Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Yet Another New Republic Edition)

Could someone please stop the New Republic? In its pages, Edward Luttwak says that (i) Reagan was a true genius, (ii) Jeane Kirkpatrick was the master strategist of the modern age, and (iii) Jeane Kirkpatrick was the only real neoconservative--the rest are poseurs. He says this at 4000 words. And the New Republic prints it.

Never have I been happier that my New Republic subscription fees are now going to support Spencer Ackerman.

Here's the tape:

Edward Luttwak: Power and Prudence: Jeane J. Kirkpatrick became famous as the Reagan administration's combative ambassador to the United Nations from 1981 to 1985, but few believed that the almost gamine former college professor could have much of a voice in shaping foreign policy, what with tough guy Al Haig and big man George Shultz in command at the State Department, and successive National Security Advisers happy to keep her in New York making noisy speeches while they quietly made policy in the White House. The implicit assumption of that line of reasoning was that the late-to-rise and early-to-bed Ronald Reagan himself was not all that important in the Reagan administration, so that even if it were true that he had a particular regard for Kirkpatrick, it would hardly matter. Besides, few believed the tale that Reagan had appointed her after reading her pieces in Commentary--that magazine's articles run to several pages, after all, and Reagan supposedly read so little that as president he even received his daily intelligence briefing in the form of bite-sized videos. With Reagan a mere cipher manipulated by his handlers, Kirkpatrick could have no White House support against powerful men with bureaucracies to serve them, and therefore no power.

The newly published Reagan diaries overturn all of the above. We encounter a shrewd and watchful president...

OK. Stop it there. The newly published Reagan diaries do no such thing. Consider: Ronald Reagan on the Caribbean! Ronald Reagan on Free Trade! Ronald Reagan on the Imminent Coming of the Lord! Ronald "I Never Wanted to Trade Weapons for Hostages" Reagan! Ronald Reagan on the Budget Deficit! Ronald Reagan on Survivable Total Thermonuclear War! Ronald Reagan on Ambassador Hinton!

Now we can resume:

...who treated Kirkpatrick as a valuable colleague in reforming the status quo at the United Nations, in which the members of the "non-aligned bloc" collected their American aid before firmly aligning their votes with the Soviet Union on almost every issue, decorating the proceedings with frequent diatribes against the United States. Observing today's ultra-tame United Nations, where inferiority complexes are vented only in such hopeless sub-venues as the Human Rights Council (China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia are members, the United States is not), one can scarcely imagine the General Assembly follies of those days, in which the perfumed representatives of smelly dictatorships competed in devising new accusations against the United States. The State Department thought all this was inevitable and harmless, and it vehemently opposed any strong response at the United Nations, let alone bilateral reprisals such as cutting aid. But Reagan did not agree, and he firmly supported Kirkpatrick's counter-attacks....

Even after [she resigned in 1985] she retained her access and her influence....

[F]or the anti-Semitic commentators from Washington to London to Tehran who keep saying that it was not really Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, or Rice who decided to invade Iraq but rather their subordinates with Jewish names, "neoconservative" is merely a euphemism for the eternally conspiring Jew, and Kirkpatrick obviously does not fit the bill. But there is another valid definition of a foreign policy neoconservative: a prudent activist. A resilient optimism about the United States and its potential to do good was the source of the activism, while an erudite knowledge of the complexities of the world induced prudence....

There is no point in prolonging the suspense... Kirkpatrick firmly opposed the Iraq War II of Bush II after vigorously supporting the Iraq War I of Bush I... because she was careful, as befits a true neoconservative...

[S]he recognized no compelling reason to send American troops in harm's way in any of the arguments advanced for the war.... Above all, Kirkpatrick (like the present writer) totally rejected the true motive of the war, which was to establish a successful democracy in the heart of the Arab world, to lead the way for the democratization of all the Arab states....

We may be certain that many a secretary in the Pentagon did more research on her next holiday destination than Secretary Rumsfeld and his officials did on Iraq before sending scores of thousands of Americans to visit the place. I was myself present at a pre-war military planning session in which it became clear that a couple of junior infantry officers who had done a few days of Internet searching knew more... than the proponents of the war.... An immediate withdrawal after the destruction of the regime was never a possible option, while it was and is absurd to employ much of the deployable strength of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps as a Mesopotamian constabulary sine die...

Why Ashcroft Threatened to Resign

Gavin McNett writes:

I'm just going to say this for the record. Please include this in your investigations and calculations.... The program that Ashcroft nearly resigned over included a component that clueless reporters are calling 'data mining,' but that was based on modern social-networking tech.

It worked legally and empirically like this: If Bin Laden's cousin's ex-chauffeur emailed the sister-in-law of someone who emailed John Kerry's campaign director, it was 'fair game' to read that campaign director's emails.

I researched this last year with phone and notebook, and what I'm saying now represents the consensus of the intelligence community, circa '06.

Lisa Shiffren Drives Matthew Yglesias and Commentors Shrill!

Yglesias writes:

Worst Corner Post Ever?: I think this is a pretty strong contender. Let's consider that this -- "my own view is that, considering the efforts all candidates go to in creating their image, discussing what they wear and whether they display cleavage at work, or ever, in their quest to make the nation comfortable with the idea of them holding ultimate power is legit" -- isn't even the most ridiculous thing Lisa Shiffren says.

And commentors:

Most ridiculous part: "It also displays just a tiny bit of internal conflict about whether she wishes to be Leader of the Free World or a still attractive woman of a certain age." Gawd help me, but it's so awful that it's kind of awesome. Anyway, "Worst Corner Post" is kind of a cheat. The competition of the moment is "dumbest thing ever written by anyone in any venue." I think Applebaum beats Slaughter by several lengths, but Atrios is right to note that Henley hasn't considered most of the serious contenders. Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 28, 2007 3:22 PM

I thought I was having an acid flashback reading Shiffren's post. Posted by Ben Cronin | July 28, 2007 3:25 PM

Are we to presume that if the candidates spent no time on grooming and clothing that none of our "serious" pundits would have anything to say? Posted by MikeJ | July 28, 2007 3:31 PM

And the line between right-wing politics and Cosmopolitan blurs just a little bit more. Are we really going to have a second week focused on Hillary's chest? Also--nice touch throwing in the deceased mother-in-law. Posted by danimal | July 28, 2007 3:40 PM

To me the most depressing thing about the post is actually the characteristic reflex reference to the U.S. president "holding ultimate power" which fairly encapsulates the worldview of today's leader-worshiping Right. Posted by Bill | July 28, 2007 4:31 PM

Shrill Movie of the Week: Phil Carter Reviews Charles Ferguson's "No End in Sight"

Phil Carter has seen the movie, and thinks it is your duty as a citizen of the United States of America to see it:

INTEL DUMP - Review: "No End in Sight": On Tuesday, I attended a screening of the new Iraq documentary "No End in Sight" in Los Angeles which was co-sponsored by the Center for American Progress and USC's Center for Public Diplomacy. (The movie is reviewed today in the New York Times.) Bottom line up front: go see this movie. It presents the history of the Iraq war in clear, sober, and vivid footage, and makes a compelling argument that we are past the point of "winnability" (whatever that means) today in Iraq...

The Belgravia Dispatch Channels Shrill Conservative Bruce Fein, Who Wants Bush and Cheney Impeached Long Ago!!

The Belgravia Dispatch: Sane Conservatives: They Still Exist: Bruce Fein, a real conservative, has been on fire recently. Witness today, in the opinion pages of the FT:

To borrow from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, upon what meat doth this our vice-president, Dick Cheney, feed that he has grown so great? Mr Cheney’s imperial vice-presidency has trampled the conservative constitutional philosophy of the Founding Fathers. He has used the law to evade checks and balances. For example, he declared himself part of the legislative branch – as president of the US Senate – to exempt his office from President George W. Bush’s order governing classified information. But days later he draped himself in the mantle of the presidency to defend the confidentiality of vice-presidential communications and claim immunity from suit for any constitutional violations.

The constitution entrusts the vice-president with a single puny chore: to preside over the Senate, without a vote except to break ties. Occupants of the vice-presidency have bewailed its insignificance. Their typical tasks have been handing out blankets after earthquakes and attending state funerals. Presidents have been characteristically jealous of their constitutional turf.

Mr Bush is a monumental exception. He entered politics not because of philosophical conviction or even a raw desire for power, but for a lack of anything better to do. His policies fluctuate like a human weather vane. Mr Bush eagerly agreed to Mr Cheney’s tacit demand that the lion’s share of the presidency be outsourced to the vice-president’s office. Unlike Mr Bush, Mr Cheney craves unchecked power....

...Chastened by his time as chief of staff in a weakened White House under President Gerald Ford after Watergate, Mr Cheney has endeavoured to aggrandise the executive at the expense of Congress and the judiciary. He has urged the people to trust the Cheney-Bush duumvirate to act wisely and benevolently.

But what about the Iraqi quagmire; Abu Ghraib; the National Security Agency’s unrestricted spying on Americans in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; the detention of citizens and non-citizens as enemy combatants on the president’s say-so alone; claiming the US as a battlefield where lethal military force can be employed to kill or maim al-Qaeda suspects; playing judge, jury and prosecutor and using secret evidence in the trials of war crimes; creating a secretive government shielded from legal or political accountability by the invocation of executive privilege or state secrets; and secretly kidnapping and imprisoning terrorist suspects abroad? To justify these misadventures and excesses, the vice-president has vastly inflated the dangers of international terrorism.

But the Cheney doctrine of an unchecked presidency is now unravelling. The Supreme Court has rebuked the executive branch over military commissions and its unfettered authority to detain citizens as enemy combatants. A federal appeals court has held that resident aliens may not be detained indefinitely as enemy combatants without accusation or trial. On Capitol Hill, Congress is demanding White House documents and witnesses pertinent to the firing of US attorneys and the legal rationale for the NSA’s spying on Americans. A popular and congressional crescendo is growing against keeping US troops in Iraq. Some Republicans are scheming to remove Mr Cheney from office prior to the November 2008 elections. And the vice-president’s approval rating is minuscule and plunging.

Congress is too timid and constitutionally illiterate to be awakened to the need to impeach Mr Cheney for his acts against the nation. Like old soldiers, he will simply fade away after the expiry of his term, but probably in disrepute. Whether any of the Cheney doctrine will survive is uncertain. The events of September 11 2001 are still distorting the judgments of many Americans and office-holders.

Right-Wing Talk Show Hosts Drive Duncan Black into Shrill Unholy Madness

At Eschaton:

Eschaton: Nancy Boyda: And finally, I would just like to share a story. When I was speaking back at home with one of a very right wing conservative talk show hosts and after, thank God, after we were off the air, I said something that I assumed he would agree with and I just said ‘you know, I’m really worried about these guys and gals, but mainly guys, that have gone, that they’ve been redeployed now three and four times’ — he came back to me and said ‘you know what, they should have thought about that before they enlisted, before they signed up.’ He said ‘it’s their fault.’

Power Cuts in Baghdad: Juan Cole and Andrew Sullivan Are Shrill

Andrew Sullivan channels Juan Cole. Both are shrill:

The Daily Dish: Juan Cole is in a good mood:

The LA Times reports that Baghdadis are down to one or two hours of electricity a day, but that the Bush administration will no longer be measuring or reporting on that sort of local data. It will give Congress only the general statistic for the entire country. But obviously whether the capital has electricity would help you know whether the current policies are working.

But we're not trying to find out whether current policies are working, are we? The Decider has decided they are. Our job is to give him the money and shut up. More protests about government information black-out on the power black-outs here, here and here...

Dana Milbank Drives Mark Kleiman Shrill!

It's his failure to cover the "executive privilege" issue coherently:

The Reality-Based Community: Is it something in the water?: Dana Milbank is a good, competent reporter. It's not a secret to him that the Bush Administration is monumentally lawless and corrupt.

But instead of reporting on the confrontation between BushCo and a newly energized Congress committed to performing its oversight function, Milbank gives us 25 grafs of pure snark and sneer, clearly implying that Congress is a contemptible institution.

The story starts and ends with nasty, feeble humor:

There's a reason why being in contempt of Congress is classified as a misdemeanor.

... if most Americans were to express their true feelings about Congress, they'd be guilty of a misdemeanor.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

At no point does Milbank suggest what it is he thinks the House Judiciary Committee is doing wrong, or what he thinks the Committee should do instead, in the face of Administration stonewalling. Nor does he make an argument about why the Congress shouldn't be concerned about whether it will win or lose the coming Constitutional clash. Instead, he sneers about the tendency to "discuss the forthcoming court battle as if it were a prizefight."

Milbank "even-handedly" expresses his contempt both for the Democrats attempting to uphold the Constitution and for the Republicans attempting to subvert it. But of course in an institutional confrontation between the Congress and the Presidency, slamming all Members of Congress indiscriminately favors the Presidency: an institution no respectable Washington reporter would dare denounce in such sloppy fashion. The story couldn't better serve Karl Rove's purposes if he had written it himself.

Milbank isn't entirely even-handed even among Congressfolk: he offers his only word of praise is a for a Sensenbrenner proposal that would tie the "executive privilege" question up in a lawsuit that would allow the Administration to run out the clock. The fact that the President has just ordered the Justice Department not to do what a long-standing statute requires it to do — refer a contempt citation to a grand jury — is not so much as hinted at. The underlying scandal — the political skulduggery around the U.S. Attorney firings and the ludicrously incompetent cover-up, featuring multiple perjuries — is never mentioned.

Is this really what it takes to keep your standing among the Washington Kool Kidz and your column in the Washington Post.

Joe Klein's Attacks on Paul Krugman Have Driven Glenn Greenwald into Shrill Unholy Madness!

Greenwald starts by quoting Klein today:

Joe Klein: [A]mong certain precincts in the blogosphere -- those prohibitively clever sorts who opine daily and endlessly about journalism without doing any reporting (or much thinking) about it -- a new epithet: serious. This is meant to convey disdain for those of us who grant undue credibility to people in positions of authority or people of moderate political views.... But... [I] will continue to use "serious" as I always have, unironically. Usually. To my mind, being a "serious person" means the following: you study the facts on the ground, you study the history, you take into account opinions on all sides -- not just your side -- and then you come to a conclusion. Essentially, that's what I try to do, and also the people I admire...

In Greenwald's view, this misses the point entirely:

Glenn Greenwald: [T]he term "Serious" when wielded by Beltway denizens is nothing more than a cheap and manipulative tactic to demonize those with non-Beltway-approved views without actually doing the work to demonstrate that those views are wrong. Beltway "Seriousness" has nothing whatever to do with the studious and careful methods one uses to reach conclusions. It has everything to do with the ideologically correct nature of the beliefs and, much more importantly still, the Authority and Place in the Beltway Court of those who are expressing them. That is how, prior to the invasion of Iraq, Howard Dean and other war opponents became so terribly "unserious" while Bill Kristol, Peter Beinert, Jonah Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer, the Brookings Institution, Joe Lieberman, Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney were Very Very Serious.... Klein thinks that he is mocked as "Serious" because he does too much work studying ideas and information. Actually, the opposite is true....

Several days ago, I referenced a Joe Klein post from January in which he called Paul Krugman an "ill-informed dilettante" and said Krugman made "a fool of himself" when Krugman argued against the Surge. Illustrating the Virtues of Beltway Seriousness, Klein complained that Krugman failed to study the Complex, Important Issues surrounding the Surge, unlike Serious Analysts like himself, Bill Kristol and Fred Kagan...

Here's Klein from 1.1 Friedman units ago:

Joe Klein: I'm afraid I'm going to get cranky about this: The Democrats who oppose the so-called "surge" are right. But they have to be careful not to sound like ill-informed dilettantes when talking about it. The latest to make a fool of himself is Paul Krugman... who argues that those who favor the increase in troops are either cynical or delusional... like Bill Kristol and Fred Kagan.... But what about retired General Jack Keane--whom Krugman doesn't mention--and the significant number of military intellectuals who have favored a labor-intensive counterinsurgency strategy in Baghdad for the past three years? They are serious people. They may be wrong about Iraq now, reflexively trying to complete a mission that has been lost, but they are not delusional. The counterinsurgency doctrine they published in 2006 is exactly what the U.S. military should be doing in places like Afghanistan.... Kagan and Kristol... at least they've taken the trouble to read the doctrine and talk to key players like Keane and General David Petraeus. Liberals won't ever be trusted on national security until they start doing their homework...

And Greenwald opposes Klein to Paul Krugman, who points out that he had done his homework--Klein just hadn't noticed--and references a column from 1.5 Friedman units ago:

Paul Krugman: The Arithmetic Of Failure: The classic analysis of the arithmetic of insurgencies is a 1995 article by James T. Quinlivan, an analyst at the Rand Corporation. ''Force Requirements in Stability Operations,'' published in Parameters, the journal of the U.S. Army War College, looked at the number of troops that peacekeeping forces have historically needed to maintain order and cope with insurgencies. Mr. Quinlivan's comparisons suggested that even small countries might need large occupying forces.

Specifically, in some cases it was possible to stabilize countries with between 4 and 10 troops per 1,000 inhabitants. But examples like the British campaign against communist guerrillas in Malaya and the fight against the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland indicated that establishing order and stability in a difficult environment could require about 20 troops per 1,000 inhabitants.

