not surprising that an occupation that began with flowers and cheers (I witnessed this in April 2003) ended two days ahead of schedule with the US administrator slipping out of Baghdad following a secret ceremony in the highly fortified Green Zone.
The process of choosing an interim government and the decision to abandon the TAL alienated the two Iraqi communities that are the best organized—the Kurds and the religious Shiites. These communities are key to the longterm stability of Iraq and include the country's only genuinely popular politicians....
Seems the VP came up with the idea of arming the nation with spitballs:
In March of this year, Cheney attacked Kerry for having “repeatedly voted against weapons systems for the military,” hammering the senator for voting “against the Apache helicopter, against the Tomahawk cruise missile, against even the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.” He said this record has “given us ample doubts about [Kerry’s] judgment and the attitude he brings to bear on vital issues of national security.”
What Cheney leaves out of his stump speeches is the ironic fact that almost all of the cuts Kerry voted for were endorsed or originally proposed by Cheney himself. At issue is not the cuts themselves, but the hypocrisy of Cheney attacking an opponent who merely followed his lead.
Pseudonymous Middle East expert Abu Aardvark collapses under the weight of our "success" in reconstructing Iraq, and joins the Order of the Shrill:
Abu Aardvark: Kirkuk, anyone?: Kirkuk, anyone? Two intense military insurgencies in Iraq, with the Sunnis and Shia, not enough for you? Do you agree that everyone wants to fight in Fallujah, but only real men want to go to Kirkuk? Do you think that if a spot of war is good for the soul, then even more must be even better? Do you think that the greater the violence, the more evidence that our policies are working? Then good news for you!
Al Hayat reports that Masoud Barzani, leader of the KDP, has chosen this calm and peaceful moment to re-open the question of the Kurdish identity of Kirkuk and has threatened to "wage a war to defend the Kurdish identity of the city." (AFP has the story here).
Oh goody! Can we have a war against all three major Iraqi ethnic groups at the same time?!? Would that count as a civil war? While this is probably just rhetoric, it certainly doesn't contribute to a warm fuzzy feeling of national reconciliation either. For more on the Kurds and their frustration, don't miss Peter Galbraith's new piece.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Abu Aardvark R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Confessore R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!
TAPPED: September 2004 Archives: NOT EVEN A GOOD LIAR. You know things have reached a low point when the White House doesn't even attempt to make its dissembling sensical. Here's an administration spokesman explaining to the Washington Post why they altered the verbatim transcript of Dick Cheney's loathsome remarks to the effect that electing John Kerry will encourage future terrorist attacks:
In a change that highlighted the sensitivity of Cheney's statement, the White House yesterday released a revised version of the transcript of his remarks. The official transcript, posted on the White House Web site Tuesday afternoon and e-mailed to reporters, said: "(I)t's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2nd, we make the right choice. Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again."
In a version released Tuesday to reporters traveling with Cheney, however, the period at the end of "hit again" was removed and replaced with a comma, which linked his blunter statement to his standard stump language expressing concern that future attacks would be treated as "just criminal acts, and that we're not really at war."
Yesterday, the transcript on the White House Web site was altered to make Cheney's remarks one sentence. Cheney's White House spokesman, Kevin Kellems, issued a statement saying that the first official transcript "contained a typographical error" and was an "interim draft." "These types of corrections are not uncommon in the transcription of verbal statements," Kellems said. "The final transcript accurately reflects the statement as delivered, which is clear when watching video of the event."
This seems to be the exact opposite of the truth; the original transcript had Cheney saying what everyone reported him to say. The changed transcript has been scrubbed. Kevin Kellems is lying to the Post, and he knows that the Post knows he lying. That takes a lot of guts and a total lack of shame.
Duncan Black of Atrios was shrill before shrill was cool, and is still shrill, raising the bar every day:
Wow, we have a Commander in Chief who, while in the service, disobeyed a direct order. That's a crime! Wow! Not only that, but his people are claiming he had the right to do that! And, they're basing this previously unknown "right to disobey direct orders if you want to" on a falsehood! This is incredible. What kind of example does this set for our men and women in the service? How can he possibly lead them?
[White House flack] Dan Bartlett explains:
There was no reason for President Bush to take a flight exam if he wasn't going to be flying.
I can think of one reason -- he was given a direct order by a superior officer and it's a crime to disobey it! But, that isn't enough for Chicken George or Dan!
Bartlett also says:
But the fact of the matter is, is that just because they weren't flying the F-102 anymore doesn't mean they were not flying a new, modern aircraft. The point was, is that it didn't make sense for the Texas Air National Guard to train President Bush in a new aircraft at the end, toward the end of his service, when he was being given permission to attend Harvard Business School. But apparently they continued to fly the F-102 until 1975! Wow, is Dan Bartlett a big liar too? Well, I guess we'd already established that, but I'm still shocked. Really really shocked.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Black R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!.
No, there is not yet an Order of the Shrill CafePress store where you can order mugs, t-shirts, et cetera. The editors have been indolent and strangely unshrill.
But you can go to the Nielsen Hayden CafePress Store and buy a t-shirt with the legend, "I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist," that more completely expresses the ethos of the Order of the Shrill than anything our poor brains can come up with.
For this and many other services, let it be known that the Nielsen Haydens are now Throne and Domination in the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill.
Retired Army Colonel Gerald A. Lechliter is one of us:
'He broke his contract with the United States government -- without any adverse consequences. And the Texas Air National Guard was complicit in allowing this to happen," Lechliter said in an interview yesterday. ''He was a pilot. It cost the government a million dollars to train him to fly. So he should have been held to an even higher standard."Retired Lieutenant Colonel Albert C. Lloyd Jr is not a member of the order, yet he's remarkably shrill for someone who was vouching for character just a few short months ago:
Even retired Lieutenant Colonel Albert C. Lloyd Jr., a former Texas Air National Guard personnel chief who vouched for Bush at the White House's request in February, agreed that Bush walked away from his obligation to join a reserve unit in the Boston area when he moved to Cambridge in September 1973. By not joining a unit in Massachusetts, Lloyd said in an interview last month, Bush ''took a chance that he could be called up for active duty. But the war was winding down, and he probably knew that the Air Force was not enforcing the penalty."
Matthew Yglesias reports to us that the entire CSIS is shrill:
matthew: CSIS Says We're F***** In Iraq: It's not actually the title of the report, but "We're F*****" would work pretty well. The frontpage headline is pretty funny, though: "Iraqis Optimistic Despite Failure in Security, Services, Economic Opportunity." It's like the Bush campaign's dream of a "more hopeful" though not actually better America or a world where terrorism, though more common and more deadly, is "less acceptable." Except if you read the report, Iraqis, while optimistic, are actually less optimistic than they used to be. And there's all this other stuff in there about how we're fucked. The good news is that we've painted a lot of new schools since the summer of 2003. The bad news is that according to every single indicator CSIS used, things are getting worse in Iraq.
President Carter writes to Zell Miller:
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: September 05, 2004 - September 11, 2004 Archives: Great Georgia Democrats who served in the past, including Walter George, Richard Russell, Herman Talmadge, and Sam Nunn disagreed strongly with the policies of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and me, but they remained loyal to the party in which they gained their public office. Other Democrats, because of philosophical differences or the race issue, like Bo Callaway and Strom Thurmond, at least had the decency to become Republicans.
Everyone knows that you were chosen to speak at the Republican Convention because of your being a “Democrat,” and it’s quite possible that your rabid and mean-spirited speech damaged our party and paid the Republicans some transient dividends.
Perhaps more troublesome of all is seeing you adopt an established and very effective Republican campaign technique of destroying the character of opponents by wild and false allegations. The Bush campaign’s personal attacks on the character of John McCain in South Carolina in 2000 was a vivid example. The claim that war hero Max Cleland was a disloyal American and an ally of Osama bin Laden should have given you pause, but you have joined in this ploy by your bizarre claims that another war hero, John Kerry, would not defend the security of our nation except with spitballs. (This is the same man whom you described previously as “one of this nation's authentic heroes, one of this party's best-known and greatest leaders -- and a good friend.")