The implication was clear: ''Many countries are simply too big to be plausible candidates for stabilization by external forces,'' Mr. Quinlivan wrote.

Maybe, just maybe, the invasion and occupation of Iraq could have been managed in such a way that a force the United States was actually capable of sending would have been enough to maintain order and stability. But that didn't happen, and at this point Iraq is a cauldron of violence, far worse than Malaya or Ulster ever was. And that means that stabilizing Iraq would require a force of at least 20 troops per 1,000 Iraqis -- that is, 500,000 soldiers and marines.

We don't have that kind of force. The combined strength of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps is less than 700,000 -- and the combination of America's other commitments plus the need to rotate units home for retraining means that only a fraction of those forces can be deployed for stability operations at any given time. Even maintaining the forces we now have deployed in Iraq, which are less than a third as large as the Quinlivan analysis suggests is necessary, is slowly breaking the Army...

The Craven Fecklessness of Fred Hiatt Drives Joshua Micah Marshall Is Unusually Shrill!!

Joshua Micah Marshall watches as the Washington Post's Fred Hiatt cravenly and fecklessly tries to save his job:

Talking Points Memo: As Bad As Bush: (ed.note: This is a post I was working on a few days ago but had set aside. But with attention fixing again today on the Post's editorial page's egregious record of distortions on Iraq, I thought I'd pull it out of Movable Type oblivion.)

The Iraq fiasco provides few opportunities for mirth. But one is watching Fred Hiatt, czar of the Washington Post editorial page, try to kick up enough dust to wriggle out of his own position on the war.

A necessary preliminary to this discussion is to realize that there is probably no editorial page in the United States that has advocated more influentially on behalf of the Iraq catastrophe at every stage of the unfolding disaster -- from the Iraq Liberation Act, the the WMD and al Qaeda bamboozlement, to the lauching of the war, to the longstanding denial of what was happening on the ground to the continuing refusal to brook any real change of course in policy. Other papers have been more hawkish certainly. But because of its location in the nation's capital and even more because of its reputation as a non-conservative paper, the Post's fatuous and frequently mendacious editorializing has without a doubt had a greater role in pushing the public debate into the war camp than any other editorial page in the nation.

Which brings us to the unsigned editorial that ran in the paper on Saturday, July 21st. According to the editorial, there's [the] existence [of a] consensus in favor of a major change of course in Iraq. And all that is holding it up is the Democrats' insistence on polarizing the debate for political gain. According the Post, most senators from both parties, the Baker-Hamilton commissioners and even the president are all part of the same broad consensus.

A large majority of senators from both parties favor a shift in the U.S. mission that would involve substantially reducing the number of American forces over the next year or so and rededicating those remaining to training the Iraqi army, protecting Iraq's borders and fighting al-Qaeda. President Bush and his senior aides and generals also support this broad strategy, which was formulated by the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton commission. Mr. Bush recently said that "it's a position I'd like to see us in"...

The problem is [that] "Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) [seeks] to deny rather than nourish a bipartisan agreement." And this is so dangerous because we need to be discussing now what we do after September when we learn that the president 'new way forward' has failed.

The country will desperately need a strategy for Iraq that can count on broad bipartisan support, one aimed at carrying the U.S. mission through the end of the Bush administration and beyond. There are serious issues still to resolve, such as whether a drawdown should begin this fall or next year, how closely it should be tied to Iraqi progress, how fast it can proceed and how the remaining forces should be deployed...

Here we get down to the stem of a whole world turned inside out. 'Serious issues still to resolve' -- like when to leave, whether to condition leaving on things getting better, how fast to leave and how many should stay and what we should have them do. I would say that covers quite a bit of the debate, doesn't it? Indeed, that's the entire debate, which is to say there's little consensus on anything.

The Iraq debate now turns on two related questions: 1) the importance of Iraq to US national security and 2) whether we want to leave and will so long as various conditions in Iraq are met or whether we've decided that it is in our interests to leave and will begin to do so now without waiting for conditions to be met. All of the different permutations of the debate can be explained in terms of different answers to those two questions.

So what you have in the Post's editorial is Mr. Hiatt's desire to take a nominal and meaningless agreement -- that everyone would like to have most US troops withdrawn from Iraq -- and stretch it so thin that it can cover most members of the senate, the president and even the Baker-Hamilton report that the president dumped in the trash last winter. Meanwhile the key questions that are the meat [of the] debate become points of detail that the members of the grand consensus still need to hash out if malefactors won't keep on cynically injecting politics into the proceedings.

It is truly the world we are living in through the looking glass. And I think the reason for this outlandish contortion is not hard to see. Hiatt and the Post editorial crew can see the writing on the wall and the direction which public opinion is inevitably taking us. But they want to twist and distort and most of all stretch the terms of the debate so far as to appear to come out on the winning side even as they never actually change their position which has been a consistent and bullheaded advocacy of the position the entire country is now abandoning. So when troops come out of Iraq -- due to the votes of the evil polarizers -- Hiatt can say, yes, that was our position and it would have come sooner if Harry Reid would have just butted out of things. Until then, it's full speed ahead with the surge.

BBC Radio 4 Is Shrill: The 1933 Anti-Roosevelt Coup Plot

Starring the Heinz and Bush families:

BBC - Radio 4 Document - Greenham's Hidden Secret: Document uncovers details of a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by a group of right-wing American businessmen. The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.

Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest ever peacetime threat to American democracy.

The Journamalism of NPR Drives Lance Knobel Shrill!

He writes:

Davos Newbies » Blog Archive » Way short of “a detailed case”: NPR usually does a better job than most of reporting accurately and maintaining the appropriate skepticism about our country’s leaders but it let me down this morning. While I was shaving, they had a report on president Bush’s speech yesterday about Iraq as the front line of the so-called war on terrorism. Mary Louise Kelly said: “In his speech, the president laid out a detailed case linking Osama Bin Laden’s terror network to its offshoot in Iraq.”

His case consisted of saying, “Al Qaeda in Iraq is Al Qaeda. In Iraq.”

Dan Froomkin Is Shrill! Bush Is Osama's Publicist!!

He says that Osama bin Laden should pay Bush more to be his best publicist:

Dan Froomkin - Al Qaeda's Best Publicist: By Dan Froomkin: Like any terrorist organization, al-Qaeda wants attention. It wants to be perceived as powerful. And it particularly wants Americans to live in fear. Could al-Qaeda possibly have found a better publicist than President Bush? At a South Carolina Air Force base yesterday, Bush mentioned al-Qaeda and bin Laden 118 times in 29 minutes, arguing that the violence unleashed by the U.S. invasion in Iraq would somehow come to America's shores if U.S. troops were to withdraw.

But the majority of that violence in Iraq is caused either by Iraqis murdering each other for religious reasons or by Iraqis trying to throw off the American occupation. The group that calls itself al-Qaeda in Iraq is only one of a multitude of factions creating chaos in that country, and the long-term goals of its Iraqi members are almost certainly not in line with those of al-Qaeda HQ (which is safely ensconced in Pakistan). Furthermore, the administration's own intelligence community has concluded that the war in Iraq has helped rather than hurt al-Qaeda.

What effect would a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq really have on al-Qaeda? Is it true that "surrendering the future of Iraq to al Qaida would be a disaster for our country," as Bush admonished yesterday? Bush's predictions about the region have been uniformly abysmal, so the opposite may be at least as likely. And in that scenario, a U.S. troop withdrawal would rob al-Qaeda of its greatest recruiting tool. It would also free American and Iraqi fighters to hunt down bin Laden and his fellow vermin wherever they are and give them what they deserve -- which is not publicity, but ignominy and extinction.

Bill Gross Joins the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill

Bill Gross Joins the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill « Mercury Rising 鳯女: Posted by Charles on July 24th, 2007: Please listen:

[W]hen the fruits of society’s labor become maldistributed, when the rich get richer and the middle and lower classes struggle to keep their heads above water as is clearly the case today, then the system ultimately breaks down; boats do not rise equally with the tide; the center cannot hold.  

Of course the wealthy fire back in cloying self-justification, stressing their charitable and philanthropic pursuits, suggesting that they can more efficiently redistribute wealth than can the society that provided the basis for their riches in the first place. Perhaps. But with exceptions (and plaudits) for the Gates and Buffetts of the mega-rich, the inefficiencies of wealth redistribution by the Forbes 400 mega-rich and their wannabes are perhaps as egregious and wasteful as any government agency, if not more. Trust funds for the kids, inheritances for the grandkids, multiple vacation homes, private planes, multi-million dollar birthday bashes and ego-rich donations to local art museums and concert halls are but a few of the ways that rich people waste money.... “The way our society equalizes incomes” argues ex-American Airlines CEO Bob Crandall, “is through much higher taxes than we have today. There is no other way.” Well said, Bob. Enough said, Bob. Because enough, when it comes to the gilded 21st century rich, has clearly become too much....  

If gluttony describes the acquisitive reach of the mega-rich, then the same gastronomical metaphor applies to today’s state of the credit markets. Stuffed! Both borrowers and lenders may have bitten off more than they can chew, and even those that swallow their hot dogs whole – Nathan’s Famous Coney Island style – are having a serious bout of indigestion. As Tim Bond of Barclays Capital put it so well a few weeks ago, “it is the excess leverage of the lenders not the borrowers which is the source of systemic problems.” Low policy rates in many countries and narrow credit spreads have encouraged levered structures bought in the hundreds of millions by lenders, in an effort to maximize returns with what they thought were relatively riskless loans.

The Cossack Works for the Czar, Fred!

Fred Hiatt calls for Alberto Gonzales to resign, but pretends that the cossack is out freelancing on his own. Fred would never call for George W. Bush to resign for protecting and encouraging Gonzales. That would be unthinkable.

That the entire rest of the Washington Post editorial board has not resigned tells us something about them as well:

Credibility Collapse: SOMETHING IS terribly, terribly wrong when the attorney general of the United States is called to testify under oath before Congress and much of the hearing revolves around his credibility -- or lack thereof.... [W]hat can only be described as incredible testimony by Mr. Gonzales yesterday.... But it's not just Mr. Comey's word against Mr. Gonzales's.... At what point does someone lose so much credibility that he should no longer serve in public office? In the case of Mr. Gonzales, we believe that time has come and gone.

Matthew Yglesias Reads the New Republic

It drives him shriller than ever:

Matthew Yglesias: Blaming John Rawls: I would take issue with a variety of things Linda Hirschman says in her article bashing John Rawls, but surely it's obviously insane to blame Rawls for Democratic Party electoral defeats. I read it again, because I thought Hirschman might be making a more subtle claim, but, no, she's actually describing a causal connection between Democratic defeats and Rawls' philosophy, arguing that "It is not a coincidence that the only successful two-term Democratic presidency of the Age of Rawls was engineered in part for Bill Clinton by Bill Galston, a political theorist with a background in classical thought. "

I'm reasonably confident that this actually is a coincidence. You can read the classic essay on political strategy that Galston wrote with Elaine Kamarck "The Politics of Evasion" and you'll see it has very, very, very little to do with the sort of philosophical issues that divide him from Rawls.

Keith Olbermann Is Shrill

The Poor Man directs us to:

Davey Hume Is Shrill!

One of our oldest members:

"Hume on Patriotism and Tyranny" (Harper's Magazine): Mankind are, in all ages, caught by the same baits: The same tricks, played over and over again, still trepan them. The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny; flattery to treachery; standing armies to arbitrary government; and the glory of God to the temporal interest of the clergy.

-–David Hume, “Of Public Credit,” pt. ii, essay ix in: Essays Moral, Political and Literary (3d ed. 1754) in the Liberty Fund ed., p. 363.

But Duncan Black Is Shrill!

At Eschaton:

Eschaton: Bonded: I think an important if generally ignored point is that not only were war supporters shouting down war opponents over the years, they also did everything they could to shout down people who were suggesting even tepidly that maybe Dear Leader and his Merry Gang of Incompetents were fucking the whole thing up. While I don't have much respect for the "incompetence dodgers" on the question of whether the Great and Glorious Invasion of Iraq was a good idea, it is true that the whole adventure was handled about as incompetently as it could have been by the Bush gang. More than that, this was pretty apparent from the beginning. The pro-war gang will, for the most part, never rethink their support for their pet war, but I'd hope at least a few of them might consider that their blind support for these idiots helped ensure that their pet war, their central mission, was a colossal fuckup.

Oh, and lots of people died too. Mustn't forget that.

Matthew Yglesias Is Not Shrill Today, But Is Snarky

Yglesias writes:

Eschaton: Quality Snark: Yglesias: "If all this had gone well, Gerson could have left his government job and become a pillar of the Washington Establishment. Since it turned out to be a tremendous failure, instead he got a Council on Foreign Relations fellowship and a Washington Post column."

Bush Drives Jimmy Breslin Shrill!

Jimmy Breslin says: Impeach George Bush to stop war lies, deaths:

Impeach George Bush to stop war lies, deaths - Newsday.com: I am walking in Rosedale on this day early in the week while I wait for the funeral of Army soldier Le Ron Wilson, who died at age 18 in Iraq. He was 17 1/2 when he had his mother sign his enlistment papers at the Jamaica recruiting office. If she didn't, he told her, he would just wait for the months to his 18th birthday and go in anyway. He graduated from Thomas Edison High School at noon one day in May. He left right away for basic training. He came home in a box last weekend. He had a fast war.

The war was there to take his life because George Bush started it with bold-faced lies.

He got this lovely kid killed by lying.

If Bush did this in Queens, he would be in court on Queens Boulevard on a murder charge.

He did it in the White House, and it is appropriate, and mandatory for the good of the nation, that impeachment proceedings be started. You can't live with lies. You can't permit them to be passed on as if it is the thing to do.

Yesterday, Bush didn't run the country for a couple of hours while he had a colonoscopy at the presidential retreat, Camp David. He came out of it all right. He should now take his good health and go home, quit a job he doesn't have a clue as to how to do.

The other day, Bush said he couldn't understand why in the world would some people say that millions of Americans have no health insurance. "Why, all they have to do is go to the emergency room," he said.

Said this with the smirk, the insolent smug, contemptuous way he speaks to citizens.

People, particularly these politicians, these frightened beggars in suits, seem petrified about impeachment. It could wreck the country. Ridiculous. I've been around this business twice and we're all still here and no politician was even injured. Richard Nixon lied during a war and helped get some 58,500 Americans killed and many escaped by hanging onto helicopter skids. Nixon left peacefully. Mike Mansfield of Montana, the Democratic Senate majority leader, said on television that the Senate impeachment trial of Nixon would be televised and there would be no immunity. That meant Nixon would have to face the country under oath and if he lied he would go to prison. He knew he was finished as he heard this. Mansfield said no more. He got up and left. Barbara Walters, on the "Today" show, said, "He doesn't say very much, does he?"

The second time the subject was Bill Clinton for illegal holding in the hallway.

This time, we have dead bodies involved. Consider what is accomplished by the simple power of the word impeachment. If you read these broken-down news writers or terrified politicians claiming that an impeachment would leave the nation in pieces, don't give a moment to them.

It opens with the appointing of an investigator to report to the House on evidence that calls for impeachment. He could bring witnesses forward. That would be all you'd need. Here in the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon came John Dean. His history shows how far down the honesty and honor of this country has gone. Dean was the White House counsel. Richard Nixon, at his worst, never told him not to appear or to remain silent in front of the Congress. Dean went on and did his best to fill prisons. After that came Alexander Butterfield, a nobody. All he had to say was that the White House had a taping system that caught all the conversations in the White House. Any of them not on tape were erased by a participant.

The same is desperately needed now. Curious, following the words, an investigator - the mind here sees George Mitchell and Warren Rudman, and you name me better - can slap a hand on the slitherers and sneaks who have kept us in war for five years and who use failing generals to beg for more time and more lives of our young. A final word in September? Two years more, the generals and Bush people say.

Say impeachment and you'll get your troops home.

As I am walking in Rosedale, on these streets sparkling with sun, I remember the places I have been in the cold rain for the deaths of our young in this war. Rosedale now, Washington Heights before, and the South Bronx, and Bay Shore and Hauppauge and too many other places around here.

And in Washington we had this Bush, and it is implausible to have anyone who is this dumb running anything, smirking at his country. He sure doesn't mind copying those people. On his PBS television show the other night, Bill Moyers said he was amazed at Sara Taylor of the White House staff saying that she didn't have to talk to a congressional committee because George Bush had ordered her not to. "I took an oath to uphold the president," she said.

That president had been in charge of a government that kidnapped, tortured, lied, intercepted mail and calls, all in the name of opposing people who are willing to kill themselves right in front of you. You have to get rid of a government like this. Ask anybody in Rosedale, where Le Ron Wilson wanted to live his young life. His grave speaks out that this is an impeachable offense.

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell Is Shrill!

From Think Progress:

Think Progress: National Intel Director: Bush Admin. Manipulated Iraq Intel ‘Because They Didn’t Like The Answers’: In Stephen Hayes’s upcoming biography on Dick Cheney, he writes that the current Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell appears to side with “those who believe that the administration manipulated intelligence on Iraq for political purposes before the 2003 invasion.”