Nadezhda of Chez Nadezhda, Unofficial chair of the Medium Lobster Fan Club, and all things
Chez Nadezhda offers the following two candidates for membership in the Order of the Shrill. Their meritorious contributions are described below.
Two Worthies for the Order of the Shrill, by nadezhda at 08:43PM (EDT) on September 7, 2004 | Permanent Link.
Ron Nussbaum is our first nominee for membership to the Order of the Shrill. Prior to the Republican National Convention, the editorial page editor of Business Week warned the Bush Administration that GOP stalwarts, including the US corporate sector and some Republicans on Capitol Hill, are putting substantial distance between themselves and the Bush Administration's foreign policy.
It should be noted that his warning was not, shall we say, delivered in the friendliest or most cordial of manner.
Nussbaum cited with approval the critique of the President's policies by our second candidate, Rep Doug Bereuter, in his announcement that he was not running for another term. Nussbaum explains:
What lessons has the Administration learned from the mistakes of Iraq, and how does it plan to change course if it wins a second term? This was the question posed by Representative Doug Bereuter (R-Neb.) in a letter to his constituents announcing his retirement. The 64-year old legislator, a powerful member of the House Intelligence and International Relations Committees, solidly supported President Bush in going to war in Iraq.
Nussbaum lists the mistakes that Bereuter believes have been made by the Bush Administration:
But he now believes "that all things being considered, it was a mistake to launch that military action," as he stated in his letter. [...] Yet there are no apparent reverberations within the White House, no debate on how to change policy."
Bereuter wrote: "I believe that launching the preemptive military action was not justified." But no discussion has emerged from the Bush camp about unilateral preemption, which may have been the most radical foreign policy change in decades." Bereuter also raised the issue of military doctrine, which underlies every foreign policy. He says the Administration ignored many entreaties by knowledgeable people in Washington to send a much larger military force to Iraq, not only to conquer it but to occupy it. Had the Pentagon sent in twice as many troops, the Sunni resistance in Fallujah would have been crushed early, the looting could have been prevented, and Iraq's slide into anarchy prevented.
Bereuter criticized the White House for giving responsibility for postwar Iraq to the Pentagon, not the State Dept. In effect, the Republican congressman raised the issue of nation-building, which may go to the heart of future foreign policy. President Bush came into office vehemently opposed to U.S. nation-building. He wanted none of it in Iraq, which is one reason all the postwar planning done at State was ignored. Such thinking was flawed, but there's no indication that would change in a second term.
It must be admitted that the tone, per se, of Rep Bereuter's critique does not, to the casual reader, strike the ear as shrill. But the knowledgeable reader, familiar with the coded language of Washington politicians, parties and power, would recognize this language as of the crystal-splitting variety. Given Rep Bereuter's position in the House and his standing on relevant committees, Nussbaum notes:
This admission by Bereuter, a trusted congressional Republican insider, is of the scale and importance of Robert McNamara's admission that the Vietnam War had been a mistake.
Surely such a statement meets the highest shrillness standards of the Order.
Returning now to Nussbaum's candidacy. Calling on the Bush Administration to put forward at the convention how they would learn from the mistakes of the past three years, Nussbaum predicts:
Indeed, instead of retooling in light of the mistakes of Iraq, the Administration shows signs of digging in and holding fast to a unilateral, preemptive course of action. [...] And the reorganization of U.S. military forces into an ever smaller, more lethal force able to win battles but not the war -- or the peace -- will continue.
Unless Bush says something different in his acceptance speech on Thursday at the Republican Convention, we must assume that foreign policy would not change much in a second term. [On the contrary, Nussbaum's forlorn hopes were dashed by Bush's speech. ed. ] That fear has a growing number of corporate executives moving to distance themselves from the Bush White House. Anti-Americanism is threatening U.S. brands overseas, and it may become tough for European managers to explain to customers and shareholders why they continue to do business with American corporations.
The truth is that it's virtually impossible to have a unilateral foreign policy and live in a global multilateral economy. It's also difficult for many practical executives to see the level of incompetence in foreign policy of late and not be put off. But it isn't difficult to see conservative Corporate America, like House Republican Bereuter, distancing itself from the Bush White House.
Clearly no one can dispute that these are two candidates who have demonstrated they merit the Order's recognition.
Richard Clarke--who is, you remember, the man whom George W. Bush thought three years ago was the best man in the world to run the White House's Counterterrorism Security Group--is very, very impressive in person:
Jose Padilla is a bad guy. Jose Padilla should be in jail. Jose Padilla should be in jail through legal process and not because John Ashcroft has named him an Enemy of the State.
There are 1.3 billion Muslims. Today, perhaps 200 million of them support, or think they support, or say they support Osama bin Laden. There are perhaps 100,000 Jihadists. Our war against the Jihadists will be very long and expensive indeed, and we can win it only by convincing the 200 million that they do not really share Osama bin Laden's ideas.
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office gets shrill:
"The message is that you cannot grow your way out of this," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who is director of the Congressional Budget Office and a former chief economist on President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers.Almost regardless of what happens in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Bush is very unlikely to fulfill his promise of reducing the federal budget deficit by half within five years, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said today.
In the last independent assessment of Mr. Bush's fiscal legacy before the elections, the Congressional agency said that if there were no change to existing law, the federal deficit would decline only modestly from a record of $422 billion in 2004 to about $312 billion in 2009.
If Mr. Bush persuades Congress to make his tax cuts permanent, he will fall even farther short of his promise. The federal deficit could reach nearly $500 billion in 2009 and the federal debt could swell by $4.8 trillion over the next decade.
The new estimate is the first time that the Congressional agency has projected that President Bush will not be able to fulfill his promise, made last February, to cut the deficit by half.
Sad when the facts themselves start sounding shrill.
Someone claiming to be "Meyer" reminds us of the shrill General Joseph Hoar:
Let us not forget General Joseph Hoar, CENTCOM commander from 1991-1994, who told the Senate earlier this year that "[t]he policy people in both Washington and Baghdad have demonstrated their inability to do a job on a day-to-day basis this past year."
Former senator Bob Kerrey of the bi-partisan and highly respected 9/11 commission on the subject of the war on terrorism:
Former senator Bob Kerrey told television host Chris Matthews last month that the United States should have declared war on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, not "terrorism." "To declare war on terrorism, it seems to me [is] to have the target wrong," he said. "It would be like after the seventh of December, 1941, declaring war on Japanese planes. We declared war on Japan. We didn't declare war on their tactic."
Kerrey's questioning of the very premise of a war on terror is echoed by Bock who notes:
Of course you can never eliminate terrorism, because terrorism is a tactic, not a concrete enemy. Terrorism is used by those too weak to prevail in a conventional military confrontation but who are fanatical enough about their cause and contemptuous enough of human life to pull off something so shocking as to cause a less ruthless foe to yield something of value or falter in resolve. As long as there are political conflicts and confrontations, there is likely to be terrorism.
Of course, the highest-placed critic of the war on terror is the guy who championed it in the first place:
"I don't think you can win it," Bush said. "But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world. Let's put it that way."
Shrill? Getting there.
Paul Krugman names Robert Rubin to the Order:
Rubin Gets Shrill:January 6, 2004: Argentina retained the confidence of international investors almost to the end of the 1990's. Analysts shrugged off its large budget and trade deficits; business-friendly, free-market policies would, they insisted, allow the country to grow out of all that.... Those of us who have suggested that the irresponsibility of recent American policy may produce a similar disaster have been dismissed as shrill, even hysterical. (Hey, the market's up, isn't it?) But few would describe Robert Rubin, the legendary former Treasury secretary, as hysterical: his ability to stay calm in the face of crises, and reassure the markets, was his greatest asset. And Mr. Rubin has formally joined the coalition of the shrill.