McConnell reportedly said he had “serious reservations” when asked by President Bush to become the DNI because of the Pentagon’s manipulation of intelligence in the lead up to the Iraq war. Today, Meet the Press host Tim Russert previewed the relevant portion of the book:

McConnell was honored to be asked [to be DNI], but he had serious reservations. He had been unimpressed with many aspects of the Bush administration and its conduct of the war on terror, particularly what he felt was a politicized use of intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq war.

[...]

“My sense of it is their political faith and convictions influenced how they took information and interpreted [it], how they picked up and interpreted outside events. … I’ve read much more about the current set of players and they did set up a whole new interpretation because they didn’t like the answers. They’ve gotten results that in my view now have been disastrous,” [McConnell said].

And Duncan Black Joins the Thomas Friedman Birthday Party

Yes, he is shrill:

Eschaton: Worst America Birthdays: Happy birthday to Tom Friedman, who turns 108 Friedman Units today. Here at Eschaton we'll honor him with his most profound quote: "What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, 'Which part of this sentence don't you understand? You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This. Okay.'

"That Charlie was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could."

Lawyers, Guns and Money: Worst American Birthdays, vol. 22: Thomas Friedman

Yes, Lefarkins is shrill!

Lawyers, Guns and Money: Worst American Birthdays, vol. 22: Billionaire Scion Thomas Friedman... turns 108 Friedman Units today.

Known mostly for his oracular declarations on the high wisdom of free trade, Friedman has also cultivated his inner thug, whose obscene bellowing he occasionally insists his readers hear. Friedman has, for example, observed in The Lexus and the Olive Tree that

[t]he hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

All of which may be true enough; that Friedman celebrates this state of affairs, however, makes him not only factually accurate but morally reprehensible. In a typical stream of billingsgate unleashed during the 1999 Kosovo war, Friedman -- the self-appointed organ-grinder for globalization -- openly declared his indifference to international law, advocating collective punishment of the Serbian people in language that recalled the worst atrocities of the second world war:

Let's at least have a real air war.... It should be lights out in Belgrade: Every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road, and war-related factory has to be targeted. Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set back your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.

In yet another flight of aggro fancy, Friedman urged President Clinton in 1998 to bomb Iraq "over and over and over again," atomizing a "different power station in Iraq every week, so no one knows when the lights will go off or who’s in charge." On this last count, at least, Friedman eventually got his wish.

The next six months may or may not prove to be a decisive period for the American war in Iraq, but we may be assured of one simple, gleaming fact: in six months, Thomas Friedman will still be a wanker of colossal and undeserved repute.

Marc Ambinder Has Made Jamison Foster Our New Grand Heresiarch

We have a new grand heresiarch:

Media Matters by Jamison Foser: Someone's got it in for me, they're planting stories in the press

America's political reporters don't like John Edwards, and have tried to destroy him.

But don't take my word for it.

Marc Ambinder was one of the founders of ABC's The Note and is a contributing editor to the National Journal's Hotline newsletter. The Note and the Hotline consist largely of links to and excerpts of political news and commentary by other reporters with ample doses of snark and Rove-worship thrown in. Whatever they may lack in insight and judgment, The Note and the Hotline are at the center of the D.C. political media establishment.

Ambinder, in other words, is a political reporter whose job has largely been to understand the political media.

This week, Marc Ambinder explained why the media has covered John Edwards' grooming regimen so much and Mitt Romney's so little:

There is a difference in the political reality: fairly or unfairly, a healthy chunk of the national political press corps doesn't like John Edwards.

Fairly or unfairly, there's also a difference in narrative timing: when the first quarter ended, the press was trying to bury Edwards. It's not so much interested in burying Romney right now -- many reporters think he's the Republican frontrunner.

Now, if reporters dislike a candidate, that's their business. But when they wage a relentless and petty campaign to "bury" that candidate, that's our business. All of us.

And we've been through this before.

The 2000 election was close enough that any number of things can fairly be described as having made the difference. But what Bob Somerby describes as the media's "War Against Gore" was undoubtedly one of the biggest factors in Bush's "victory." The contempt many political reporters felt for Gore is clear, as is the inaccurate, unfair, and grossly distorted coverage of Gore that decided the campaign. And, again, you needn't take my word for it: Bob Somerby, Eric Alterman, Eric Boehlert, and others have chronicled the acknowledgements by working journalists of their colleagues' hate for Gore. Jake Tapper described reporters "hissing" -- actually hissing -- Gore. Time's Eric Pooley described an incident in which a roomful of reporters "erupted in a collective jeer" of Gore "like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd."

And Joe Scarborough -- conservative television host Joe Scarborough; former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough -- has said that during the 2000 election, the media "were fairly brutal to Al Gore. ... [I]f they had done that to a Republican candidate, I'd be going on your show saying, you know, that they were being biased."

Somerby has long argued that one of the reasons the media's hatred for Gore was able to define the 2000 campaign so completely is that too few people talked about it -- and demanded that it stop -- at the time. Indeed, as he writes today, too many of those who should be combating these nonsensical but damaging storylines repeat them instead:

But then, inside Washington, establishment liberals and Democrats often seem congenitally unable to understand the shape of the past fifteen years. Haircuts -- and earth tones -- have destroyed the known world! But so what? Dems and libs keep reciting these trivia! We keep inviting the public to draw conclusions from these idiot tales.

One recent example occurred during Wednesday's Lou Dobbs Tonight, when Air America Radio host Laura Flanders said that Barack Obama has "kind of become the female on this race. ... He's seen as the weaker -- cute, attractive. ... Hillary is the one with the balls." In just a few moments, Flanders managed to suggest that a male progressive is feminine and that a female is masculine -- one of the conservatives' favorite tactics for marginalizing progressives -- and to equate being "female" with being "weak." With progressives like Laura Flanders, who needs Ann Coulter?

For anyone who would rather fight these absurd media storylines than repeat them, coverage of Edwards' haircut presents a valuable opportunity to do so.

Last week, we noted that NBC senior correspondent Jim Miklaszewski took $30,000 from the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce for a speech in which he reportedly called John Edwards a "loser" for defending his haircut. (Not that it really matters, but Edwards hasn't defended the haircut.)

This is a grossly unethical act on Miklaszewski's part -- taking tens of thousands of dollars from a special interest group for a speech, then attacking a candidate in that speech. Last year, NBC president Rick Kaplan said that company policy prevented anchors from taking speaking fees, and that anyone who violates that policy "would risk being fired."

But this is worse than simply taking speaking fees: this is taking a speaking fee from a special interest group that has supported tax cuts for the wealthy -- and attacking a candidate who has proposed eliminating a tax break for the wealthy in order to pay for health care.

If Miklaszewski took $30,000 from, say, the Children's Defense Fund to give a speech in which he attacked President Bush for announcing that he would veto a children's health program, you can bet the Right would be up in arms and calling for his head. They'd claim it proves that the media is biased against them. And their criticisms would promptly be amplified by that same media. Howard Kurtz would waste no time at all in telling you what Rich Lowry and Glenn Reynolds thought of the matter.

Well, Miklaszewski didn't take $30,000 from the Children's Defense Fund, and he didn't blast George Bush for threatening to veto health care for kids. He took $30,000 from the business lobby, and in exchange for it, he attacked John Edwards.

If you care about stopping misinformation in the media -- if you care about the media at all, really -- it doesn't get much clearer than this. Contact NBC. Tell them Miklaszewski's actions are unacceptable. Ask them if he violated NBC policy -- and if he hasn't, ask NBC to change their policies to prevent such behavior.

This isn't going to stop unless you make it stop.

After you contact NBC, contact Howard Kurtz. As the media beat reporter for The Washington Post and the host of CNN's Reliable Sources, Kurtz may be the nation's highest-profile media critic. Yet a Nexis search shows that Kurtz hasn't written a word about media coverage of Edwards' haircut for the print edition of the Post. And it has come up only in passing on his television show. (In a "Media Backtalk" online discussion with Washington Post readers, Kurtz acknowledged that "[t]he haircut thing has been overdone." Then -- in the next sentence -- he defended Post reporter John Solomon's much-maligned effort to count Edwards' haircuts.) So: contact Howard Kurtz. Ask him to cover Miklaszewski's unethical attacks on Edwards.

This isn't going to stop unless you make it stop.

How can we be so sure? Well, the 2000 campaign should be all the proof anyone needs. But here's another indication of how relentless the media will continue to be in harassing John Edwards about his haircut: So far this week alone, there are nine Washington Post articles available in Lexis-Nexis that mention John Edwards. Four of the nine mention his haircuts. Three mention his haircuts or his wealth in either the first or second sentence. Another doesn't mention either until the fifth paragraph -- but then makes up for lost time with three paragraphs about "controversies" including the haircut, Edwards' big house, and his work at a hedge fund before finally focusing on the ostensible topic of the article: Edwards' poverty tour.

And that doesn't even include an online-only article by Dan Balz and Chris Cillizza about an interview Edwards gave to the washingtonpost.com "PostTalk" program. The article began: "Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards defended himself against criticism that his expensive haircuts and lucrative income from a hedge fund undercut his campaign's effort to highlight the issue of poverty in America."

Keep in mind that it has been more than three months since the haircut story first appeared. But the media continue cover it as though it is both new and important. It is not. It is old and utterly insignificant.

There's another lesson to be drawn from 2000. Too often, those who weren't actively participating in the media's War Against Gore were enabling it by suggesting he brought it on himself. Sure, the media was unduly harsh toward Gore -- but he gave them ammunition. We hear the same thing said about John Edwards today: The Washington Post's decision to assign its star investigative reporter to count Edwards' haircuts may be absurd, but Edwards opened himself up to the attack by getting the pricey cut in the first place. It showed poor judgment; he should have known it would provide fodder for the media.

This is blame-the-victim nonsense.

If you think it is foolish to suggest that John Edwards' haircut makes him a hypocrite, it is foolish to hold him responsible for such suggestions. If there is nothing inherently wrong with a haircut, it's unfair to hold it against a candidate just because some reporters decide to pretend there is.

But shouldn't the candidate have known it would be unfairly held against him? No. If reporters don't like a candidate and decide to "bury" him, they're going to do so. If they can't do it by pointing to his "ostentatious" displays of wealth, they'll do it by claiming he is hiding his wealth. It isn't hard to imagine the media reaction if John Edwards, like Fred Thompson, rented a red pickup truck to campaign for office: he's a phony, they'd say; a rich man pretending to be otherwise. Or they'd find out he gets the Biggie Fries during his anniversary dinners at Wendy's. The key details here are that reporters don't like him, and they're willing to be unfair in order to bury him.

John Edwards could not have avoided making a "mistake" that the media would trash him for, because they were willing to trash him for any dumb thing they could think of. And if they couldn't have found something dumb-but-real, they'd have used something dumb-but-made-up, like they did in falsely claiming Al Gore had taken credit for discovering Love Canal. If it is impossible for a candidate to avoid unfair, absurd coverage like this, then it is unfair to hold that candidate responsible for a meaningless "mistake" that is only a "mistake" in that it plays into that coverage.

Earlier this year, Ambinder inadvertently illustrated the circularity of the blame-the-victim approach to these bogus media stories.

The truth is that the media seems to be confusing "hypocrisy" -- doing what one says one must not do -- with bad optics and a few cases of ill-considered judgment.

The fact is, if you're in politics and you talk about poverty, extra attention will be paid to the manner in which you display your personal wealth -- whether, by dint of expensive haircuts and mammoth homes, you spend the money you earn and don't care about "what it looks like."

Edwards has been uncautiously ostentatious. That's the basic mistake. He's set himself up for questions about the work his poverty center did, the Cayman Islands, why he joined Fortress, Sudan holdings, etc, not because he held himself to a different moral standard, but because he didn't hold himself to a high enough political standard. The press reads this as arrogance.

Knowing he was going to focus on poverty, he probably should have dialed back his displays of wealth. The optics would look better. Roger Simon wrote that the problem with Edwards's $400 haircut was not the haircut itself; it was the fact that it slipped into his campaign finance report. Wrong. The problem was the haircut -- or, more precisely, the shrug of the shoulders that accompanied his decision to get it. The press pays attention to these things. It -- we -- have a fetish for the discrepant, the unseemly, the showy. You just don't get a $400 haircut during a campaign to eradicate poverty. Your credibility as a messenger suffers.

It may seem at first like Ambinder's explanation makes sense. But if -- as Ambinder stipulates -- there is nothing hypocritical about a rich man talking about poverty, or about a haircut, what are we left with? Precious little.

Ambinder tells us: "If you're in politics and you talk about poverty, extra attention will be paid to the manner in which you display your personal wealth" But why? Why will extra attention be paid to the wealth of the candidate who talks about poverty rather than to the wealth of the candidate who wants to lower taxes for the wealthy? There is no logical reason; nor is there a legitimate emotional reason. Ambinder has already acknowledged there is no hypocrisy at play in the former case. In the latter, there is arguably self-serving greed. So why will "extra attention" be paid? Ambinder doesn't tell us -- he doesn't even seem to think the question needs an answer. Extra attention will be paid because it will be paid.

The haircut is bad "optics," Ambinder tells us. But why? Candidates (all humans, really) do a dozen things a day that could look bad if they were endlessly repeated and mocked. Why is this one bad "optics"? What makes it different from, say, lobbyist Fred Thompson renting a red pickup, or Mitt Romney spending a lot of money on makeup (or strapping his poor dog to the roof of the Family Truckster)? Why are those not optically bad? All we're left with is that the optics of the haircut are bad because the press covers it so much, and the press covers it so much because the optics are bad.

These aren't reasons, they are excuses.

Grasping, Ambinder announced that the media "have a fetish for the discrepant, the unseemly, the showy."

Bunk. "Discrepant" doesn't apply, as there is nothing inconsistent with being rich and talking about poverty, as Ambinder himself already acknowledged. So, we're left with "unseemly" and "showy." But that cannot explain the media's focus on Edwards. Mitt Romney has a big house -- in fact, he has three. President Bush hand-picks the cloth for his custom-made suits, each of which costs thousands of dollars. That's awfully "showy," and coming from people who support tax policies that benefit ... themselves. No, the media's "fetish" for the "showy" can't explain the abuse Edwards has taken, because other "showy" behavior isn't treated similarly.

"You just don't get a $400 haircut during a campaign to eradicate poverty," Ambinder finally announces. But ... why not? You "just don't." That's the best Ambinder can come up with: you just don't. And that is perhaps the best indication that there is no real reason; that there is no actual problem with the haircut.

If the media is going to spend three months -- and counting -- relentlessly covering a damn haircut, is it too much to ask that they have a better explanation for it than that "you just don't" get such a haircut? These are professional journalists, who hold enormous power over our political process, and they can't come up with a better reason than a parent gives for not letting a teenager stay out 15 minutes later? "You just can't."

This kind of media coverage, as Bob Somerby says, is what gave us President Bush. It is why we are in Iraq today. It isn't going to go away on its own, and it isn't going to go away if John Edwards is no longer a candidate. There is an endless supply of nonsense for reporters to say about progressives, whether it is Hillary Clinton's alleged display of cleavage (the horror!) or bogus attacks on Barack Obama's comments about teaching kindergarteners about "inappropriate touching."

This isn't going to stop unless you make it stop.

Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post Drives Matthew Yglesias to an Even Higher Stage of Shrillness!

Anybody see any reason why the Washington Post should publish a print edition tomorrow? Anyone? Bueller?

Matthew Yglesias: No, F--- You 21 Jul 2007 01:34 pm: The Washington Post's latest editorial on Iraq is, of course, idiotic:

The decision of Democrats led by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) to deny rather than nourish a bipartisan agreement is, of course, irresponsible.... A Democratic strategy of trying to use Iraq as a polarizing campaign issue and as a club against moderate Republicans who are up for reelection will certainly have the effect of making consensus impossible — and deepening the trouble for Iraq and for American security.

Yes, yes . . . providing political cover to moderate Republicans who want to distance themselves from Bush while minimizing the practical impact of their actions would solve our problems in Iraq.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates Succumbs!

Yes, the Secretary of Defense is shrill:

Talking Points Memo | : In response to our inquiries, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has issued a statement responding to the uproar over the letter from Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman to Sen. Hillary Clinton condemning her for reinforcing "enemy propaganda." Says Gates:

I have long been a staunch advocate of Congressional oversight, first at the CIA and now at the Defense Department. I have said on several occasions in recent months that I believe that congressional debate on Iraq has been constructive and appropriate. I had not seen Senator Clinton’s reply to Ambassador Edelman’s letter until today. I am looking into the issues she raised and will respond to them early next week.

I'd stop short of calling that a rebuke to Edelman, but just barely short. Greg, who has been dogging this story for the last couple of days, has more at Election Central.

The Poor Man Institute Watches Glenn Greenwald

It is scary:

The Poor Man Institute » Glenn Greenwald is shrill: Actually, he has moved beyond shrill into some strange, nameless territory beyond the outer reaches of shrillness, where Azathoth and his insane and churning pipers of emptiness howl mindlessly for him to pipe down because it’s late and some people have to get up in the morning and scream mindlessly at the dead uncaring stars already, fer Chrissakes! And I like it:

I confess some difficulty here in becoming particularly outraged over this latest theory [that the President and all his creatures are above the law]. There is nothing new here. As has long been known, this administration believes themselves to reside above and beyond the reach of the law. What else would they need to do in order to make that as clear as can be? They got caught red-handed committing multiple felonies — by eavesdropping on Americans in precisely the way the law we enacted 30 years ago prohibited — and they not only admitted it, but vowed to continue to break our laws, and asserted the right to do so. And nothing happened.