In a paper presented over the weekend at the meeting of the American Economic Association, Mr. Rubin and his co-authors - Peter Orszag of the Brookings Institution and Allan Sinai of Decision Economics - argue along lines that will be familiar to regular readers of this column. The United States, they point out, is currently running very large budget and trade deficits. Official projections that this deficit will decline over time aren't based on "credible assumptions." Realistic projections show a huge buildup of debt over the next decade, which will accelerate once the baby boomers retire in large numbers.
All of this is conventional stuff, if anathema to administration apologists, who insist, in flat defiance of the facts, that they have a "plan" to cut the deficit in half. What's new is what Mr. Rubin and his co-authors say about the consequences. Rather than focusing on the gradual harm inflicted by deficits, they highlight the potential for catastrophe.
"Substantial ongoing deficits," they warn, "may severely and adversely affect expectations and confidence, which in turn can generate a self-reinforcing negative cycle among the underlying fiscal deficit, financial markets, and the real economy.... The potential costs and fallout from such fiscal and financial disarray provide perhaps the strongest motivation for avoiding substantial, ongoing budget deficits."...
Lest readers think that the most celebrated Treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton has flipped his lid, the paper rather mischievously quotes at length from an earlier paper by Laurence Ball and N. Gregory Mankiw, who make a similar point. Mr. Mankiw is now the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, a job that requires him to support his boss's policies, and reassure the public that the budget deficit produced by those policies is manageable and not really a problem.
But here's what he wrote back in 1995, at a time when the federal deficit was much smaller than it is today, and headed down, not up: the risk of a crisis of confidence "may be the most important reason for seeking to reduce budget deficits. . . . As countries increase their debt, they wander into unfamiliar territory in which hard landings may lurk. If policymakers are prudent, they will not take the chance of learning what hard landings in [advanced] countries are really like."
The point made by Mr. Rubin now, and by Mr. Mankiw when he was a free agent, is that the traditional immunity of advanced countries like America to third-world-style financial crises isn't a birthright. Financial markets give us the benefit of the doubt only because they believe in our political maturity
Ted Turner is a shrill billionaire
Unless we have a climate that will allow more independent media companies to survive, a dangerously high percentage of what we see--and what we don't see--will be shaped by the profit motives and political interests of large, publicly traded conglomerates. The economy will suffer, and so will the quality of our public life. Let me be clear: As a business proposition, consolidation makes sense. The moguls behind the mergers are acting in their corporate interests and playing by the rules. We just shouldn't have those rules. They make sense for a corporation. But for a society, it's like over-fishing the oceans. When the independent businesses are gone, where will the new ideas come from? We have to do more than keep media giants from growing larger; they're already too big. We need a new set of rules that will break these huge companies to pieces.
Hmm, super-rich media mogul upset over bigger profits? I don't understand. Oh, wait a minute:
Consolidation has given big media companies new power over what is said not just on the air, but off it as well. Cumulus Media banned the Dixie Chicks on its 42 country music stations for 30 days after lead singer Natalie Maines criticized President Bush for the war in Iraq. It's hard to imagine Cumulus would have been so bold if its listeners had more of a choice in country music stations. And Disney recently provoked an uproar when it prevented its subsidiary Miramax from distributing Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11. As a senior Disney executive told The New York Times: "It's not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle." Follow the logic, and you can see what lies ahead: If the only media companies are major corporations, controversial and dissenting views may not be aired at all.
Freedom of speech to sustain democracy: priceless.
Welcome, Ted.
Stanford's Hoover institution is the Republican Old Guard. Its founder never reconciled himself to the New Deal, which he saw as strongly influenced by and perhaps subservient to the ideas of Karl Marx. Its fellows--the Martin Andersons, the John Cogans--have always been the most partisan of the partisan. It is the only place on earth where flat taxers are the middle-of-the-roaders, and where "Team B"'s claims that the Soviet Union in 1981 was vastly more powerful than the United States is unchallengeable dogma. Yet even the Hoover Institution's fellows are being driven into the Order of the Shrill by the George W. Bush administration.
Here's rock-solid Republican and Hoover institution Senior Fellow Larry Diamond:
Foreign Affairs - What Went Wrong in Iraq - Larry Diamond: ...original miscalculations... well known... early blunders have had diffuse, profound, and lasting consequences... security: the Bush administration was never willing to commit anything like the forces necessary to ensure order in postwar Iraq. From the beginning, military experts warned Washington that the task would require, as Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki told Congress in February 2003, "hundreds of thousands" of troops.... Donald Rumsfeld and his senior civilian deputies rejected every call for a much larger commitment and made it very clear, despite their disingenuous promises to give the military "everything" it asked for, that such requests would not be welcome... the lesson of General Shinseki, whom the Pentagon rewarded for his public candor by announcing his replacement a year early, making him a lame-duck... soldiers in Iraq... forced to keep their complaints about insufficient manpower and equipment private.... 300,000 troops might have been enough.... But doing so would also have required different kinds of troops, with different rules of engagement... military police... urban patrols, crowd control, civil reconstruction, and peace maintenance and enforcement... posted along the borders.... Washington failed to take such steps... hubris and ideology.... State Department... too "soft"... Pentagon... ignored... elaborate postwar planning... Ahmed Chalabi... naive assumptions quickly collapsed, along with overall security, in the immediate aftermath of the war. U.S. troops stood by helplessly, outnumbered and unprepared, as much of Iraq's remaining physical, economic, and institutional infrastructure was systematically looted and sabotaged.... Bush administration compounded its initial mistakes by stubbornly refusing to send in more troops.... As in Vietnam, a turning point always seemed imminent, and Washington refused to grasp the depth of popular disaffection.... my brief tenure as a senior CPA adviser on governance... one cannot review the political record without underscoring the pervasive security deficit, which undermined everything else the coalition sought to achieve....
Matthew Yglesias and "P.K." bring this to our attention:
matthew: Here Kitty: UPDATE: More from Zinni. The Iraq War was a "brain fart of an idea of a strategy that isn't thought out." Thanks to reader P.K. for bringing it to my attention.
Wow. Remember, this is the guy whom George W. Bush thought was the most qualified guy in the world to be his personal envoy to the Middle East. Wow.
Clearly it is no longer enough for General Anthony Zinni to be a member of the Order of the Shrill. He is a full member of the Order of the Shrill, unbalanced in the Highest Degree by the incompetence of the George W. Bush administration, and thus capable of staring down Nameless Horrors.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Zinni R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!.
And, friends, if fifty people do it, they may think it is a movement:
Technorati: Search for http://shrillblog.blogspot.com/: The Shrill Blog has 26 Links from 23 Sources.
Matthew Yglesias nominates Julian Sanchez of Reason to the Order of the Shrill:
Matthew Yglesias: Julian Sanchez, who's too cool to vote, joins the ranks of the shrill:
[P]olitical conventions are deeply creepy events. Wading through thousands upon thousands of people who regard a monstrous little mutant like George W. Bush as the messiah was enough to make even the rabid leftism of the Thursday night leftblogger party at The Tank a relief.
Noting that Sebastian Mallady is not quite ready to join our ranks, Yglesias explains the shrillness imperative:
As Glenn Reynolds would say, read the whole post.And yet, as Mallaby himself must recognize, anyone who cares about the country's fiscal solvency absolutely must become shrill as quickly as possible, or else all is lost. We know from The Price of Loyalty that not only is Bush surrounded by people who think that "deficits don't matter" he's surrounded by people who believe that electoral success constitutes proof that deficits don't matter and that election victories provide mandates for deep tax cuts whether the election was one because of such tax cuts or in spite of them. In other words, a second Bush term will not merely continue down the current unsustainable course -- it will speed us off the cliff faster than ever.
You might think he was a war hating liberal by the fact that he was one of the highest ranking commanders in the Marines, had a habit of bombing Baghdad, and prepared scenarios for the fall of Saddam hussein. But yes, even Zinni, a registered Republican, is one of us:
“But regardless of whose responsibility I think it is, somebody has screwed up. And at this level and at this stage, it should be evident to everybody that they've screwed up. And whose heads are rolling on this? That's what bothers me most.”
Adds Zinni: “If you charge me with the responsibility of taking this nation to war, if you charge me with implementing that policy with creating the strategy which convinces me to go to war, and I fail you, then I ought to go.”
Who specifically is he talking about?
“Well, it starts with at the top. If you're the secretary of defense and you're responsible for that. If you're responsible for that planning and that execution on the ground. If you've assumed responsibility for the other elements, non-military, non-security, political, economic, social and everything else, then you bear responsibility,” says Zinni. “Certainly those in your ranks that foisted this strategy on us that is flawed. Certainly they ought to be gone and replaced.”
Zinni is talking about a group of policymakers within the administration known as "the neo-conservatives" who saw the invasion of Iraq as a way to stabilize American interests in the region and strengthen the position of Israel. They include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith; Former Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle; National Security Council member Eliot Abrams; and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Katherine R. is a member in good standing of the Order of the Shrill for her investigation of the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian plucked by the U.S. Justice Department from JFK Airport and sent to Syria to be tortured for reasons nobody can or will explain:
Obsidian Wings: Maher Arar: ...Another very, very, important investigative story by the Globe and Mail--they obtained a copy of the I.N.S. document which determined that Arar was a member of Al Qaeda:
According to U.S. documents obtained by The Globe and Mail, an Immigration and Naturalization Service's regional director concluded that Mr. Arar was a member of al-Qaeda because the 33-year-old Ottawa computer engineer admitted to the FBI after his arrest in 2002 that he was acquainted with two men suspected of being terrorists at the time. "I have determined that Arar is a member of the designated foreign terrorist organization known as al-Qaeda," INS Eastern region director J. Scott Blackman wrote in his October, 2002, decision. The seven-page decision does not give any further reasons for the finding.
It refers to the two men — Abdullah Almalki and Ahmad Abou El-Maati — and to information received from the FBI and other unspecified agencies. It says that a "classified addendum" spells out more clearly why Mr. Arar was regarded as a security threat, but that attachment remains classified.... Mr. Blackman outlined his reasoning in a decision he wrote only a few hours before. "The FBI interviewed Arar on September 27, 2002, at JFK International Airport. During the interview, Arar admitted his association with Abdullah Almalki and Abdullah Almalki's brother, Nazih Almalki," it reads.
Mr. Arar had told the FBI he worked as a computer engineer with Nazih Almalki, who has never been accused of involvement in terrorism. Mr. Arar also had said he once met Abdullah Almalki outside an Ottawa fast-food restaurant and "advised the FBI that Almalki exports radios and that one of his customers was the Pakistani military," according to the INS. The significance of this fact is unclear, though RMCP officers who questioned the Almalki family suggested that some of the exported computer equipment ended up in al-Qaeda's hands. As for Mr. Arar's relationship with Mr. El-Maati, the truck driver, the INS director's description is even more terse. "During the September 27, 2002, interview at JFK, Arar admitted knowing Ahman [sic] El-Maati," it reads.
Is that it? There is that still-classified appendix (though I have dark guesses about that containing information from Almalki's interrogation in Syria). But, my God. On the basis of this, and statements made under torture, the Department of Justice continues to assert that Arar is in Al Qaeda?
They are the finest and best-equipped battlefield soldiers in the history of the world. THEY ARE NOT ARABIC-SPEAKING MILITARY POLICE! THEY SHOULD NOT BE USED AS IF THEY WERE ARABIC-SPEAKING MILITARY POLICE!!
Yahoo! News - Car Bomb Near Fallujah Kills 7 Marines: A massive car bomb exploded on the outskirts of Fallujah on Monday, killing seven U.S. Marines and wounding several others, a U.S. military official said. The strength of the blast sent the engine from the vehicle used in the bombing flying "a good distance" from the site, a military official said on condition of anonymity....
Witnesses said the attack took place nine miles north of Fallujah and destroyed two Humvees.... With Monday's deaths and those of two U.S. soldiers in a mortar barrage outside Baghdad a day earlier, 985 U.S. service members have died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq (news - web sites) in March 2003, according to the Defense Department....
Tommy Franks and Bob Graham are both shrill:
Guardian Unlimited: Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., contends that just months into combat in Afghanistan, Gen. Tommy Franks also told him that fighting terrorism in Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere should take priority over invading Iraq. Graham said Franks told him he thought the United States knew less about the situation in Iraq than did some European governments, and the Bush administration should ask them for advice... in February 2002, when Graham was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
That was the month that Secretary of State Colin Powell told a House committee that President Bush was considering ``the most serious set of options one might imagine'' to bring ``regime change'' in Iraq, including the possibility of doing it alone. At least one European leader, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, said a few days later that Bush had assured him ``he harbors no attack plans.''...
Graham said on NBC's ``Meet the Press'' that his meeting with Franks was at the general's headquarters, Central Command in Tampa, Fla. ``He laid out a very precise strategy for fighting the war on terror,'' Graham said. ``First, we should win the war in Afghanistan. Second, move to Somalia, which as he described was almost anarchy but with a substantial number of al-Qaida cells; then to Yemen. And that we should be very careful about Iraq, because our intelligence was so weak that we didn't know what we were getting into,'' Graham said....
Graham wrote of his meeting with Franks in a book, ``Intelligence Matters,'' which goes on sale Tuesday. In an excerpt read on the program, the senator said Franks told him ``his men and resources were being moved to Iraq, where he felt that our intelligence was shoddy. This admission was coming almost 14 months before the beginning of combat operations in Iraq and only five months after the commencement of combat in Afghanistan.''...
University of Michigan professor Juan Cole makes the case for being shrill:
As for me, I'm just trying to understand our world. If the understanding I attain is found useful by others, I am gratified, and I think understanding is a prerequisite for making good policy. I fear a lot of policy has been being made by people who are simply uninterested in understanding, and who have all sorts of ulterior motives for trying to shove a policy down the world's throat regardless of the realities of the situation. That is how we got the Iraq debacle.
Real understanding requires that an analyst be unafraid to go wherever the evidence leads, be unafraid to step on toes or offend. Risking being perceived as "shrill" on occasion, in other words, is essential to the enterprise.
But then, he is one of us:
Bush's basic characteristic is not steadfastness, as the convention attempted to argue, but rashness. He is a gambler who goes for the big bang. He loses his temper easily, and makes hasty and uninformed decisions about important matters. No corporation would keep on a CEO that took risks the way Bush has, if the gambles so often resulted in huge losses.
Let us imagine you had a corporation with annual gross revenues of about $2 trillion. And let's say that in 2000, it had profits of $150 billion. So you bring in a new CEO, and within four years, the profit falls to zero and then the company goes into the red to the tune of over $400 billion per year. You're on the Board of Directors and the CEO's term is up for renewal. Do you vote to keep him in? That's what Bush did to the US government. He took it from surpluses to deep in the red. We are all paying interest on the unprecedented $400 billion per year in deficits (a deficit is just a loan), and our grandchildren will be paying the interest in all likelihood.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cole R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Rich R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!:
The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: How Kerry Became a Girlie-Man: [Kerry's] Vietnam service and Vietnam itself are entirely relevant to a campaign set against an unpopular and ineptly executed war in Iraq that was spawned by the executive branch in similarly cloudy circumstances. But having brought Vietnam up against the backdrop of our 2004 war, Mr. Kerry has nothing to say about it except that his service proves he's more manly than Mr. Bush. Well, nearly anyone is more manly than a president who didn't have the guts to visit with the 9/11 commission unaccompanied by a chaperone...
General Tommy Franks is in the Order of the Shrill. His opinion of Pentagon Undersecretary Doug Feith:
I have to deal with the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day.
How stupid is Doug Feith? Chris Suellentrop writes: "Feith intentionally excluded experts with experience in postwar nation-building, out of fear that their pessimistic, worst-case scenarios would leak and damage the case for [the] war [on Iraq]... did not participate in CIA war games about the occupation, because 'it could be seen as an "antiwar" undertaking'.... The State Department's Future of Iraq Project... dismissed by Feith and company out of hand.... Last September... Paul Bremer's request for more than 220 employees for the occupation had yet to be approved.... 'It is taking forever because Feith only wants true believers to get through the gate,' a senior administration official said."