This latest assertion of power — to literally block U.S. Attorneys from prosecuting executive branch employees — is but another reflection of the lawlessness prevailing in our country, not a new revelation. We know the administration breaks laws with impunity and believes it can. That is no longer in question. The only real question is what, if anything, we are willing to do about that.

Yes, it is true that, as various Democratic statements are claiming, this theory poses a constitutional crisis since, yet again, the President declares the other two branches of government impotent and himself omnipotent. But we have had such a crisis for the last five years. We have just chosen to ignore it, to acquiesce to it, to allow it to fester.

There is no magic force that is going to descend from the sky and strike with lighting at George Bush and Dick Cheney for so flagrantly subverting our constitutional order. The Founders created various checks for confronting tyrannical abuses of power, but they have to be activated by political will and the courage to confront it. That has been lacking. Hence, they have seized omnipotent powers with impunity.

At this point, the blame rests not with the Bush administration. They have long made clear what they believe and, especially, what they are. They have been rubbing in our faces for several years the fact that they believe they can ignore the law and do what they want because nobody is willing to do anything about it. Thus far, they have been right, and the blame rests with those who have acquiesced to it.

It has been six months since the Democrats took over Congress. Yes, they have commenced some investigations and highlighted some wrongdoing. But that is but the first step, not the ultimate step, which we desperately need. Where are the real confrontations needed to vindicate the rule of law and restore constitutional order? No reasonable person can dispute that in the absence of genuine compulsion (and perhaps even then), the administration will continue to treat “the law” as something optional, and their power as absolute. Their wrongdoing is extreme, and only equally extreme corrective measures will suffice.

John Derbyshire is Shrill! The Horror … The Horror …

From the Poor Man:

The Poor Man Institute » The Horror … The Horror …: Jonah: Nope, don’t care whether Iraqis “choose our side” or not. And I believe the American people have a much higher tolerance than you think for bloobaths caused by our giving up on people who—I think the American people would say—were so intrinsically hopeless, we had no choice but to give up on them. The American people barely turned a hair at Pol Pot.

And I must say, your ruthlessness seems pretty tame to me. REAL ruthlessness is what Winston Churchill (disapprovingly) called “frightfulness.” I think you’d have to conclude, looking back after the last century or so, that modern Anglo powers simply don’t do “frightfulness”—not as a land-war tactic, anyway: the city-flattening air raids of WW2 were in a category of their own. The Brits tried the well-proven Roman-Ottoman style counterinsurgency tactics in Ireland (the Black and Tans) and India (Amritsar—that was Churchill’s context), and discovered they had no stomach for it. That’s why Ireland* and India are independent. I doubt we have the stomach either.

Russell Baker Drives Brad DeLong Shrill

Russell Baker on America's newspapers. I find it kind of sad:

Goodbye to Newspapers? - The New York Review of Books: Instead of heroes, today's table talk is about journalistic frauds and a Washington press too dim to stay out of a three-card-monte game. Rupert Murdoch of course has long spread melancholy in newsrooms around the world, but it was the disclosure in May that the Bancroft family, which controls The Wall Street Journal, might be ready to sell him their paper for five billion dollars that really struck at journalism's soul. The sale of another newspaper is common enough these days, but The Wall Street Journal is not another newspaper. It is one of the proudest pillars of American journalism....

One document widely read among newspaper people is a speech delivered to the American Society of Newspaper Editors a year ago by John S. Carroll, formerly editor of the Los Angeles Times. It is an eloquent expression of the uneasiness many reporters and editors now feel about the future. Carroll titled his speech "What Will Become of Newspapers?" and, as the title suggests, his prognosis was not cheery. He was especially alarmed about the breakdown of understanding between owners and working journalists and about the loss of common purpose that once united them. This has come about, he said, because the functions that were once the realm of strong publishers have been taken over by Wall Street money managers.... Carroll's speech is invaluable for its working journalist's grim view of how competitive market practices have changed the business; but Donald Graham recently provided a similar view from the owner's seat. Graham is chairman of the board of The Washington Post.... Eliminate the two-tier [shareholding] structure, and "a line of buyers eager to purchase the company would form within minutes," Graham wrote. "No one could say no. The line would include private equity firms, high-ego billionaires, international media companies lacking a famous property and lots more." The New York Times, he predicted, would be "auctioned off like a side of beef."...

[M]any who comment on journalism these days... are angry about the press's flabby performance at the time when Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz & Co. were stoking public appetite for war in Iraq. Everyone, including most journalists, seems to agree that the press did a rotten job, but whether a superb job would have defeated the neocons' determination to have their war is another question.... [C]redit the administration with a masterful job of deception. It fooled its own secretary of state, Colin Powell. It even fooled itself about enjoying a swift flower-strewn triumph. Despite Congress's humiliating performance, the idea that the press could have averted the disaster is slow to die....

Contrary to popular impression, there was some very good journalism as the administration rushed toward war. There was articulate dissent, too, even at the Capitol when the war resolution was being rushed through Congress. The press simply did not give it much attention since, for one thing it came from people out of power-—Senators Kennedy of Massachusetts and Byrd of West Virginia, for instance, both Democrats.... [W]hereas Ari Fleischer-—voice of the White House—-was inescapable on the networks.... [T]here was also some good investigative reporting. Michael Massing... credits several reporters.... Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank at the Post.... Pincus told Massing the Post's editors "went through a whole phase in which they didn't put things on the front page that would make a difference."

Massing gave especially high marks to Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, and John Walcott of Knight Ridder's Washington bureau.... Knight Ridder's reporting on the reality behind the "script" had no influence at all on the rest of the press; because Knight Ridder had no paper in Washington, its reporting was not read there.

This may reflect something worse than a Washington press corps asleep at the switch. John Walcott, Washington bureau chief for Knight Ridder, speaking recently of his bureau's Iraq coverage, said the Washington press had had a problem worse than timidity and too much coziness with power:

There was simple laziness: Much of what the administration said, especially about Iraq and al Qaida, simply made no sense, yet very few reporters bothered to check it out.

It also took a little courage to irritate a White House pack famous for telling the world only what served their purpose and whim. Challenging the "script" invited punishment by White House enforcers. Knight Ridder reporters were barred from traveling on the secretary of defense's airplane for three years because their coverage had differed from the "script."...

One result has been a widening disconnection between public and press.... To the average person today, [Neil] Henry writes, "a Journalist is the television talker who is paid a considerable retainer to regularly make noise on cable news programs." The person hosting the program is a Journalist, too, drawing down big money "not to seek out and report the news but to entertain an audience with a certain glibness and an argumentative personality."... And there is "the inveterate Washington Beltway insider with shifting loyalties and ethics who works as a Pentagon spokesperson, political campaign adviser, or presidential speechwriter one year" and hires out next year as a network reporter or magazine correspondent worthy of trust.... Henry is clearly unhappy about all this. His assemblage of self-servers, frauds, political double-dippers, gasbags, mountebanks, spoiled reporters, and unprincipled swine make up that vague organism called "media." How the press and journalism became entwined in this squalor is a long and complicated tale, but there seems to be no escape. Indeed, the press seems to have become only a minor player in Henry's carnival, and there is even some question whether many people care. Nobody phones the paper expecting to find a hero anymore...

First of all, the Wall Street Journal is not "one of the proudest pillars of American journalism." The editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal are a sewer. To pretend that the editorial pages are not part of the newspaper... I would have thought that was beneath Russell Baker.

Second, the press coverage of the Iraq War was not the anomaly that Russell Baker portrays it as. Lots of us have longer memories of issues and events where the press has fallen down on the job. Lots of us have dealt with reporters and columnists whose behavior cannot be explained by either stupidity or a total lack of ethics, but requires both.

AFAIK, Russell Baker is wrong in claiming that Colin Powell was a bamboozlee rather than a bamboozler. Powell's chief of staff Colonel Wilkerson says that the night the two of them spent preparing Powell's UN speech was the worst moment of his life. To cover for Colin Powell on this... I would have thought that was beneath Russell Baker. The job of deception was not "masterful": the claim that the press was so weak that its defalcation didn't matter... I would have thought that was beneath Russell Baker.

The lowest moment was:

It also took a little courage to irritate a White House pack famous for telling the world only what served their purpose and whim. Challenging the "script" invited punishment by White House enforcers. Knight Ridder reporters were barred from traveling on the secretary of defense's airplane for three years because their coverage had differed from the "script."...

I think that John Walcott should have written this article, not Russell Baker. John Walcott nails it:

There was simple laziness: Much of what the administration said, especially about Iraq and al Qaida, simply made no sense, yet very few reporters bothered to check it out...

One thing people might do is to remind their readers at every opportunity that Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, John Walcott, Walter Pincus, Dana Milbank, and company have street cred as a result of their work on Iraq in 2002-2004--and that few other reporters and next to no editors and no owners do.

Elizabeth Edwards Writes To Slate's John Dickerson, and Is Shrill

"No," she says, "my husband and I are not exploiting my cancer":

Elizabeth Edwards Writes To Slate's John Dickerson: No, We Aren't Exploiting My Cancer | TPMCafe: Elizabeth Edwards has just written in to Slate to slam the online mag's chief political reporter, John Dickerson, for insinuating that she and John Edwards are using her cancer in an ad for political gain.

She was responding to a Dickerson piece in Slate today bearing this intriguing subhed: "A new ad exploits the suffering of the Edwards family. But that's okay."

In the article Dickerson seems to locate something contradictory in the fact that Edwards' latest ad features Elizabeth saying: "It's unbelievably important that in our president we have someone who can stare the worst in the face and not blink."

Dickerson asks what "the worst" is a reference to, and he concludes that it falls "laughably short" to suggest that it could refer to anything from Edwards' trial lawyer career. He decides that Edwards couldn't possibly be referring to anything but her cancer, and suggests that this shows Edwards to be a phony once again:

When we see an ad with Elizabeth Edwards talking about "the worst," we're talking either in whole or in part about her cancer. So, how does this square with Edwards' statement on 60 Minutes that he doesn't want anyone to vote for him because of his wife's cancer?

Now Elizabeth has hit back at Dickerson in the comments section at Slate, saying that John did indeed see some awful things in his career as a trial lawyer -- you know, clients who'd suffered horrible accidents and injuries.From Elizabeth's comment, which we've confirmed was really written by her:

John Dickerson needs to read my husband's book, Four Trials. In it, he will read the stories of four families uprooted by tragedy or accident who leaned, in their worst moments, on John Edwards. He was but a young man when he represented a former salesman, E.G. Sawyer, who, because a doctor prescribed an excessive amount of a pharmaceutical, was confined to a sliver of life in squalor. Without John's strength, intelligence and voice, he would have died that same way. Dickerson would not have to have read Four Trials to know the story of Valerie, whom John represented after a pump connected to a kiddie pool drain with a faulty cover sucked most of her intestines from her little body...

Yes, he has faced death and disease in our family, but the measure of his strength is the fights he has -- for his entire adult life -- voluntarily taken on, not just those that fate would not permit him to avoid...

Hullabaloo: This Is Why We Revile the Press. Digby on Marc Ambinder

It is a thing of beauty:

Hullabaloo: Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic defends the Edwards haircut story and condemns the undue coverage of Romney's make-up thusly:

The centerpiece of Edwards's campaign is his anti-poverty efforts; he presents himself as a dedicated messenger for the cause, and he likes expensive haircuts, bought a gimungous house, etc. etc. His credibility as a messenger comes into question when he spends money ostentatiously. (The haircut was inadvertently billed to the campaign, a spokesman later said).There is a difference in the political reality: fairly or unfairly, a healthy chunk of the national political press corps doesn't like John Edwards.Fairly or unfairly, there's also a difference in narrative timing: when the first quarter ended, the press was trying to bury Edwards. It's not so much interested in burying Romney right now -- many reporters think he's the Republican frontrunner.

I honestly don't quite know what to say. Plenty of effort has already been expended reminding people that you don't have to be poor to advocate for the poor --- and that historically some of the most ardent advocates were quite wealthy. The press corps really needs to examine whether they truly believe that the rich are required to be selfish jackasses who care about nothing but the stock market and tax cuts and only poor people can care about poverty. Perhaps that's a country they want to live in, but most of the rest of us aren't so keen on it. But that's not the part of this post that's startling.

Ambinder says right out that "fairly or unfairly" the press can't stand John Edwards and so they are going to bury him. This is, of course, not unprecedented, since we saw what they did to Al Gore for the same reason. The matter-of-factness of his statement still made my head spin a little, but I appreciate the candor. At least we now know what we are dealing with. (And there is no question about whether it's fair. It most certainly isn't.)

Now, I am not especially surprised that the press corps doesn't like John Edwards. Many of these people probably didn't like guys like him in high school either and one thing we know about the political press corps is that they have never matured beyond the 11th grade. (See: chilean bass stupidity.) But I have to ask, once again, just who in the hell these people think they are and why they think they are allowed to pick our candidates for us based upon their own "feelings" about them? I don't recall electing them to anything. (But, hey, maybe we should just poll the kewl kidz and find out which candidate they "like, totally, like" and we can cancel the election and save a lot of time and money.)

This is exactly this kind of thing that makes people like me laugh when I get lectured by professional journalists about "objectivity" and "ethics." At least I put my political biases up front. These phonies hide behind a veil of journalistic conventions so they can exercise their psychologically stunted desire to stick it to the BMOC, or the dork or whoever these catty little gossips want to skewer for their own pleasure that day. Please, please, no more hand-wringing sanctimony from reporters about the undisciplined, unethical blogosphere. Their glass houses are lying in shards all around their feet.

Each time they've pulled this puerile nonsense in the last few years, it's resulted in a mess that's going to take even more years to unravel. And they learned nothing, apparently, since they are doing exactly the same thing in this election. If the press really wants to know why they are held in lower esteem than hitmen and health insurance claims adjusters, this is it.

Brian Beutler Is Shrill Because of George Will and David Broder

Brian Beutler writes:

Brian Beutler: More McCain: Option 1, from George Will: "McCain, whose reservoir of righteousness is deep, thinks the parlous condition of his campaign is the price of his principled behavior in supporting an immigration reform that is intensely unpopular with the Republican base (read: the party's nominating electorate) and the war, which is intensely unpopular with almost everyone else."

Option 2, identical to Option 1, from David Broder: "John McCain...is the most stubbornly principled person in the Republican field. He is being punished now for saying what he believes about Iraq and immigration, among other things."

Option 3, from Gail Collins: "His presidential campaign is falling apart and everyone is debating whether it’s due to his principled stand on Iraq or his principled stand on immigration. But the alternate plotline was the one in which the stalwart maverick senator sells out to everybody from the irrational religious right to the irresponsible tax-cut crowd, and then loses the nomination anyway."

This is quite enough McCainnery for one day, if you ask me. But I think the ratio of reverential conventional wisdom to alternative-but-also-correct analysis here pretty well represents what readers can generally expect from their pundits on any given point of order.

Shailagh Murray Drives Duncan Black Even Shriller!

Just stop. Just stop printing the Washington Post. Just stop printing it now:

Eschaton: The Devil Writes Copy for the Post: I was trying to convince someone who disagreed that the Washington Post's Shailagh Murray was, in fact, the devil. Now I didn't mean in the sense of literally being the Lord of the Underworld, but a very bad reporter who has a very twisted sense of how American democracy and press do and should operate. So, I make the case. First we have this:

Washington, D.C.: I am somewhat surprised at the debate about the surge. In October, The Post's own polling showed that 19% of voters favored an immediate withdrawal. Yesterday, CNN reported that more than 50% want an immediate or by year's end withdrawal. Still, the politicians debate more or less, not sooner or later. Why won't the politicians follow the polls when it comes to leaving Iraq?

Shailagh Murray: Would you want a department store manager or orthodontist running the Pentagon? I don't think so. The reason that many politicians are squeamish about hard and fast goals of any kind in Iraq is that there is no simple response or solution -- it would have emerged by now. A withdrawal by year's end carries enormous, very serious implications.

And then, of course, is her regular habit of suggesting that opposition to the war is anti-military. Her falsehoods about polling on Bush's illegal wiretapping. Her misrepresentation of the Lieberman campaign.etc....

Sidney Blumenthal: Tragedy as Farce

Sidney Blumenthal is shrill:

Talking Points Memo | Tragedy as Farce: By David Kurtz: Sidney Blumenthal previews the next scene of the Iraq debacle:

Gen. Petraeus is promised as the dramatic hero who will stride to triumph in the last act. The author of a recent study of counterinsurgency who has not previously fought such a war, he has been thrust into the spotlight partly because his halo is yet untarnished. Bush's unpopularity disqualifies him from the "Mission Accomplished" moment. So he pushes out his handpicked general and walks behind his chariot, hoping the cheering of the crowd will be also for him. In his July 12 press conference, Bush mentioned Petraeus 11 times, his name flourished as a talisman for "victory." The generals with the greatest experience with the Iraq insurgency, who opposed Bush's surge, such as Gen. John Abizaid, an Arabic speaker, have been discharged or reassigned. The burden on the ambitious general to produce a military solution is unbearable and his breaking inevitable. But for now, Petraeus' tragedy foretold is being cast as the first dawn of a happy ending.