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Franks R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!.
What Secretary of State Colin Powell things of George W. Bush's "military service" in the Texas Air National Guard:
Illruminations: Colin Powell's words on National Guard Service during Viet Nam: I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful and well-placed managed to wangle slots in the Army Reserve and National Guard units... Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country.
And that's if Bush had actually shown up for duty. It is an undisputed matter of fact that George W. Bush did not show up for the last two years of his commitment as a pilot: after April 1972, he never again stepped into a military jet cockpit until... until... his "Mission Accomplished" flight to the Abraham Lincoln in 2003.
Now the Associated Press is reporting that five kinds of documents that might help explain why George W. Bush failed to show up for his last two years of pilot duty have apparently been purged from his files:
The New York Times > AP > National > Bush's National Guard File Missing Records: The five kinds of missing files are:
--A report from the Texas Air National Guard to Bush's local draft board certifying that Bush remained in good standing. The government has released copies of those DD Form 44 documents for Bush for 1971 and earlier years but not for 1972 or 1973. Records from Bush's draft board in Houston do not show his draft status changed after he joined the guard in 1968. The AP obtained the draft board records Aug. 27 under the Freedom of Information Act.
--Records of a required investigation into why Bush lost flight status. When Bush skipped his 1972 physical, regulations required his Texas commanders to ``direct an investigation as to why the individual failed to accomplish the medical examination,'' according to the Air Force manual at the time. An investigative report was supposed to be forwarded ``with the command recommendation'' to Air Force officials ``for final determination.'' Bush's spokesmen have said he skipped the exam because he knew he would be doing desk duty in Alabama. But Bush was required to take the physical by the end of July 1972, more than a month before he won final approval to train in Alabama.
--A written acknowledgment from Bush that he had received the orders grounding him. His Texas commanders were ordered to have Bush sign such a document; but none has been released.
--Reports of formal counseling sessions Bush was required to have after missing more than three training sessions. Bush missed at least five months' worth of National Guard training in 1972. No documents have surfaced indicating Bush was counseled or had written authorization to skip that training or make it up later. Commanders did have broad discretion to allow guardsmen to make up for missed training sessions, said Weaver and Lawrence Korb, Pentagon personnel chief during the Reagan administration from 1981 to 1985. "If you missed it, you could make it up,'' said Korb, who now works for the Center for American Progress, which supports Kerry.
--A signed statement from Bush acknowledging he could be called to active duty if he did not promptly transfer to another guard unit after leaving Texas. The statement was required as part of a Vietnam-era crackdown on no-show guardsmen. Bush was approved in September 1972 to train with the Alabama unit, more than four months after he left Texas. Bush was approved to train in September, October and November 1972 with the Alabama Air National Guard's 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group. The only record tying Bush to that unit is a dental exam at the group's Montgomery base in January 1973. No records have been released giving Bush permission to train with the 187th after November 1972. Walls, the Air Force combat veteran, was assigned to the 187th in 1972 and 1973 to train its pilots to fly the F-4 Phantom. Walls and more than a dozen other members of the 187th say they never saw Bush.
How angry is Powell at those who "managed to wangle slots in the Army Reserve and National Guard units" and then didn't even bother to show up for their required training?
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Powell R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!.
The Prairie Home Companionist has joined the order:
Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of tragedy—the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken for the president’s personal satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully.
The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The omens are not good.
Our beloved land has been fogged with fear—fear, the greatest political strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.
There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn’t the Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it’s 9/11 that we keep coming back to. It wasn’t the “end of innocence,” or a turning point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And patriotism shouldn’t prevent people from asking hard questions of the man who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time.
George H.W. Bush's National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, is shrill:
Brent Scowcroft Calls Iraq War ‘overreaction’: "Look, I’m a friend of this administration," Mr. Scowcroft said. "I love the father. So do I want to do things which complicate [matters for] them? No. But do I feel that there are some things that it’s important to get out? Yes."... the Presidency of George W. Bush according to Mr. Scowcroft... a shadow cabinet of neoconservatives... evangelical... Christianity... a feeling of manifest destiny about conquering terrorism in the Middle Eas... father whose one-term Presidential destiny he is at pains not to live out himself... "overreacted"... squandered opportunities to avoid war in Iraq, said Mr. Scowcroft, who also speculated that the Bush administration had exaggerated the threat of weapons of mass destruction because it provided "the only reason which you could use to propel a war [in] a particular time frame."...
[...]
"The President has said—I think he told [Bob] Woodward—[that] he doesn’t feel that he has to reach beyond the experts that he has gathered around him. That he has every perspective he needs in order to make his decisions.... "If you look at many of the things the President said when he was running for election in 2000, they are fairly dramatically different from the way the administration has behaved. A humbler foreign policy, for example, greater consideration for our allies, shying away from peacekeeping, nation-building—all of those have been reversed. Now the nation-building part not through choice, but it leads one to speculate: Why the shift?"... Mr. Scowcroft suggested that some of Mr. Bush’s more bellicose moves were about politics rather than policy. "I’m not sure how much the President is driven by the [neoconservatives] and how much he is driven by wanting to be re-elected—maybe more than most Presidents do—because his father was defeated. And I think it’s not impossible that, freed from that demand [for reelection], he might behave somewhat differently."...
Maureen Dowd is shrill:
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Amnesia in the Garden: Painting himself as the noble agent for "the transformational power of liberty" abroad, [Bush] said "there have always been doubters" when America uses its "strength" to "advance freedom": "In 1946, 18 months after the fall of Berlin to Allied forces, a journalist in The New York Times wrote this: 'Germany is a land in an acute stage of economic, political and moral crisis. European capitals are frightened. In every military headquarters, one meets alarmed officials doing their utmost to deal with the consequences of the occupation policy that they admit has failed.' End quote. Maybe that same person's still around, writing editorials."
She isn't. Anne O'Hare McCormick, who died in 1954, was The Times's pioneering foreign affairs correspondent who covered the real Axis of Evil, interviewing Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Patton. She was hardly a left-wing radical or defeatist. In 1937, she became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, and she was the first woman to be a member of The Times's editorial board.
The president distorted the columnist's dispatch. (download a PDF of the original column)The "moral crisis" and failure she described were in the British and French sectors. She reported that the Americans were doing better because of their policy to "encourage initiative and develop self-government." She wanted the U.S. to commit more troops and stay the course - not cut and run.
Mr. Bush Swift-boated her.
The Manichaean Candidate's convention was a brazen bizarro masterpiece...
John DiIulio--whom George W. Bush thought was the best person in the world to serve as one of his special assistants for social policy--belongs to the Order of the Shrill in the rank of sub-junior tentacled horror:
...the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking -- discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera. Even quite junior staff would sometimes hear quite senior staff pooh-pooh any need to dig deeper for pertinent information on a given issue.
Likewise, every administration at some point comes to think of the White House as its own private tree house, to define itself as "us" versus "them" on Capitol Hill, or in the media, or what have you, and, before 100 days are out, to vest ever more organizational and operational authority with the White House's political, press, and communications people, both senior and junior. I think, however, that the Bush administration -- maybe because they were coming off Florida and the election controversy, maybe because they were so unusually tight-knit and "Texas," maybe because the chief of staff, Andy Card, was more a pure staff process than a staff leader or policy person, or maybe for other reasons I can't recognize -- was far more inclined in that direction, and became progressively more so as the months pre-9/11 wore on.
This gave rise to what you might call Mayberry Machiavellis -- staff, senior and junior, who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest, black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible. These folks have their predecessors in previous administrations (left and right, Democrat and Republican), but, in the Bush administration, they were particularly unfettered.