As Josh mentioned a few days ago, Bush still wants his parade

Michael Gordon's Omissions Would Drive Anybody Shrill

And Moon of Alabama certainly is:

M of A - Gordon's Source on Iran: Michael Gordon (NYT co-writer of Judith Miller) has another hate-Iran piece in today's NYT:

U.S. Ties Iranians to Iraq Attack That Killed G.I.’s: BAGHDAD, July 2 — Iranian operatives helped plan a January raid in Karbala in which five American soldiers were killed, an American military spokesman in Iraq said today.

[...]

General Bergner declined to speculate on the Iranian motivations. But he said that interrogations of Qais Khazali, a Shiite militant who oversaw Iranian-supported cells in Iraq and who was captured several months ago along with another militant, Laith Khazali, his brother, showed that Iran’s Quds force helped plan the operation.[...]“Both Ali Musa Daqduq and Qais Khazali state that senior leadership within the Quds force knew of and supported planning for the eventual Karbala attack that killed five coalition soldiers,” General Bergner said.

Glenn Greenwald points out that Gordon's only source for this piece is a "military spokesman" Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner. The source is not doubted, there are no other sources or viewpoints present. It is in fact, a pure U.S. military press release.

What Glenn doesn't not tell is the background of Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner. Via sourcewatch we learn:

Kevin J. Bergner was named February 3, 2006, by President George W. Bush as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Iraq. Brigadier General Bergner recently served as Deputy Director of Political-Military Affairs (Middle East) at the Department of Defense. He received his bachelor's degree from Trinity University and his master's degree from City University of New York.

Berger left the White House and became spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq only three weeks ago.

You can bet with a very good chance that his statement, which Michael Gordon dutiful stenographs,  has its origins in the White House. This bomb-Iran propaganda, the accusation of direct, official Iranian military intervention in Iraq, is originating from within the center of the Bush administration. It is fed through a "military spokesman" who just left the White House to Michael Gorden who's editors dependably publish it unfiltered in the New York Times.

Given the schemes we know from the start of the Iraq war disinformation campaign, the next step is obvious.

Someone from Bush's administration will appear on television and will cite and confirm Gordon's New York Times reporting as proof for Iran's "bad intent".

Newsweek explained how this worked on Iraq:

The strongest evidence that Saddam was building a nuke was the fact that he was secretly importing aluminum tubes that could be used to help make enriched uranium. At least it seemed that way. In early September, just before Bush was scheduled to speak to the United Nations about the Iraqi threat, the story was leaked to Judith Miller and Michael Gordon of The New York Times, which put it on page one. That same Sunday (Sept. 8), Cheney and national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice went on the talk shows to confirm the story.

Here is the transcript Wolf Blitzer's interview with Rice and there is Cheney on Meet the Press:

VICE PRES. CHENEY: [...]The third thing you need is fissile material, weapons-grade material. Now, in the case of a nuclear weapon, that means either plutonium or highly enriched uranium. And what we’ve seen recently that has raised our level of concern to the current state of unrest, if you will, if I can put it in those terms, is that he now is trying, through his illicit procurement network, to acquire the equipment he needs to be able to enrich uranium to make the bombs.

MR. RUSSERT: Aluminum tubes.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Specifically aluminum tubes. There’s a story in The New York Times this morning-this is-I don’t-and I want to attribute The Times. I don’t want to talk about, obviously, specific intelligence sources, but it’s now public that, in fact, he has been seeking to acquire, and we have been able to intercept and prevent him from acquiring through this particular channel, the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge. 

Thanks to Michael Gordon "it's now public that, in fact," Iran attacks U.S. forces in Iraq.

Here we go again ...

UPDATE: 1. As Glenn just added, the NYT has changed its story:

Gordon's article has now been edited substantially, most notably to include several sentences near the beginning of the article that cast at least some doubt on the military's claims. None of these facts were included in the original version...

Mark Kleiman Says that Peggy Noonan Is Cured!

He writes:

The Reality-Based Community: Cured!: Peggy Noonan, reflecting on why just about everyone these days loathes and despises George W. Bush:

I'm not referring to what used to be called Bush Derangement Syndrome. That phrase suggested that to passionately dislike the president was to be somewhat unhinged. No one thinks that anymore.

I'm glad to hear it. (Quick! Someone tell Krauthammer and Don Surber and their fan Glenn Reynolds.) It feels good to be sane again.

But I have a question for Noonan and the other folks who have finally stopped drinking the Kool-Aid: When did I stop being crazy? When did it become consistent with sanity to notice that we are ruled by combination of fool, fanatic, bully, and weakling? Or is it barely possible that what "no one thinks anymore" was never the case, and that the derangement was on the other side?

If anyone on the Right, including Noonan, challenged the rhetorical tactic of questioning the mental health of Bush's critics, I must have missed it. Consider that the next time Wingnutistan picks itself a target.

I'm not expecting an apology. But would just a little bit of self-reflection, prompting just a little bit of humility, be too much to ask? I suppose it would.

h/t Andrew Sullivan

Mark Kleiman Is Shrill Because Bush Thinks His Worshippers Are Idiots

Steve Benen writes:

Talking Points Memo | 20/20 Hindsight: The president sat down on Friday with a small group of sympathetic conservative journalists -- Bush is generally at his most comfortable around those who already convinced how right he is -- and offered some insights into his perspective on Iraq. "[L]ast fall, if I had been part of this polling, if they had called upstairs and said, do you approve of Iraq I would have been on the 66 percent who said, 'No I don't approve.' That's why I made the decision I made. To get in a position where I would be able to say 'Yes, I approve.'"

Mark Kleiman translated the remarks for the rest of us.

"I'm not nearly as stupid as my supporters. Back when I was telling the world that things in Iraq were going well, and you folks were helping me by calling anyone who said otherwise a traitor, I knew we were all lying."

It was an odd thing for Bush to concede, wasn't it? Last fall, the White House was insisting, aggressively, that critics of the war were confused and misguided. To disapprove of the war, the president and his aides said, was to support a dangerous agenda that would necessarily undermine national security.

Except now the president is prepared to argue that he was with the unsatisfied majority. Here's a follow-up: what does that say about Bush's opinion of the one-third of Americans who bought into the White House line and told pollsters that they approved of how the war was going?

Joshuas Micah Marshall: Impeach George W. Bush Now--for Frances Townsend If Nothing Else

Joshua Micah Marshall is shrill:

Talking Points Memo | Townsend's Dodge: Townsend's answer is that of course al Qaeda will use our attacks on them for propaganda purposes to further grow their movement. But it's silly to argue that we should never attack our enemies just because they'll try to use our attacks against us in this way. It's not a zero sum game, she argues.

Now, Henry didn't have the perfect follow-up ready for this response. But honestly it's not always easy to parry this sort of bamboozlement perfectly in real time. (Believe me, it's not that easy.) But the key point is that Townsend dodges the essential issue. This would be a decent response if people were making it as an argument against our invasion of Afghanistan, because that was after all al Qaeda's base of operation. We were attacking them where they were. So it would be silly or at least a weak argument to say we shouldn't have attacked Afghanistan just because al Qaeda would use the attack as a propaganda tool against us. As Townsend's logic suggests, sure they might use it for their media campaign. But that's far outweighed by the benefit of destroying their sanctuary.

But that's the heart of the issue, the one Townsend dodges and which Henry unfortunately didn't press. Iraq wasn't a sanctuary or recruiting or training ground for al Qaeda before we invaded. This has now been as definitively established as proving a negative ever can be. So, contra Townsend, it really is a zero sum game for us since we did nothing to hurt al Qaeda by invading Iraq -- they weren't there and had no prospect of being there. But we did help them almost immeasurably by giving the whole organization a new lease on life for recruitment, fundraising and more. And the rising unpopularity of the United States in the Muslim world because of the invasion has undoubtedly played a large role in preventing Pervez Musharraf from keeping al Qaeda from reestablishing itself in Pakistan.

Townsend sort of begs off this last point by saying that if al Qaeda didn't set up in one country it would set up in other. If not Iraq, then Somalia and if not Somalia then in the Magreb or Southeast Asia or wherever. But what sort of sad sack defeatism is that? If that's the case why are we spending so much time trying to stop them from getting set up in Iraq?

The whole point is stupid.

The simple fact is that the full picture is now clear. The White House was repeatedly warned in advance that attacking Iraq would strengthen al Qaeda. We did and it did. That's where we are now. The White House has no excuse and no answer.

Matthew Yglesias Thinks Little of Anne Applebaum and David Brooks

Young Yglesias thinks little of Anne Applebaum:

Matthew Yglesias: Hypocrites Everywhere: Anne Applebaum:

No troops? Though deeply appealing to the "we told you so" crowd, this plan is clothed in the greatest degree of hypocrisy. How many of the people who clamor for intervention in Darfur will also be clamoring to rush back into Iraq when full-scale ethnic cleansing starts taking place? How many will take responsibility for the victims of genocide? I'm not saying there will be such a catastrophe, but there could be: Mass ethnic murders have certainly been carried out in Iraq before.

This line of argument has been in vogue for some time now, but it seems singularly nonsensical. For one thing, I think there are real questions about the math -- how many people arguing for withdrawal for Iraq really are advocates of large-scale insertion of US ground forces to Darfur? Not me! Numbers aside, I think it's fairly obvious that if the US does withdraw from Iraq and full-scale ethnic cleansing does result (something Applebaum concedes is by no means certain) that very few withdrawal advocates are going to be clamoring for intervention. Here, I guess, is where the hypocrisy comes into play.

But it's not actually hypocritical to favor interventions to prevent mass slaughter where you think such interventions will be effective, but not otherwise. The idea that consistency's sake requires one to either be a pacificist or else to support whatever military adventure happens to be fashionable in the Washington Post opinion pages at the moment is daft.

And he thinks less of David Brooks:

Matthew Yglesias: Conservatives and the Government: His conclusion is odd, but today's David Brooks column is pregnant with things to blog about. For example:

Conservatives are supposed to distrust government, but Bush clearly loves the presidency. Or to be more precise, he loves leadership. He’s convinced leaders have the power to change societies. Even in a place as chaotic as Iraq, good leadership makes all the difference.

Now I suppose there must be some conservatives for whom this "are supposed to distrust government" dictum applies, but for the past fifty or so years that's clearly not the case. The mainstream conservative belief is that the government needs to be given dramatically greater scope to gather information and to deploy force -- including deadly force -- and threats thereof. This isn't an innovation of the Torture and Arbitrary Detention administration, it's a longstanding pattern. Conservatives didn't like the Warren Court's criminal justice jurisprudence, they didn't like the Church Commission's inquiries into the CIA, they chafe at contemporary military reticence about civilian casualties, etc.

There are exceptions to this (as there are exceptions to everything), but the dominant view in post-war American conservatism has been of almost boundless faith in violence and in large government institutions like the military, the prison system, etc.

This is what Jim Henley calls Heinlein-Goldwater Fusionism: "limited" government plus militarism.

Ezra Klein: What Does Larry Kudlow Know?

Larry Kudlow drives Ezra Klein into shrillness:

Ezra Klein: What Does Kudlow Know?: What Does Kudlow Know?: "Kudlow isn't a specialist in something else who's just freelancing in economic ignorance on the National Review blogs," writes Matt. "This is supposed to be his area of specialization. But he doesn't know anything about it."

I've done a fair amount of television at this point, and argued, in general, with a fair number of conservatives, and I have literally never encountered an interlocutor who seemed as utterly ignorant of his subject as when I went up against Kudlow. The guy may not be a health care specialist, but he professes to be a business economist, and anyone who's read The Wall Street Journal over the past decade should have at least a passing familiarity with the subject, and any economist should be able to quickly understand the various types of market failure bedeviling the system. But so far as I could tell, he knew, literally, nothing. That's not a condition of ideology. Plenty of conservatives can argue health care. This was a condition of truly spectacular ignorance. Spectacular not because he didn't know, but because he thought a few free market aphorisms were a sufficient substitute for actually knowing. And yet he's seen as an expert. It's bizarre.

Unqualified Offerings Is Shrill! Jim Henley on Anne Applebaum

Shut the Washington Post print edition down today. That's all I'm sayin':

Anne Applebaum Looks Also Into You § Unqualified Offerings: Anne Applebaum Looks Also Into You: This is the stupidest column anyone has ever written for any venue. I sure am glad Anne Applebaum returned to Washington in time to let us all know that, like Madeleine Albright’s America, she sees farther than others. I know just where “a dose of humility” is missing: Applebaum’s column.

There’s an implication lurking underneath the self-regard - that since all the Iraq options have downsides, what we happened to be doing at the exact moment Anne Applebaum started paying attention again is the sensible course.

Needless to say, there’s no argument in favor of, to coin a phrase, staying the course.

Meanwhile, the funny part . . .

No troops? Though deeply appealing to the “we told you so” crowd, this plan is clothed in the greatest degree of hypocrisy. How many of the people who clamor for intervention in Darfur will also be clamoring to rush back into Iraq when full-scale ethnic cleansing starts taking place?

Um, who cares? Look, you don’t even need to be as hard as I am on enthusiasts for intervention in Darfur to notice that despite their enthusiasm we still don’t have troops in Darfur. That suggests to me that Darfur hawks do not hold the whip hand in American politics. I think we could make an Iraq withdrawal stick if they’re the only issue. But what Applebaum is really up to here is the old “Prove your compassion . . . by hurting other people!” dodge. I’ve long since built up an immunity.

Glenn Greenwald on the Sewer that Is John Harris's and Michael Allen's The Politico

Glenn Greenwald is shrill:

Glenn Greenwald - Salon: The Politico sewer: The Politico today is prominently touting on its front page another vapid, petty, and inane "news story" -- the type of story which has, in just a few short months, become its hallmark:

Romney spent $300 on makeup 'consulting'

What kinds of things do you think of when you hear "communications consulting"?

Speechwriting? Message strategy?

Well, "communications consulting" is how presidential candidate Mitt Romney recorded $300 in payments to a California company that describes itself as "a mobile beauty team for hair, makeup and men's grooming and spa services."

Romney spokesman Kevin Madden confirmed that the payments -- actually two separate $150 charges -- were for makeup, though he said the former Massachusetts governor had only one session with Hidden Beauty of West Hills, Calif.

Impressively, they followed up their Romney scoop with a hard-hitting, probing interview that marks the outer limits of journalism of which their "reporters" are capable: But Stacy Andrews, who made up Romney for Hidden Beauty, said he barely needs makeup.

"He's already tan," she said. "We basically put a drop of foundation on him . . . and we powdered him a little bit."

This is not some throw-away blog item, but one of The Politico's featured front page news stories today.

One of the reasons why vapid petty-personality "journalism" of this sort has so disadvantaged liberals and so advantaged right-wing fanatics is because the latter are not only willing, but droolingly eager, to exploit these sorts of themes, while liberals in general are highly reluctant, almost embarrassed, to do so. Thus, even after months of John Edwards being mauled in every media venue as a result of the Pulitzer-worthy haircut "scoop" by The Politico's Ben Smith, these are representative reactions by liberals to the Romney "story":

Kevin Drum, Washington Monthly:

MAKE IT STOP....From the front page of The Politico on Monday: . . . Seriously. Can we just stop this stuff? Does anyone really think that the problem with presidential campaign coverage is that it isn't vapid and half-witted enough already? Jeebus.

Melissa McEwan, Shakespeare's Sister:

OMG -- Who GIVES a Shit?!

I swear to the fates, if there's ever a museum of internet journalism, celebrating the best the web has to offer, The Politico would best be represented by a turd in the unfinished basement bathroom.

The only remotely non-critical reference I can find to the Romney story is this seven-word statement from Oliver Willis, which seems more satirical than anything else.

The real issue here -- aside from the complete lack of journalistic standards at the Politico, which is old news by now -- is whether this trashy, worthless item will be given anywhere near the coverage and attention which the Politico's equally trashly, equally worthless Edwards item received. It goes without saying that the hordes of right-wing commentators who spewed one Edwards hair insult after the next will not do anything similar with Romney. Their utter lack of consistency is far too established to be worthy of commentary.

But it is worth recalling how intense and endless the coverage of the Edwards hair item was -- and continues to be -- in our establishment media. Ever since Ben Smith broke this story, we have been subjected to countless references -- one after the next -- not just by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, but in The New York Times -- multiple, repetitive "news" articles for months, along with "news analysis" and substance-free Op-Eds. All of that is just from the NYT news and editorial pages alone (the Times' coverage of Edwards' haircut almost exceeds that of The Politico itself). It was also, needless to say, endlessly repeated by one television pundit after the next and other news outlets as well.

In fact, as Greg Sargent noted weeks ago, our broken, petty media's "coverage" of this "story" was so intense and endless that far more Americans were aware of it than they are of some of the most politically important facts:

Buried in the new Fox News poll is a startling number that doesn't reflect terribly well on the priorities of our political media:

From the new Fox poll of registered voters:

1. Do you happen to know which presidential candidate has been in the news recently for paying four hundred dollars for a haircut?

Edwards 44% Hillary 2% Obama 1% Other 1% Don't know 53%As Greg noted, a recent Harris poll had found that only 45% of Americans were aware that Saddam had no WMD's at the time we invaded Iraq. As Greg said: "the same number know about Edwards' haircut that knew the truth last year about Saddam and his phantom weapons."

And citing the poll numbers showing that Americans overwhelmingly believed even as late as September, 2003 that Saddam personally planned the 9/11 attacks, Greg observed:So nearly 20 percent more know about Edwards' haircut than believed Saddam wasn't behind 9/11 -- two years after the attacks and six whole months after the invasion.

Something's wrong here.

Yes, something is quite wrong here. But the establishment media will not voluntarily change its behavior. Why not? Because they do not think there is a problem at all. Quite the contrary. Let us turn to Newsweek's Senior White House Correspondent Richard Wolffe and hear again what he thinks about such matters: "the press here does a fantastic job of adhering to journalistic standards and covering politics in general." Fantastic.

It isn't only that the press is petty and obsessed with worthless gossip at the expense of real reporting. It's also that their pettiness is so transparently one-sided. As MyDD's Jonathan Singer put it:

A whole lot of words have been spilled -- far too many, indeed -- over John Edwards' decision to spend $400 of campaign contributions on a haircut. But in the interest of balance, I suppose we should expect as much media attention to be poured on Mitt Romney's decision to spend nearly as much on a makeover this quarter. . . .

It has only been about three hours since The Politico ran with this story online, but to this point not a single other news service running its stories on Google news has run with the Romney makeover story, and the particular article quoted above has been scantly mentioned within the blogosphere thus far. This might change -- but I'm not betting on the right wing echochamber working too hard on bringing this story to the attention of the broader electorate.

There is a reason The Politico is referred to in some circles as "Drudgico" and/or "Drudge's little sister." But those terms are increasingly apt for our largest and most influential media outlets as well.

---

On a not entirely unrelated note, one of the panels I am on at Yearly Kos this year is entitled "Blogs and the MSM: from Clash to Civilization". The panel, to be moderated by The Nation's Ari Melber, also features Jill Filipovic of the Feministe blog and Mike Allen of The Politico, whose journalism I examined here.

---

UPDATE: James Joyner disputes what he says is my claim that "Liberals [are] Just Too Darn Nice to Play Politics." I don't actually think, and did not argue, that liberals are "nicer" or too elevated to engage in hard-core political warfare, including below-the-belt personality attacks, though there is, admittedly, an ambiguity in what I wrote that could account for that misreading.

When I said that conservatives are far more eager than liberals "to exploit these sorts of themes," I am referring to the gender-based personality attacks that have become a staple of right-wing campaigns and -- far more than the supposed "hypocrisy" from Edwards' poverty platform -- is what has made the Edwards hair story resonate. The standard right-wing attack on liberals generally, and on John Edwards specifically, is to attack them as being effeminate (in contrast to the swaggering, pseudo-tough guy GOP brush-clearing ranchers and military officers).

For some time now, it has been commonplace for Democratic candidates to be depicted as gender-confused freaks -- Al Gore, emasculated with earth colors at the hands of the controlling Naomi Wolf; John Kerry, the wife-dominated, French windsurfer; Hillary Clinton, the domineering, emasculating, pants-wearing dyke; and John Edwards, the pretty, womanly faggot obsessed with his hair. One can make a strong argument, as some have, that those personality-attack themes have played a far larger role in the outcome of the last two presidential election than any substantive issues, and liberals simply have nothing close to the potency of the right-wing filth machine in advancing these gender themes.

The muted, even critical reaction to the Romney story -- as compared to the still-ongoing feeding frenzy about Edwards' hair, not just among right-wing pundits but our establishment press -- demonstrates that point rather conclusively. Are there any right-wing commentators of any note who have ever objected to the "Edwards hair" theme -- which has endured for years -- as the worthless, petty, vindictive distraction that it is?

Daniel W. Drezner Is Shrill! He Writes a Letter to George W. Bush

Really shrill!

danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner :: Dear Mr. President: please leave Iran in limbo: Dear Mr. President: please leave Iran in limbo

Dear George,

I trust you and yours are doing well. I'm writing because Ewen MacAskill and Julian Borger have this story in the Guardian that says you want to solve Iran by the time you leave office:

The balance in the internal White House debate over Iran has shifted back in favour of military action before President George Bush leaves office in 18 months, the Guardian has learned.

The shift follows an internal review involving the White House, the Pentagon and the state department over the last month. Although the Bush administration is in deep trouble over Iraq, it remains focused on Iran. A well-placed source in Washington said: "Bush is not going to leave office with Iran still in limbo."

The White House claims that Iran, whose influence in the Middle East has increased significantly over the last six years, is intent on building a nuclear weapon and is arming insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. The vice-president, Dick Cheney, has long favoured upping the threat of military action against Iran. He is being resisted by the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and the defence secretary, Robert Gates.

Last year Mr Bush came down in favour of Ms Rice, who along with Britain, France and Germany has been putting a diplomatic squeeze on Iran. But at a meeting of the White House, Pentagon and state department last month, Mr Cheney expressed frustration at the lack of progress and Mr Bush sided with him. "The balance has tilted. There is cause for concern," the source said this week.

Nick Burns, the undersecretary of state responsible for Iran and a career diplomat who is one of the main advocates of negotiation, told the meeting it was likely that diplomatic manoeuvring would still be continuing in January 2009. That assessment went down badly with Mr Cheney and Mr Bush.

"Cheney has limited capital left, but if he wanted to use all his capital on this one issue, he could still have an impact," said Patrick Cronin, the director of studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The Washington source said Mr Bush and Mr Cheney did not trust any potential successors in the White House, Republican or Democratic, to deal with Iran decisively. They are also reluctant for Israel to carry out any strikes because the US would get the blame in the region anyway.This story jibes with what I'm hearing about your mindset as well.

George, George, George.... haven't you learned to prioritize? Last I checked, Pakistan's tribal areas are falling apart, Al Qaeda seems resurgent, your homeland security chief has a bad gut feeling, and, oh yes, there's Iraq. Aren't there enough current threats to focus on without fretting about threats that could manifest themselves 5-10 years from now.

Speaking of Iraq, there's another reason I'd like you to kick the Iran can down the road. I was sent a screener of a new documentary, No End In Sight. Here's a preview in case it wasn't sent to you: The documentary consists almost entirely of observations from former administration officials and servicemen. What they have to say suggests that even if you are the decider, you and yours suck eggs at being the implementer.

The truth is, no matter how many times I game it in my head, I can't see a scenario where, by focusing your energies on Iran and adopting Cheney's perspective on what to do, you make the situation there even a smidgen better. And in almost all of them, you dramatically worsen the problem.

Please, I beg you, just stop worrying about Iran. Worry about other things instead.

Sincerely,

Dan Drezner

Fred Hiatt Drives Glenn Greenwald Shrill!

You would think that even Donald Graham would have cut an embarrassment like Fred Hiatt loose long ago:

Glenn Greenwald - Salon: Fred Hiatt defends the administration's mild, restrained secrecy: Senior Washington Bush spokesman Fred Hiatt -- who also works as the Editorial Page Editor of The Washington Post -- shatters conventional wisdom this morning by defending the Bush administration's mild, balanced, and restrained use of government secrecy. Government secrecy, you see, is a complex and serious issue -- we desperately need our leaders to act in secret, but they should try to balance that with a concern for civil liberties. And, decrees Hiatt, let us all be grateful that we have a Government that is so sensitive about this need for balance and is so fair and judicious in its use of secrecy privileges:

A PRESIDENT'S prerogative to protect national security secrets needs to be respected, but it should not unconditionally trump the rights of those harmed by the very programs the president means to shield from public view. Such is the tension in several cases involving Bush administration antiterrorism policies, including the use of "extraordinary rendition" to seize terror suspects and most recently the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program. In defending against court challenges, the administration has invoked the state secrets privilege, which evolved from a series of cases dating to the 1950s and which allows it to hold back material that it claims if released would compromise national security.

. . . . The Bush administration appears thus far to have used the privilege sparingly, at about the same rate as predecessors, according to a forthcoming law review article by Professor Robert M. Chesney of Wake Forest University School of Law.

Because the law review article which Hiatt cites is "forthcoming," neither I nor, presumably, most other people have yet seen it. But what I do know is that virtually all other long-available evidence -- which Hiatt studiously ignores -- demonstrates exactly the opposite.

As but one example, Professors William Weaver and Robert Pallito of the University of Texas at El Paso, in the Spring, 2005 issue of The Political Science Quarterly, published a widely discussed and much-cited study (.pdf) documenting that the Bush administration's use of the "state secret privilege" is unprecedented in both quantity and scope...

The Washington Post Commits More Howlers in Moral Philosophy

It publishes Michael Gerson, who believes that the answer to "Why be good?" is "If you don't do what I say God commands, then he will smite you forever." But how do we know that what you say God commands is in fact good? We don't. In fact, lots of times what people like Michael Gerson say God commands is not good at all:

[God] said unto him, "Abraham:"

And he said, "Behold, here I am."

And he said, "Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of."

And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.

Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off.

And Abraham said unto his young men, "Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you," And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together.

And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, "My father:"

And he said, "Here am I, my son."

And he said, "Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?"

And Abraham said, "My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering:" so they went both of them together. And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood...

Here's the mess the Post made on the floor:

Michael Gerson - What Atheists Can't Answer: Theism, for several millennia, has given one answer: We should cultivate the better angels of our nature because the God we love and respect requires it. While many of us fall tragically short, the ideal remains.

Atheism provides no answer to this dilemma.... Atheists can be good people; they just have no objective way to judge the conduct of those who are not.

The death of God has greater consequences than expanded golf time on Sunday mornings. And it is not simply religious fundamentalists who have recognized it. America's Founders embraced public neutrality on matters of religion, but they were not indifferent to the existence of religious faith. George Washington warned against the "supposition that morality can be maintained without religion." The Founders generally believed that the virtues necessary for self-government -- self-sacrifice, honesty, public spirit -- were strengthened by religious beliefs and institutions.

None of this amounts to proof of God's existence. But it clarifies a point of agreement -- which reveals an even deeper division. Atheists and theists seem to agree that human beings have an innate desire for morality and purpose. For the theist, this is perfectly understandable: We long for love, harmony and sympathy because we are intended by a Creator to find them. In a world without God, however, this desire for love and purpose is a cruel joke of nature -- imprinted by evolution, but destined for disappointment, just as we are destined for oblivion, on a planet that will be consumed by fire before the sun grows dim and cold.

This form of "liberation" is like liberating a plant from the soil or a whale from the ocean. In this kind of freedom, something dies.

Why One Should Not Trust the New Republic

I think it was 1993 when the fact that an article appeared in or an author wrote for the New Republic became a signal that one should presume that the article was self-serving and misleading b---s---. The trend has continued.

Matthew Yglesias reports, and is shrill:

Matthew Yglesias: When conservative president George W. Bush, having promised to nominate conservative Supreme Court justices like Scalia and Thomas, selected life-long conservative John Roberts to be a Supreme Court justice, and this pick was met with universal acclaim among conservatives, sensible people espied a pattern here Roberts would be a conservative Supreme Court justice. Others, however, saw a more subtle pattern. An unsigned September 26, 2005 New Republic editorial argued:

If Roberts seemed reassuring, he did not seem dazzling. He appears to be a decent man with the soul of an attorney. He is a man of the establishment, smart but not quite wise, more suave than strident, and utterly without a trace of the radical temperament, which will be salutary in these volatile times. But who will President Bush nominate next? The conservative bench is not exactly riddled with Roberts-like reasonableness. So it is too soon for liberals to be disarmed. Confirm Roberts, and prepare for Owen.

Jonathan Chait, writing in the October 24, 2005 issue about Bush's betrayals of social conservatives argued:

Bush's betrayal of the social conservative cause did not begin with Miers. His previous high court appointment, John Roberts, ought to have been taken as such. Bush all but explicitly promised to nominate justices like Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia, but Roberts is not in that mold. He has not displayed a passion for overturning precedents that enrage the right, and he has disavowed the tendency, favored by conservatives like Thomas, to use the Court to smother liberal legislation.

In the September 19, 2005 issue of the magazine, legal affairs editor Jeffrey Rosen argued that:

The truth is that Roberts's nomination as chief justice was a peace offering from Bush to Democrats and a gift to principled liberal and conservative defenders of judicial restraint. Rather than listening to the siren song of ideological interest groups who are urging them to cast a symbolic but futile vote of opposition, Democrats should instead vote to confirm Roberts as chief justice with gratitude and relief.

At any rate, Roberts is on the bench now and, exactly as one would have expected, he's a party line vote for the Court's conservative wing. The new issue of The New Republic even has an unsigned editorial denouncing his ruling in the school desegregation case. And Jeffrey Rosen, of course, has a long article admitting he was totally wrong covering his ass:

Breyer's cautious hope that the Court might become less polarized in the future, combined with disappointment at the polarization of the present, seems like the right attitude. It is a far more productive model for liberals than self-pity or shock about the unsurprising fact that, now that Alito has replaced O'Connor, the Court has moved right. For example, Emily Bazelon of Slate has demanded that liberals and moderates who supported Roberts as a potential unifier (including me) recant. This is premature. Bush won the 2004 election, and the opportunity to replace O'Connor with Alito ensured that he would change the direction of the Court. Those of us who supported Roberts never denied his conservatism.

But, look, neither I nor Bazelon nor anyone else dredging this up are exhibiting "self-pity or shock." It's what we expected. Rosen now wants us to believe that he was making some kind of point about political realism ("The question was: Who among the candidates President Bush was plausibly inclined to appoint as chief justice would be most likely to avoid the radicalism of Scalia and Thomas and try to unify the Court?") but that's not what was going on. People were writing, in the face of the evidence, that Roberts marked a clear break with Scalia. And we're seeing that he unquestionably is a break in prose style but he makes the same rulings.

And, look, people make predictions that go wrong. After Howard Dean secured the endorsements of Al Gore, SEIU, and AFSCME I was quite certain he was going to win the Democratic presidential nomination. These things happen. But they should be admitted; that's how one learns.

Andrew Leonard is Shrill

 Andrew Leonard is puzzled by the survival of the stupid:

The Senate says "Om," Part 2, How the World Works - Salon.com: This afternoon, How the World Works will be your one-stop shop for regular updates on asinine Christian antics. A couple of weeks ago, I noted that the news that a Hindu prayer would kick off the U.S. Senate session on July 12 was not warmly received by some of the more troglodytic regions of the Web. Today, three self-styled Christian "patriots" physically attempted to disrupt the prayer, shouting, among other things, that "this was an abomination." … In combination with my earlier post today on the Christian jihadis in Boulder, Colo., this latest eruption of stupidity poses a puzzler for those of us who do believe in evolution. If Darwin was right, how does such religious idiocy survive? What is it fit for?

It's About Time

Joe Klein, after defending the use of term Al Queda to describe the enemy in Iraq, finally calls the administration on its deceptive use of the term:

The July Surprise - TIME: George W. Bush … demonstrated only an intermittent relationship with reality... Recently, in his desperation, starting with his speech at the Naval War College on June 28, he has been telling an outright lie, and he repeated it …: "The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is the crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims, trying to stop the advance of a system based upon liberty."

That is not true. ... Bush's lie, which assumes a lack of knowledge on the part of the American people, was compounded by an outrageous bit of spin: "We just started [the surge]," the President said. General David Petraeus "got all the troops there a couple of weeks ago." In fact, Operation Fardh al-Qanoon, the military effort to secure Baghdad, has been going on since February.

We have had more than four years of a President who seems to have such a low opinion of the public that he can't bear to tell it the truth about a war gone sour.

Let's Just Shut Associated Press Down and Run with McClatchey...

Hilzoy is shrill:

Obsidian Wings: Through The Looking Glass: Matt is right: this AP article is just bizarre. Here's its main point:

U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded al-Qaida has rebuilt its operating capability to a level not seen since just before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, The Associated Press has learned. The conclusion suggests that the group that launched the most devastating terror attack on the United States has been able to rebuild despite nearly six years of bombings, war and other tactics aimed at crippling it. (...)

Counterterrorism analysts produced the document, titled "Al-Qaida better positioned to strike the West." The document pays special heed to the terror group's safe haven in Pakistan and makes a range of observations about the threat posed to the United States and its allies, officials said.

Al-Qaida is "considerably operationally stronger than a year ago" and has "regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001," the official said, paraphrasing the report's conclusions. "They are showing greater and greater ability to plan attacks in Europe and the United States."

Frankly, I'd be happiest if the AP didn't bother saying who, in their opinion, is likely to benefit politically from this state of affairs, and spent their time giving more details on the actual news. However, if they have to look into their secret crystal balls and tell us who profits from the rebuilding of al Qaeda, why say this?

The findings could bolster the president's hand at a moment when support on Capitol Hill for the war is eroding and the administration is struggling to defend its decision for a military buildup in Iraq. A progress report that the White House is releasing to Congress this week is expected to indicate scant progress on the political and military benchmarks set for Iraq.