I could cite a half-dozen examples, but, on the so-called faith bill, they basically rejected any idea that the president's best political interests -- not to mention the best policy for the country -- could be served by letting centrist Senate Democrats in on the issue, starting with a bipartisan effort to review the implementation of the kindred law (called "charitable choice") signed in 1996 by Clinton. For a fact, had they done that, six months later they would have had a strongly bipartisan copycat bill to extend that law. But, over-generalizing the lesson from the politics of the tax cut bill, they winked at the most far-right House Republicans who, in turn, drafted a so-called faith bill (H.R. 7, the Community Solutions Act) that (or so they thought) satisfied certain fundamentalist leaders and beltway libertarians but bore few marks of "compassionate conservatism" and was, as anybody could tell, an absolute political non-starter. It could pass the House only on a virtual party-line vote, and it could never pass the Senate, even before Jeffords switched.
Not only that, but it reflected neither the president's own previous rhetoric on the idea, nor any of the actual empirical evidence that recommended policies promoting greater public/private partnerships involving community-serving religious organizations. I said so, wrote memos, and so on for the first six weeks. But, hey, what's that fat, out-of-the-loop professor guy know; besides, he says he'll be gone in six months. As one senior staff member chided me at a meeting at which many junior staff were present and all ears, "John, get a faith bill, any faith bill." Like college students who fall for the colorful, opinionated, but intellectually third-rate professor, you could see these 20- and 30-something junior White House staff falling for the Mayberry Machiavellis. It was all very disheartening...
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh DiIulio R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!.
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill--the man whom George W. Bush thought was the best man in the world to be his Treasury Secretary--is a junior tentacled horror in the Order of the Shrill:
Bush is like "a blind man in a room full of deaf people..."
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh O'Neill R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!.
Since the entire Fafblog--Fafnir, Giblets, and the Medium Lobster--exists "outside" our "notions" of "linear" "time," it is false to say that Fafblog has joined, is joining, or will join the Order of the Shrill. Before the Order was, Fafblog shrill am:
So on Tuesday George Bush said his plan for a missile defense shield showed he was living in the future. So far into the future he doesn't have to worry about terrorists anymore.
"I think those who oppose this ballistic missile system really don't understand the threats of the 21st century," he said. "They're living in the past. We're living in the future. We're going to do what's necessary to protect this country."Namby-pamby suspiciously-French-lookin' Democrat John Kerry is plannin' to take money AWAY from this incredibly important overpriced boondoggle and send it towards expanding the military! Clearly John Kerry is not living in the future! He is stranded way back in the present, when we still needed "troop strength" and "special forces" to hunt down "terrorists"!
George Bush is more interested in the threats of tomorrow, which oddly enough look strangely like the threats of 1980: thousands of intercontinental missiles comin' across the sea from commie nations, possibly such as North Korea* and France. Our only defense against them? A missile shield that will one day, in the future, fail only about eighty to ninety percent of the time!
Again Giblets is not impressed! Giblets is living even farther into the future, in a time when terrorism and pinko-tyranny are both irrelevant! Giblets demands that we spend 1.8 trillion dollars on an array of massive space lasers pointed outward to defend Earth against the onslaught of immense insectoid invaders who will strike from beyond the asteroid belt! Giblets will not allow the tyrant Bug Emperor to lay its death spores in our atmosphere - and the whiney pleas of those stuck formulating "today's" foreign policy to secure the former Soviet nuclear stockpile will not get in his way!
Once more Giblets outdoes George Bush at every turn! Whose vision is grander? Who not only bypasses today's wars to fight what we think are tomorrow's, but gives tomorrow a pass for sometime next week? The answer is clear: Giblets!
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Fafnir 'ah Giblets 'ah Medium Lobster R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!.
Q: Can honest conservatives be members of the Order of the Shrill, or is it reserved for just liberals?
A: Yes, honest conservatives can be full members of the Order of the Shrill--if they recoil in horror from the monstrosity that is the Bush administration, and are shrill about it. For example, consider Jacob Sullum of Reason magazine:
Although he delivered the tax cuts he promised, by failing to cut spending he is passing the bill to future taxpayers. Yet far from being embarrassed about the spending binge over which he has presided, Bush is proud of it.
"President Bush and Congressional Republicans have provided the largest increase in federal education funding in history," brags the GOP platform, which borrows the Clintonian trick of calling spending "investing." It praises Bush for increasing farm subsidies and for "strengthening Medicare" by hastening its insolvency through a drug benefit that is projected to cost more than half a trillion dollars during its first decade and as much as $2 trillion the decade after that.
As the platform reminds us, this boondoggle was part of legislation that also gave us health savings accounts, a step toward changing the incentives that help drive escalating medical costs. This combination of reckless government expansion with modest market-oriented reform makes me worry what the cost of "strengthening Social Security" will be.
Along with education and health care, the platform advocates a federal role in job training, "combating chronic homelessness," "promoting drug-free communities," encouraging local volunteer work, "removing barriers for Americans with disabilities," "promoting healthy marriages and responsible fatherhood," "supporting adoption and foster children," and "promoting healthy choices." It supports subsidies for home ownership, rural Internet service, railroads, energy research, commercial research and development, and "faith-based" social services, among other things.
The platform committee tries to cheer up advocates of smaller government who are depressed by this litany with the following joke: "We believe that the federal government should be limited and restricted to the functions mandated by the United States Constitution. The taxation system should not be used to redistribute wealth or fund ever-increasing entitlements and social programs."
That's funnier than all of Jenna and Barbara's one-liners put together
Jacob is definitely a member of the Order of the Shrill. In fact, there is something wrong with people who claim to be "conservatives" or "libertarians" who have not yet joined the Order of the Shrill.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Sullum R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!.
Trying to calm down an analyst who was worried that Colin Powell's U.N. speech contained lies from a source called "Curveball," the Deputy Director of the CIA's Task Force on Weapons of Mass Destruction wrote:
As I said last night, let's keep in mind the fact that this war [on Iraq] is going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and the powers that be [i.e., Colin Powell] probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh CIA R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!
Christopher Buckley may be joining us.
Our president, whom you are gathering to renominate, is, of course, Republican. He has increased discretionary spending at a rate twice that of Lyndon Johnson and has yet to veto a single bill. I cannot wait for the speeches about the need to control federal spending and the growth of big government.
Gary Farber is a member of the Order of the Shrill:
Amygdala: Search [the text of George W. Bush's convention speech for [any of] the following words:
Iran, North Korea, bin Laden, uniter, racism, hunger, poverty, environment, gay, lesbian, Mars, space, Darfur, Sudan, mistake, flawed intelligence, Abu Ghraib, abuse, deficit, debt, miscalculation, military service, honored dead, our dead, dead
"The text you entered was not found."
The only mention of "science" was in "We will place a new focus on math and science [in high school]."
The only mention of "crime" was in regard to Saddam Hussein.
The only mention of "Republican" was "I brought Republicans and Democrats together to strengthen Medicare."
The only mention of "duty" was "I believe the most solemn duty of the American President is to protect the American people."
The only mention of "war" was "Again, my opponent takes a different approach. In the midst of war, he has called American allies...."
The only mention of "win" was "win this election."
Matthew Yglesias joins the Order of the Shrill with a short reaction to Glenn Reynolds:
[Cheney] you, Glenn. The entire item I wrote was one goddamn paragraph long would it have killed you to accurately reproduce what I wrote?
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Yglesias R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!.
Von of Obsidian Wings--not a member of the Order of the Shrill--is surprised and disturbed to find that Glenn Reynolds is a Cheney-head engaged in... ummm... what he calls dishonest argument. I'm not sure why he's surprised:
Reynolds misrepresents the substance and intent of Matt Yglesias's post on the situation in Chechnya. Reynolds has the better side of this debate (and I hope to post a bit more on the subject over the weekend), but he can't win it by misrepresenting his opponent's position. To the extent that Yglesias was at all unclear (though I understood him, his initial post was not a model of clarity), the second comment in the thread resolves the ambiguity.