Offhand, the idea that this administration has completely failed to cripple the organization that actually attacked us, in large part because of a combination of ineptitude (cough, Tora Bora, cough cough) and the clever decision to divert attention and resources from the fight against al Qaeda to the unrelated fight against Saddam Hussein, might strike an impartial observer as, well, a problem for Bush, not a source of strength. And the idea that it should strengthen his arguments for sticking with his unrelated war, which he has prosecuted every bit as ineptly as the fight against al Qaeda, might seem just a bit peculiar. What is this strengthened argument supposed to be? "I have completely screwed up, so you need to keep on supporting me"? "I have failed at everything I've tried so far, and with your help I can fail some more"? "Keep our armed forces tied down in Iraq so that al Qaeda can fully reconstitute itself"? "Total incompetence deserves your support"? Honestly, what?

Ladies and gentlemen: your so-called liberal media.

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Yet Another Washington Post Should Have Fired David Ignatius Long Ago Edition)

If the Washington Post wants to survive five years, it should have pulled the plug on David Ignatius long ago. Every column he writes takes a flamethrower to the shreds that are all that is left of the Post's reputation. Just sayin'.

Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein say more.

Ezra Klein:

Ezra Klein: Return of the ISG: Do these people realize how they sound? Today, David Ignatius singlehandedly creates a safe, centrist ground that he can write all the dirty, hippy Democrats outside of, saying:

The Iraq debate in Washington this week is intense and angry. But as with the Palestinian conflict, the rhetorical fireworks mask the fact that there's an emerging consensus on what the final result should be. Leaders on both sides endorse the broad strategy proposed last December by the Iraq Study Group: a gradual withdrawal that shifts the American mission to training, force protection, counterterrorism and border security. That formula gets wide support from members of Congress and administration officials alike. As a senior administration official puts it, it's "where everybody agrees you want to go." The problem is getting there.

Oh lordy. You know who's not included in "everybody?" The "administration" that this "senior administration official" is part of. They, after all, not only rejected the Iraq Study Group's recommendations, but took the reverse course and increased the deployment without any concurrent shift in strategy. But that doesn't stop Ignatius from saying:

There's broad agreement on the need to put Iraq policy on a sustainable path that will gradually withdraw American forces without producing the bloodbath that frightens people like Ryan Crocker in Baghdad. But Bush and the Democrats are running out of opportunities to make it happen.

Given that the whole of Ignatius's column focuses on the wisdom of the Iraq Study Group's recommendation, no, it's not Bush and the Democrats who are missing opportunities to draw down the Iraq War. It's just Bush.

But then, that's not the sort of thing a Very Serious columnist is supposed to say, is it?

Kevin Drum:

The Washington Monthly: STRAW MEN....David Ignatius today:

Getting into Iraq was President Bush's decision, and history will judge his administration harshly for its mistakes in the postwar occupation. But getting out of Iraq is now partly in the hands of the Democrats who control both houses of Congress. History will be equally unforgiving if their agitation for withdrawal results in a pell-mell retreat that causes lasting damage.

Can we please cut the crap? There are virtually no Democrats — and certainly none with any real influence — who are advocating a pell-mell retreat. But for some reason every columnist in the world seems to find it necessary to warn us against this nonexistent straw man. Why?

Those of us who want to leave want to do it in an orderly way. If the Pentagon says it will take 12 months, that's fine. 18 months? Also fine. It just needs to be real. Nobody wants to endanger any American lives by ignoring legitimate force protection issues, and I'm really, really tired of lazy writers who continually imply otherwise on no basis at all. Knock it off.

POSTSCRIPT: The rest of the column is about whether we should withdraw completely or whether we should leave a residual "training force" in Iraq. That's fine. It's a genuine argument. It would, however, be a far more genuine argument if Ignatius and others explained how the residual force actually had any chance of accomplishing anything. As Stephen Biddle persuasively argued yesterday, it's one of those things that's politically attractive but militarily untenable. In fact, I'd say it's the worst possible option available.

Having Fitz

For a court opinion, ths is close to shrill:

Bloomberg.com: Worldwide: A judge told Lewis ''Scooter'' Libby to begin serving a term of supervised release, while saying he was ''somewhat perplexed'' that President George W. Bush said the prison sentence he ordered for Libby was excessive.  … The prison term was ''consistent with the bottom end'' of federal sentencing guidelines, Walton's opinion said today. ''The court is somewhat perplexed as to how its sentence could accurately be characterized as excessive.'' …  Bush had ''rewritten the statutory scheme'' to make it ''applicable to a situation that Congress clearly did not intend,'' the judge wrote.

Jonathan Zasloff Is Shrill!

Constitutional-crisis shrill:

The Reality-Based Community: The Gonzales Denounement--You Heard It Here First: Now that the Washington Post has revealed that Alberto Gonzales perjured himself while testifying before a Senate committee in 2005 (piling on top of his other perjuries), I will now offer the Ultimate Prediction on what will happen. Likely? No. But if it happens, you heard it here first:

1. The House of Representatives will impeach Gonzales.
2. The Senate, with the cooperation of Republicans looking to distance themselves from Mr. 26% Approval in the upcoming election, will remove him from office.
3. Bush will then give Gonzales a recess appointment as Acting Attorney General (which lasts until the end of the current Congress).
4. This recess appointment is illegal. Article I, Section 3, Clause 7 of the Constitution forbids anyone impeached and removed from "hold[ing] . . . any Office of Honor, trust, of Profit under the United States." (Impeached federal judge Alcee Hastings can serve in Congress probably because a legislative representative is not an Officer. While it is true that being Bush's AG hardly constitutes an Office of Honor, this probably carries little legal purchase).
5. The Roberts Court, in a 5-4 majority opinion written by Justice Kennedy, will rule that no one has standing to sue over the recess appointment.

I think that a lot of the creation of the Imperial Presidency will happen in this way. Bush will break the law, and the Supremes will stop anyone from challenging it. Expect the same with the subpoenas and executive privilege.

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Yet Another New Republic Edition)

Joshua Kurlantzick, for some reason, doesn't like Thailand--or any place in East Asia, for that matter:

Thailand's Potemkin village: [B]eneath the gold-plated surface, many of the problems that caused the [1997-98] crisis have not been resolved.... Thailand and Malaysia grew by relying on exporting to the West.... But an economy cannot grow on exports alone, and few East Asian nations have developed strong local consumer markets. Instead, they have simply gone back to their old model and exported their way back to growth. And as China--and low-cost Vietnam--increasingly dominate manufacturing, higher-wage nations like Malaysia will not be able to compete....

Many East Asian nations suffer from other unresolved issues. Though countries like Thailand boast strong primary education, which created a literate workforce necessary for basic manufacturing, they have not developed enough sophisticated secondary schools to make their citizens competitive in information technology, English, and other high-end skills of the twenty-first century. Instead, these nations lose ground to English-speaking India and face a situation where only a small percentage of their populations thrives, while their income inequality worsens and average people buy new mobile phones, cars, and clothes on credit. Already, the Philippines suffers from Latin American levels of inequality, with a tiny wealthy elite sipping coffees at Starbucks in Makati, the business district, while more than 100,000 people in Manila make a paltry living scavenging through the city's garbage.

Even the region's wealthiest nations, like Singapore, struggle to develop creative citizens who can start their own companies. Singapore's famously plan-oriented government has determined that its citizens must be creative, and it has launched a raft of state creativity-oriented initiatives, from building a new arts complex to allowing bar-top dancing, to get strait-laced Singaporeans to loosen up.

Worse, the type of local entrepreneurship needed to create a vibrant economy still has not been created.... [S]mall business people in Asia like Sirivat do not enjoy easy access to loans from banks or government agencies like America's Small Business Administration.

Then there is corruption... a study by the Asian Development Bank showed that in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand, there was less accountability and other indicators of good governance in 2005 than there was in 1996.

With their massive currency reserves, most Asian nations are relatively immune from another total meltdown. And without a crisis to spur more reform--in education, or corporate governance--countries like Thailand may continue to muddle along, growing but never leaping into the ranks of developed economies, as many Thais once hoped. Their economies may have rebounded, but the payoff isn't there.

Outside of Japan and China, East Asia's economies today are twice the size they were in 1990, and a third larger than they were in 1997. Japan's economy is only 20% bigger today than it was in 1990 and 1997. China's economy is four times the size it was in 1990 and at least twice the size it was in 1997. As a whole, East Asia's economies are significantly more equal than America's--the Philippines is very much the odd one out.

Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan have successfully leaped into the ranks of the developed economies. All in all, the East Asian economies are the most "vibrant" in the world--and they remain the most rapidly-growing economies the world has ever seen.

So why does the New Republic pay Joshua Kurlantzick to deny reality?

Bush's first Surgeon General joins the Order of the Shrill!

From: rmoomaw@xxxxxxxx
Subject: Bush's first Surgeon General joins the Order of the Shrill
Date: July 10, 2007 4:35:26 PM PDT
To: loucks@see.com, mbobier@rcn.com, andrew@theatlantic.com, and 9 more…

During Congressional testimony, no less: http://www.tnr.com/blog/the_plank?pid=124418.

(Of course, Bush & Cheney won't lose anything more from this, since their argument has already been reduced to: "Yeah? What are you gonna do about it?")

Dean Baker Gets Shrill on CNN!

Sanjay Gupta and Wolf Blitzer need new careers:

Beat the Press Archive | The American Prospect: Accurate Health Care Numbers: Michael Moore 1, CNN 0: CNN decided to have its health care expert, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, go after Michael Moore's new movie Sicko. One of the facts that he claimed the movie got wrong was its assertion that health care spending in the United States is $7,000 per person. Dr. Gupta said it was only $6,000.

Well, this is an easy one. We go to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services National Health Care Expenditure projections and find on Table 1, line 3, that projected per capita health care expenditure for 2007 is $7,498.

Along with Michael Moore, BTP eagerly awaits the apology for getting such a simple fact completely wrong. (Actually, they should make a double apology, since the point was to show that Moore was sloppy with his numbers. What exactly does CNN's health care expert get paid for if he can't read a simple table before presenting his stories to the country?)

Wurzt David Brooks Kolum Evar!

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? A New York Times edition:

Rising Hegemon: Oh the Inanity!!!: Imagine, if you will, the worst possible combination of topics possible for a David Brooks column and see if you can top these:

Women's sexuality, female popstars, these kids nowadays

It's like he broke into Maureen Dowd's progesterone...

Meanwhile, the soft bigotry of *extremely* low expectations for right-wing thought strikes again, as Matthew Yglesias turns kinder and gentler, and lowers the bar by praising the one not-wrong thing that Brooks says in his column:

Yes, it's true, his column's invocation of Pink and Avril Lavigne is clumsy and unconvincing, and the precise claim he's making about pop music trends breaks down on any number of levels....

That said, Brooks' observation here is true and, I think, not made often enough:

Now young people face a social frontier of their own. They hit puberty around 13 and many don’t get married until they’re past 30. That’s two decades of coupling, uncoupling, hooking up, relationships and shopping around. This period isn’t a transition anymore. It’s a sprawling life stage, and nobody knows the rules.

This is a much more sensible entry-point into the endless "hooking up" disputes than the standard "what's with all these sluts these days" fare that you usually get from the right.... [T]echnological and economic change.... But biology stays the same. Consequently, people in their teens and early twenties engage in a lot of courtship-related program activities that don't really entail a good-faith search for a spouse.

This is a real and meaningful change from the recent past, that, like any significant, change, is going to have some downsides.... Now, I do wish Brooks had spent less time on Pink and more time on trying to reach some kind of conclusions about this, but as far as observations go, it's not a bad one.

There just ought to be a maximum age above which you can't casually opine on pop music trends...

Median age at first marriage for American women rose from 20.3 in 1960 to 23.9 in 1990 to 25.3 in 2003. Median age at first marriage for American men rose from 22.8 in 1960 to 26.1 in 1990 to 27.1 in 2003. It's been rising about a tenth of a year per year for five decades: it's not like this is a new thing.

Former Bush Surgeon General Carmona Is Shrill

Former Bush Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona is not happy:

Former Bush Surgeon General Says He Was Muzzled - New York Times: The first U.S. surgeon general appointed by President George W. Bush accused the administration on Tuesday of political interference and muzzling him on key issues… "Anything that doesn't fit into the political appointees' ideological, theological or political agenda is ignored, marginalized or simply buried," Dr. Richard Carmona, who served as the nation's top doctor from 2002 until 2006…

"The problem with this approach is that in public health, as in a democracy, there is nothing worse than ignoring science, or marginalizing the voice of science for reasons driven by changing political winds. The job of surgeon general is to be the doctor of the nation, not the doctor of a political party," Carmona added.
Carmona said Bush administration political appointees censored his speeches and kept him from talking out publicly about certain issues…

Carmona said he was politically naive when he took the job, but became astounded at the partisanship and manipulation he witnessed as administration political appointees hemmed him in….

Carmona said he was prevented from talking publicly even about the science underpinning the research to enable the U.S. public to have a better understanding of a complicated issue. He said most of the public debate over the matter has been driven by political, ideological or theological motivations. "I was blocked at every turn. I was told the decision had already been made -- stand down, don't talk about it," he said…

Carmona said some of his predecessors told him, "We have never seen it as partisan, as malicious, as vindictive, as mean-spirited as it is today, and you clearly have worse than anyone's had."

Robert Pear of the New York Times Has Driven Dean Baker into Shrill Unholy Madness!

Yep. Dean writes:

Beat the Press Archive | The American Prospect: NYT Flacks for White House to Help Stop Child Health Care: The White House doesn't want to see the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) expanded at the cost of eliminating government subsidies for private insurers in Medicare. While this might look bad to the public (poor kids generally garner more sympathy than health insurance companies), the NYT is quick to tell readers at the beginning of the article "the seemingly uncontroversial goal of insuring more children has become the focus of an ideological battle between the White House and Congress. The fight epitomizes fundamental disagreements over the future of the nation’s health care system and the role of government."

How do we know that this is a battle over ideology and not just a case where the White House is doing the bidding of its campaign contributors in the insurance industry? Well, according to the article, Alan Hubbard, assistant to the president for economic policy, said that White House opposition to expanding SCHIP is “philosophical and ideological.”

I guess that settles it. Hey, if the assistant to the president for economic policy said it, it must be true.

Sadly, No! Is Shrill!

Because it reads the Corner. Poor sap:

Sadly, No! » Never Leave the Cut No More:

You know, pretty often, The Corner can be kind of a slog. Right-wing policy nerds nodding sagely at each other, Jonah Goldberg and John Podhoretz trying to out-geek each other with Dr. Who references, Kathryn Jean Lopez wetting herself over Mitt Romney’s latest photo op, and John Derbyshire wandering in from Planet Zoot to complain about the wimpiness of today’s murder and kidnap victims, can only hold your interest for so long.

Occasionally, though, especially on a slow news day, they attain a sort of wingnut perfect-storm, a self-generating auto-feedback loop of douchebaggery that starts rolling like an an avalanche and cannot be stopped. It’s a real wonder to behold, like many great and terrible natural disasters, and when we document it, we feel sort of like those guys who cling to the back of pickups during a tornado just so they can get some compelling video footage of the whole mess. We know that there’s a very strong possibility that we will be hurt, or killed, or at the very least disembrained, by the swirling cyclone of dumb that is NRO’s group blog, but we cannot look away.

Bradrocket has already documented Larry Kudlow’s daring investigative report into the sinister Chinese Communist dog food conspiracy, by which they will sicken an entire generation of house pets, thus leaving no one to bark out a warning when the Red Army sneaks into our back yards and tee-pees our freedom and democracy. But there is far, far more than that going on this weekend: The Corner Boys — who, charmingly, still cling to the pretense that they are talking to someone other than themselves — have worked themselves into the kind of frenzy of outrage and indignation (at dire threats such as the Live Earth concert in DC) that can only happen when there’s nothing good on TV. Let’s watch!

Stanley Kurtz: “If British Muslims don’t have big marches against terrorism, it will prove that Islam is evil.”

John J. Miller: “The National Museum of Women in the Arts has been duped by a Communist sympathizer! What the hell is this, Russia? And besides, they’re using art from her toilet! That’s where you make number ones and doo-doos!”

Rick Brookhiser: “Since the latest English terror attacks, we’ve all decided that doctors are evil, because we are six years old. And I just thought of another one! Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who I only know about because he was a dirty Nazi anti-Semite and probably ate babies. Of course, to balance things out, there is this guy, who is fictional, but still.”

Jonah Goldberg: “That Ayman al-Zawahiri sure is a lying crazy nut, except when he says things I agree with.”

Andy McCarthy: “When the government and big corporations try and force their employees to quit dicking around on the internet and get back to work, it is a clear sign of America’s suicidal self-delusion about Islamofascism.”

John Derbyshire: “Hi, everyone! I’m just beaming down from Planet Zoot to glowingly quote a piece by Robert Heinlein that is diametrically opposed to everything I have ever written, said or thought about Muslims and Democrats.”

Ramesh Ponnuru: “Michael Gerson used an online game to try and prove that libertarian capitalism is flawed! Isn’t that silly? And totally unlike when we use 24 and Battlestar Galactica to bolster our arguments about the war on terror, or when we cite Dr. Watson as proof that not all doctors are evil, or whatever.”

Jonah Goldberg: “Economic statistics carefully handpicked by Sam Brownback prove that the economy under President Bush today isn’t nearly as bad as it was under President Bush a couple of years ago.”