Typically I'd let this kind of thing pass, but Reynolds is a law professor and really should know better. Indeed, given the heat thrown off by this election, it's up to the people do who know better to try to cast light on the differences between the parties, rather than merely shoving another log onto the bonfire of the partisans. Our enemies in the current war, after all, are not our political opponents -- and there is benefit in open, free, and honest debate.
Candidate member Patrick Taylor of the Poison Kitchen raises an important question: can carnivorous, invading space aliens bent on universal domination be legitimate members of the Order of the Shrill?
The Poison Kitchen: When Liberal Blogs Attack: Who are you and what have you done with Andrew Sullivan?: While my evidence isn't good enough to be featured on a late-night "documentary" on the Sci-Fi Channel (or even the State of the Union), I think you'll agree that this is no time to be "reasonable" or "sensitive". Here is my evidence:
I propose that the Tarzissian space aliens from the planetary system of Bellatrix Orion have started abducting Pundits. I have reason to believe that Andy [Sullivan] is just part of the first wave.
Fortunately, the Aliens lack a sophisticated understanding of our political mores so this fake Andy can be easily spotted, however some abductions aren't so easily discovered... "Solid" intelligence from "reliable" sources indicates that Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds was replaced almost two years ago by a cheap Casio synthesizer.... [A] misguided effort to build a better Slate Columnist.... a bonobo ape with a waning libido "writes" out the column in his place. [But, who's editing kausfiles now? -ed. Nobody, same as before.] My sources at Slate tell me that the feces problem has significantly improved. [Hey! -ed.].... The Zell we saw at the RNC can only be the result of a terrible unholy experiment gone horribly awry. I think we'd all agree that any intelligent being that would do something like that is capable of almost anything....
Well, I for one welcome our Abduction-happy Alien Masters, if only for the potential improvements in Sunday Morning political chat shows. I know that I certainly don't want to be accused of being one of the "Blame-Bellatrix-Orion-Firsters".
So --in summary-- we have definite links which suggest that America's Pundit Class is being abducted by Space Aliens: the only explanation that makes any sense! If Pundits are being abducted it's only a matter of time before they come after bloggers, and eventually, even normal people. So keep your eyes on the skies!
Michael Kinsley remained sane, reasonable, fair, balanced, and calm--until he realized the George and Laura Bush were trying to kill him by hobbling research into curing Parkinson's disease. Then Michael Kinsley joined the Order of the Shrill. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Kinsley R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!.
Dance of the Stem Cells (washingtonpost.com): It is true indeed that Bush's predecessors, from George Washington to Bill Clinton, failed to fund embryonic stem cell research. Even Abraham Lincoln. Not a penny for stem-cell research from any of them. Historians believe this might have been because it didn't exist yet. But that's just a guess.
George Bush gave this nascent research a tiny sliver of money and piled on a smothering load of restrictions. As Laura Bush did not note, that makes Bush the only president ever to authorize federal rules against stem cell research.
It is characteristic of George W. Bush that he would not see, or have no patience for, the irony of justifying a policy on moral grounds and then, when it comes under attack, claiming that the policy is not having the very effect he is supposed to want. Meanwhile, it is characteristic of the Bush political machine to be utterly fearless about insisting that things are the way it would be convenient for them to be, despite all evidence that things are the way they really are.
The purpose of Bush's stem cell policy is to discourage medical research using embryos. Bush is supposed to think that these clumps of a few dozen cells are every bit as human as the people who will suffer or die from diseases that stem cells could cure. He had better believe that, because stem-cell research uses embryos being discarded by fertility clinics and doesn't actually add to the embryonic death toll at all. Only a deep conviction about the humanity of these microscopic dots -- which have fewer human characteristics than a potato -- could justify sacrificing real human lives to make the purely symbolic point that these dots are human too.
Scientists are in agreement that Bush's policy is succeeding. Stem cell research has been drastically slowed. Yet Bush surrogates now pretend that the policy's real success is its failure to stop this research completely. Hey! You're supposed to think all those embryos being used in privately funded research are human victims, remember? It's a huge tragedy, remember? Stop bragging about it.
In a display of her husband's famous compassionate conservatism, Laura Bush scolded that "it really isn't fair to people who are watching a loved one suffer" to overplay the promise of stem cells. She said, helpfully, "We don't know that stem cell research will provide cures for anything."
As someone with a loved one (myself, as it happens) who has the disease (Parkinson's) for which stem cells hold the most promise, please allow me to say: Thank you so much, Mrs. Bush, for trying to make sure that I don't get too hopeful. While your husband and Sen. John Kerry make a major issue out of who is more optimistic, it is inspiring to have a first lady with the courage to say: Let's be pessimistic! Optimism is unfair!
But talk is cheap. While Laura Bush is destroying hope by the traditional method of spreading gloom and pessimism, her husband is bringing the pessimist's art into the 21st century by actually destroying the objective basis for hope. While she battles rhetorically against false hopes, he works to ensure that there is no hope at all.
Apparently there is something is in the drinking water for those wacky California liberalsRepublican former statesmen. We may need to get a bigger lodge.
A Call to our Grand Old Party:
COME BACK TO THE MAINSTREAMAs Republican former Governors, Senators and public officials, we urge our party to renew its allegiance to the proven, common sense values which unite America.
Instead of partisan ideology - which increasingly has led moderates to leave the party - what's needed is a speedy return to the pragmatic, problem-solving mainstream. Here's how the President and Republican-majority Congress can send that clear signal to the nation:
Stop weakening environmental law - and once again protect our air, water and public lands as Teddy Roosevelt and other great Republican leaders intended;
Restore fiscal responsibility - with "pay-as-you-go" budget discipline to end record deficits that jeopardize economic growth;
Put the health of millions first - and clear the way for embryonic stem cell research;
Appoint mainstream federal judges - and respect the Constitution;
Make America safer - and protect cities and towns, still vulnerable three years after 9/11, by securing chemical and nuclear plants and shipping containers;
Rebuild our alliances – with real partnerships and restore America’s standing in the world.
By returning to the mainstream in these ways, our party can regain the trust of a divided nation and earn a vote of confidence in November.
David Cargo, Governor of New Mexico, 1967-71 • Dan Evans, Governor of Washington, 1965-77 • A. Linwood Holton, Governor of Virginia, 1970-74 • Willam G. Milliken, Governor of Michigan, 1969-83 • Walter R. Peterson, Governor of New Hampshire, 1969-73 • Charles M. Mathias, Jr., U.S. Senator from Maryland, 1969-87 • Robert T. Stafford, U.S. Senator from Vermont, 1971-89 • Robert G. Dunn, Minnesota Senate, 1973-80 • Jack B. Jewett, Arizona House of Representatives, 1983-92 • Norma Paulus, Oregon Secretary of State, 1977-85 • Harry Richardson, Maine House & Senate, 1968-75 • Hon. Thom Rumberger, judge, Florida, 1969-70 • Rick Russman, New Hampshire Senate, 1990-2000 • Bill Rutherford, Oregon State Treasurer, 1984-87 • Grant Woods, Arizona Attorney General, 1991-99 • Nathaniel P. Reed, Assistant U.S. Secretary of the Interior under Presidents Nixon and Ford • Russell E. Train, U.S Environmental Protection Agency Administrator under Presidents Nixon and Ford
Welcome to our new web site. It looks like things are up and running quite nicely. Please send correspondence to shrillblog@gmail.com.
I wish to nominate Andrew Northrup and Andrew Sullivan as candidates for the High Office of Grand Exalted Heresiarch of the Order of the Shrill. It will be a long time before anything comes down the pike shriller than "Bush's Lies" and "Zell's Lies."
And, of course, Andrew Sullivan (or is it his alien replacement?) is one of us: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Sullivan R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!.
From Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal:
Andrew Sullivan Is Five Octaves Above Middle C: Shriller than Paul Krugman ever was, or ever could be:www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish: Zell Miller's address... I kept thinking of the contrast with the Democrats' keynote speaker, Barack Obama, a post-racial, smiling, expansive young American, speaking about national unity and uplift.... Zell Miller... face rigid with anger... eyes blazing with years of frustration as his Dixiecrat vision became slowly eclipsed... a man who lambasted LBJ for selling his soul to the negroes... classic Dixiecrat speech, jammed with bald lies, straw men, and hateful rhetoric... Northern stereotypes about the South... Miller did his best to revive them.... if the Democrats win in November, his own family would not be physically safe... dissent... is equivalent to treason... claiming that the Democrats were the enemies of the troops, traitors, quislings and wimps, Miller did exactly what he had the audacity to claim the Democrats were doing: making national security a partisan matter... gob-smackingly vile.... another lie, another cheap, faux-patriotic smear... despicable.... Another lie: "Senator Kerry has made it clear that he would use military force only if approved by the United Nations.... Another lie: "John Kerry wants to re-fight yesterday's war." Kerry didn't want to do that.... Smearing opponents as traitors to their country, as unfit to be commander-in-chief, as agents of foreign powers (France) is now fair game.... I watched a Democrat at a GOP Convention convince me that I could never be a Republican... lying, angry old men like this as their keynote.... Cheney's speech... over-shadowed by the foul rhetoric that went before him, rhetoric he blessed with his opening line.... [A]stonishing to me that neither he not anyone, in invoking the war on terror, has mentioned any developments in Iraq or Afghanistan over the last year.... Real war-leaders explain defeats and set-backs... grapple with reality... the surrealism of the rhetoric... an insult to the American people... not even a nod to reality... the character of our leaders... prefer bromides and denial to a real accounting and real leadership.... Cheney barely mentioned the economy. Almost no one has. They realize it's a liability.... Mary Cheney... "disappeared" from the family tableau.... No openly gay people belong anywhere near that podium...
Andrew Northrup, the Poor Man, is a member of the Ancient, Hermetic, and Occult Order of the Shrill: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Krugman R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!
The Poor Man: He's Not A Liar, He's My President!: Nicholas Kristof is sick and tired of people calling the President a liar. And he's got lots of arguments about why this is a terrible thing to do:
I'm against the "liar" label for two reasons. First, it further polarizes the political cesspool, and this polarization is making America increasingly difficult to govern. Second, insults and rage impede understanding.Indeed. It is wrong to call the President a liar, because that's a bad word. Liberals should think of a nicer way of couching their criticism. Kristoff gives an example:
In fact, of course, Mr. Bush did stretch the truth. The run-up to Iraq was all about exaggerations, but not flat-out lies. Indeed, there's some evidence that Mr. Bush carefully avoids the most blatant lies — witness his meticulous descriptions of the periods in which he did not use illegal drugs.See? The President doesn't lie, he only exaggerates, maybe stretches the truth on occassion, possibly says things in such a way as to deliberately leave the listener with the wrong impression. Indeed, there's some evidence that Mr. Bush carefully avoids the most blatant lies - and if maybe perhaps carefully avoiding the most blatant lies isn't an adequate standard of truthfulness to hold the President to, well, I just don't know what this country is coming to.
There's the usual litany - Michael Moore is a uncritical conspiracy theorist (true), ergo the President is truthful (false); calling the President a liar is like accusing Bill Clinton of murder; Bush always says the wrong thing, so maybe everything was just a big misunderstanding; liberals are turning into what they hate the most; etc. Largely unexplored, however, is the issue of whether or not Bush is a liar. Let's explore it:
He has lied about his time in the National Guard, and lied about his criminal history. He lied about his relationship with Ken Lay, he lied about who would benefit from his tax cuts, and he lied about stem cells. He lied about his visit to Bob Jones University, he lied about why he wouldn't meet with Log Cabin Republicans, and he lied about reading the EPA report on global warming. He lied about blaming the Clinton administration for the second intifada, he lies constantly about how he pays no attention to polls, he lied about how he loves New York, and he lied about moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. He lied about finding WMD in Iraq, he lied about making his decision to go to war, he lied about the CIA's dismissal of the yellowcake rumors, and he lied about the IAEA's assessment of Iraq's nuclear program. He lied about funding the fight against AIDS in Africa, he lied about when the recession started, and he lied about seeing the first plane hit the WTC. He lied about supporting the Patient Protection Act, and he lied about his deficit spending, and now my wrist hurts.
These are all lies, told by the President himself. This doesn't include any distortions, half-truths, or exaggerations, or any lies told by senior figures in the administration. These lies are big and small. Together, these lies involve trillions of dollars and at least tens of thousands of deaths, and Nicholas Kristof is terribly concerned about sharp words and Michael Moore movies. It is indeed too bad that the "political cesspool" is becoming polarized, but I don't think that the solution to this is to shoot the messenger and agonize over ever-finer definitions of falsehood. It shouldn't be this difficult to get your priorities in order.
[UPDATE: If anyone needs help prioritizing, Tim Dunlop has a handy list of what is important and what isn't.]
[UPDATE 2: If you have any Bush lies that I may have missed, or any quarrels about the lies I have listed, please let me know in the comments. I'm looking for reports from respectable, mainstream news sources which show a deliberate and knowing lie from Bush's own mouth. If there's much more, I'll try and put together a master list of lies at some point.]
And, yes, in answer to Tyler Cowen's question:
...What do you have to do to join The Ranks of the Shrill? Does someone have to send you an E-Invite?"
This is the place to join the Ancient, Hermetic, and Occult Order of the Shrill.
We welcome libertarian Tyler Cowen to the ranks of the Ancient, Hermetic, and Occult Order of the Shrill: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cowen R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!
Marginal Revolution: I've had enough: Here is our latest foreign policy initiative:
New US curbs on travel to communist-ruled Cuba went into effect on Wednesday, with opponents decrying them as an attack on family and the Bush administration arguing they will hasten the fall of Cuban President Fidel Castro.
Cuban Americans may now visit relatives on the island once every three years instead of annually and they may go only to see close family members rather than more distant relatives, among other restrictions aimed at toughening the four-decade-old US economic embargo on Cuba.
"It's unimaginable, abusive," said Raquel Chaviano, one of hundreds waiting at Havana airport on Tuesday for one of the last flights back to Miami before the rules went into force.
"The family is the main thing in life, and it has nothing to do with politics," said Chaviano, who left the Caribbean island in 1980, leaving behind her daughter and siblings.
...What do you have to do to join The Ranks of the Shrill? Does someone have to send you an E-Invite?"
We welcome moderate Republican William Saletan to the ranks of the Ancient, Hermetic, and Occult Order of the Shrill: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Saletan R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaaiiiiii!!!!
Back to the Future - What Bush would do if he were president. By William Saletan: For $2.4 trillion, guess what word—other than "a," "and," and "the"—occurs most frequently in the acceptance speech George W. Bush delivered tonight. The word is "will." It appears 76 times. This was a speech all about what Bush will do, and what will happen, if he becomes president.
Except he already is president. He already ran this campaign. He promised great things. They haven't happened. So, he's trying to go back in time. He wants you to see in him the potential you saw four years ago. He can't show you the things he promised, so he asks you to envision them. He asks you to be "optimistic." He asks you to have faith.... Recession. Unemployment. Corporate fraud. A war based on false premises that has cost us $200 billion and nearly a thousand American lives. They're all hills we've "been given to climb." It's as though Bush wasn't president. As though he didn't get the tax cuts he wanted. As though he didn't bring about postwar Iraq and authorize the planning for it. All this was "given," and now Bush can show up, three and a half years into his term, and start solving the problems some other president left behind."
Founding member Paul Krugman has this to say:
"I don't know where George Soros gets his money," one man said. "I don't know where - if it comes from overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from." George Soros, another declared, "wants to spend $75 million defeating George W. Bush because Soros wants to legalize heroin." After all, a third said, Mr. Soros "is a self-admitted atheist; he was a Jew who figured out a way to survive the Holocaust."
They aren't LaRouchies - they're Republicans.
We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.
"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."
"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
Gilbert, Gustave. "Interview with Herman Goering." Nuremberg Diary