Iain Murray: “In keeping with the National Review’s corporate policy that Al Gore is Satan, I would like to be the first to point out that the Live Earth Concert in DC is worse than a thousand Holocausts.”

John Derbyshire: “Hey, everybody! Did you know that here on Planet Zoot, kamikazes are better than Islamist suicide bombers, because the Japanese like puppies? OK bye!”

Larry Kudlow: “Boy, Jonah, those economic figures sure are impressive! Especially if you’re not some dumbass who didn’t go to college, in which case you can expect your real wages against inflation to have risen a whopping 1.5% in the last six years!”

John Derbyshire: “You know what, folks? On Planet Zoot, the ’50s were totally awesome, because none of us are women, or homosexuals, or Jews, or leftists, or coloreds, or anything like that.”

Kathryn Jean Lopez: Well, it looks like Muslims did, in fact, have big marches against terror. But since I don’t know how big the crowds were, I am assuming the marches were not attended by every Muslim in the British Isles, and therefore, Islam is evil.”

John Derbyshire: “Guess what? Here on my homeworld of Planet Zoot, we think Carl Perkins is Elvis Presley! This is Space Ranger Derbyshire, signing off! Beep boop.”

Michael Ledeen: “Anyone who has read my top-notch reporting on the death of Iranian religious leaders knows what a fan I am of well-researched, fact-checked, responsible journalism. That’s why I totally believe Michael Yon when he reports that 15 years ago in Iraq, al-Q’aeda operatives cooked children and served them to their families for lunch.”

John J. Miller: “I am Lieutenant Bookman.”

Mark Steyn: “It is my sad duty to report that the Live Earth concert in DC has crashed into the side of a mountain, killing thousands.”

John Derbyshire: “Look, it’s me again! I’m here to report that even on my far-distant homeworld of Planet Zoot, where apples are strawberries and your feet walk left-side-out, the Live Earth concert in DC is guilty of war crimes, hate crimes, and crimes against humanity, and it also killed President Kennendy.”

Kathryn Jean Lopez: “Did you know that the Live Earth concert in DC caused the Black Plague? It might as well be true!”

Mark Steyn: “Hey, who can’t stop talking about the fucking Live Earth concert in DC? I know I can’t! Also, there should be more ukelele music.”

Kathryn Jean Lopez: “Not to change the subject or anything, but it has come to my attention that even Bob Geldof agrees that the Live Earth concert in DC kills Iraqi children and cooks them and serves them to their families at lunch.”

Joseph Galloway of McClatchy Washington Bureau Is Shrill!

Really shrill:

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 07/05/2007 | What happened to the George Bush who insisted on honest government?: Why is it that the Bush administration, in its dying throes, looks remarkably more like an organized crime ring than one of the arms of the American government? A poorly organized and run crime ring, truly, but a crime ring nonetheless.

Why do I keep remembering the George Bush that I actually once voted for when he first ran for president — the one who talked of bringing in an administration that would look more like the face of America and of giving us a government whose appointees would be honest, upright, fair and moral.

Yes, that's the one. What happened to him? Where did that George Bush go? When did he go over to The Dark Side? What enticements did Vice President Darth Cheney offer him? Was it the vision of unlimited, unchecked power over the world? How can it be that this man from Texas presides over a White House that shelters and provides cover for men like Karl Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who clearly believe that the laws of our country are only meant to be imposed on lesser beings, the man in the street? Remember the George Bush who declared that anyone who violated the law and participated in the leaking of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame would be fired on the spot? What about Karl Rove who works beside President Bush and is his Mr. Fixit and Mr. Fix Them? Was it just my imagination or did I not hear sworn testimony and see documents indicating that he was up to his pudgy little neck in the whole deal?

Can we not suppose that Mr. Rove was, in fact, at the root of the 51 White House employees whose e-mails miraculously vanished from all those e-mail accounts that executive-branch employees maintained through a cut-out: the Republican National Committee? How many laws governing the preservation of White House records, passed by Congress after the sorry spectacle of Richard Nixon and the vanishing 18.5 minutes of taped chit-chat in the Oval Office, have Mr. Rove and his hench-people broken? What ARE they hiding?

What about the lies and lame excuses put forward to hide their actions in the case of the missing federal prosecutors by the chief law enforcement officer of our country, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and his sophomoric young assistant attorneys general with their degrees from universities where only one book is on the reading list? Does anyone doubt that Karl Rove personally drew up the list of those prosecutors who were to be executed because they did not enthusiastically go after people who were likely to vote for the Democrats in any election?

The good attorney general should be fired if he didn’t know where that list came from and he should also be fired if he did know and denied it under oath before Congress. It was his department, the one that is supposedly dedicated to upholding the laws of our nation fairly and with an even hand, and he damned well should have known and damned well should have told the simple truth.

Where is it written in either the federal statutes or the Constitution of the United States that our laws against criminal acts apply to everyone but nice, meek, small-statured Republican political operatives who have a wonderful wife and children? Our prisons are full of nice, meek white-collar criminals who cheated a bit on their taxes or back-dated their bountiful option awards or raped and looted the coffers of corporations and beggared the poor fools who trusted them and bought stock in their criminal enterprises.

The estimable Scooter Libby repeatedly lied under oath to investigators of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a sitting federal grand jury. Last time I looked that is a felony offense punishable by fine and imprisonment.

There are two former agents of the U.S. Border Patrol sitting in a federal prison for shooting a fleeing dope smuggler and then lying in their reports in an attempt to cover their butts with their bosses. Where is their commutation of sentences? Where is their pardon?

Instead of firing federal prosecutors who didn’t go after illegal immigrants and voter registration fraud like pit bulls, why isn’t our president demanding the dismissal of prosecutors and appointed regulators who turn a blind eye while the National Treasury is looted of billions by big corporations whose bosses write very large checks to Republican candidates?What we have here, at the very heart of our own government, is a morass of criminal behavior unlike anything seen in recent American history. It is past time to throw the rascals out of office, and I mean ALL the rascals of whatever party or political persuasion. If they didn’t participate then they closed their eyes to the rot, and by this I cheerfully include the Democrats in Congress who now control Congress and haven’t done anything but talk about doing something.

On his way out the door, whether sooner or later, George W. Bush had better sign one last pardon — to himself — for all the damage and destruction he has wrought on a nation that expected far better.

Joseph L. Galloway is a military columnist for McClatchy Newspapers and a former senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers; he is co-author of the national best-seller “We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young.” Readers may write to him at: P.O. Box 399, Bayside, Texas 78340.

On the Third Try, The New York Times Succeeds in Hiring an Ombudsman

Clark Hoyt appears to understand what the job of an ombudsman entails. Kudos. Neither of his two predecessors--Okrent or Calame--did. And Clark Hoyt is close enough to being shrill:

Seeing Al Qaeda Around Every Corner - New York Times: AS domestic support for the war in Iraq continues to melt away, President Bush and the United States military in Baghdad are increasingly pointing to a single villain on the battlefield: Al Qaeda. Bush mentioned the terrorist group 27 times in a recent speech on Iraq at the Naval War College.... [A]lthough some 30 groups have claimed credit for attacks on United States and Iraqi government targets, press releases from the American military focus overwhelmingly on Al Qaeda.

Why Bush and the military are emphasizing Al Qaeda to the virtual exclusion of other sources of violence in Iraq is an important story. So is the question of how well their version of events squares with the facts.... But these are stories you haven’t been reading in The Times... the newspaper has slipped into a routine of quoting the president and the military uncritically about Al Qaeda’s role in Iraq... [and] failed at times to distinguish between Al Qaeda, the group that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an Iraqi group that didn’t even exist until after the American invasion.... While a president running out of time and policy options may want to talk about a single enemy that Americans hate and fear in the hope of uniting the country behind him, journalists have the obligation to ask tough questions about the accuracy of his statements....

Anthony H. Cordesman of the bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Even when you talk about Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the idea of somehow it is the center of the insurgency is almost absurd.” Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor of Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, said, “I have been noticing — not just your paper — all papers have fallen into this reporting.” The administration, he added, “made a strategic decision” to play up Al Qaeda’s role in Iraq, “and the press went along with it.”... For the president, an emphasis on Al Qaeda has political advantages at a time when powerful former allies... are starting to back away....

Jonathan Landay, a friend and former colleague, wrote a sharply skeptical story for the McClatchy newspaper group after the president’s June 28 speech. Bush called Al Qaeda “the main enemy” in Iraq, but Landay reported that “U.S. military and intelligence officials” reject that characterization....

The Times report on the Naval War College speech didn’t deal with the president’s emphasis on Al Qaeda and instead focused on his growing troubles with Republicans in Congress. Dean Baquet, the paper’s Washington bureau chief, said the article reflected the “overall sense he’s losing ground even within his own party.”... Baquet said, “I think the paper’s coverage over all has been pretty skeptical of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.”... Susan Chira, the foreign editor, said she takes “great pride in the whole of our coverage” but acknowledged that the paper had used “excessive shorthand” when referring to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. “We’ve been sloppy,” she said. She and other editors started worrying about it, Chira said, when the American military began an operation in mid-June against what it said were strongholds of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. On Thursday, she and her deputy, Ethan Bronner, circulated a memo with guidelines on how to distinguish Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia from bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. It’s a good move. I’d have been happier still if The Times had helped its readers by doing a deeper job of reporting on the administration’s drive to make Al Qaeda the singular enemy in Iraq...

Tim Noah Should Get a Real Job

Ezra Klein is shrill:

Ezra Klein: Sigh: Tim Noah, in a column that's supposed to be about John Edwards' health care plan, can't resist starting off with "His coiffure's a bit overdone (would somebody please muzzle his stylist?), but let's remember this category refers to the plan, not the man."

You know what would help people remember that? *If you didn't start out by talking about the man's haircut.* I can't even conceive of the internal monologue that results in a piece like this. Do political reporters think the haircut stuff is funny? Important? New? Cute? Was there some sort of editorial meeting where Weisberg took the gavel and said,"Tim, your piece on Edwards' health plan great, but it could use a bit more on his grooming?" Edward's haircut has become the "more cowbell" of political reportage -- an inexplicable, constant inclusion, which always serves to distract from the whole.

Tim Noah could decide to be in the information business, rather than in the smarmy-pundit business. But you shouldn't hold your breath.

Jane Hamsher on Joe Biden

She gets shrill and medieval on this wholly-owned subsidiary of the Maryland Bank National Association:

Better Than Being Owned By MBNA: Joe Biden says he’s going to that “Daily Kos thing” but he’s got a bone to pick with inaccurate bloggers:

[O]ne of the things that happens is that the public is coming to grips with how to deal with this instant, unfiltered information that may be deliberately mis-edited. But I think — and this is naive maybe — I have confidence that the American people will put this in perspective. Like when one of the bloggers said, “We’re going to take back the Democratic Party.” They don’t own the Democratic Party.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume Biden is referring to the famous Eli Pariser quote about the Democratic Party, “We bought it, we own it, and we’re taking it back.” As the Executive Director of MoveOn at the time, he was speaking to “professional election losers” who run the Democratic Party, and by “we” he meant “the people.” No blogger in sight.

I’m going to do Joe the credit of assuming he didn’t “deliberately mis-edit” and just didn’t know, once again, what the hell he was talking about. Presidential timber, that one. Too bad he’s not running as a Republican.

Speaking of MoveOn, as Christy noted this morning the Live Earth concert is happening in DC. I’m going to try to be there, it looks like it’s going to be a really good show and I hope everyone shows up in support.

Lieberman Supporters Have an Awful Lot of Explaining to Do

Publius is shrill:

Obsidian Wings: Fightin' Joe: It’s not surprising that Joe “War is Always the Answer” Lieberman wants to start another war. The absurdity and immorality of his views speak for themselves, so I’m not going into them. Fightin’ Joe’s op-ed does, however, raise some broader points about media narratives that are worth discussing.

First, I think op-eds like this vindicate Lamont supporters. The rise of Lamont was too often described -- and more importantly conceptualized -- as a wild Lefty revolt against a sensible centrist. Blinded by anti-Bush anti-Iraq rage, Lamont Lefties were purging Lieberman over one issue even though he’s solid on others. Remember too that he fought for civil rights in the 1960s. Well, that’s an easy narrative for journalists facing a deadline to report, but the truth is that a lot of us had serious substantive disagreements with Lieberman’s judgment and policy preferences. As this op-ed indicates, the Lamont/Lieberman battle was a substantive political debate over substantive (indeed, world-historical) issues.

It’s true that Lieberman agrees with Dems more times than he disagrees. Did I mention he fought for civil rights in the 1960s? But it’s important not to undervalue intensity of preferences. Yes, I care about the education issues that Fightin’ Joe seems to be solid on. But I care more about not starting wars. Wars are different -- they are orders of magnitude more important than almost anything else. And if one candidate is solid on every other issue but wants to solve all foreign policy problems with wars and death, well, that’s enough for me to oppose him. What’s more -- it’s not blind irrational rage for me to think this way. It’s a substantive political disagreement based on policy and my moral judgment.

Second, I think Fightin’ Joe’s op-ed also illustrates how bankrupt the conception of “centrism” is -- in particular, the Broder/Nyhan view that the correct position between any two points is the straight middle. It’s on the basis of this “centrism is good” view that Lieberman gets invited to the Sunday talk shows every single week advocating for more wars. Apparently no substantive position that Lieberman takes can get him kicked out of the respectable Sunday discussion crowd.

So really, there are two problems. The first is the “hail centrism” view that gets Lieberman on the shows each week (and gets him quoted incessantly in newspapers). The second is that Lieberman isn’t really a centrist. He’s gone so far on Iran and Iraq that he’s well to right of most Republicans these days.

Let’s call a spade a spade here -- the “bomb Iran” positions that Lieberman and Kristol have adopted are radical, immoral positions. We should really resist the urge to label them as crazy. I mean, they are, but that obscures how dangerous these positions really are. Better for the public to understand that these men are dangerous, extremist radicals oblivious to the consequences of their political positions.

Dean Baker Is Shrill! It's Robin Toner's Fault

It's Robin Toner who has done it this time:

Beat the Press Archive | The American Prospect: NYT piece is written entirely from the Republican perspective in which the interventions they support, which have the effect of redistributing income upward and making health care more expensive, are disguised as being simply the natural workings of the market. On the other hand, the efforts of the Democrats to restructure the market to make it more workable (e.g. mandating coverage to eliminate the problem of adverse section) are mocked as “big government.”

Dean Baker Is Shrill!

It's Robin Toner of the New York Times this time:

Robin Toner did a good job of putting forward caricatures in her piece on the health care plans being put forward by the presidential candidates (e.g. "Democrats are competing furiously among themselves over who has the bigger, better plan to control costs and to approach universal coverage"), but not nearly as good as dealing with the substance http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/06/us/politics/06health.html?hp

Does the NYT prohibit reporters from mentioning "adverse selection," which might be a way of informing readers that mandated coverage is not just a case of big government running everyone's life? Where is it written that the strong patent protection (a.k.a. government imposed monopolies) that the Republicans favor are not government interference? And, is there some reason that the NYT finds it impossible to mention single-payer even when this is the only reform proposal that has any substantial mass support at this point?

Mona Is Shrill!

Can somebody please get Sally Quinn out of the newsroom?

Yeah, but Pagans are Per Se More Tolerant § Unqualified Offerings: Chuck Colson has nothing good to say about any religion other than his own version of Christianity, and strict Judaism. Not news. And mistakes of the silliest, most embarrassing sort are often found even at the blogs of the best and most insightful folk. But this Colson screed was not published at a blog sans editor, but rather, at Washingtonpost.com at the “On Faith” section, as mediated/edited by Jon Meacham and Sally Quinn: "It is debatable whether paganism is a religion, per say. "The “arguments” that follow track the intelligence of the illiterate error in that sentence.

William Odon, Reagan’s NSA Chief, Is Shrill: Withdraw Funds, Pull Out, Impeach

Boy! Is he shrill:

Think Progress » Reagan’s NSA Chief: Withdraw funds, pull out, impeach.: Reagan’s NSA Chief: Withdraw funds, pull out, impeach.

Gen. William Odom, the former head of the National Security Agency under President Reagan, writes that Congress should begin cutting off funds for Iraq and must force Bush to begin a withdrawal before he leaves office: To force him to begin a withdrawal before then, the first step should be to rally the public by providing an honest and candid definition of what “supporting the troops” really means and pointing out who is and who is not supporting our troops at war. The next step should be a flat refusal to appropriate money for to be used in Iraq for anything but withdrawal operations with a clear deadline for completion.

The final step should be to put that president on notice that if ignores this legislative action and tries to extort Congress into providing funds by keeping U.S. forces in peril, impeachment proceeding will proceed in the House of Representatives. Such presidential behavior surely would constitute the “high crime” of squandering the lives of soldiers and Marines for his own personal interest.

Patrick Fitzgerald Is Shrill!

Here is the STATEMENT OF SPECIAL COUNSEL

Statement of Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald regarding today's decision by President Bush to commute the 30-month prison sentence of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby:

We fully recognize that the Constitution provides that commutation decisions are a matter of presidential prerogative and we do not comment on the exercise of that prerogative.

We comment only on the statement in which the President termed the sentence imposed by the judge as "excessive." The sentence in this case was imposed pursuant to the laws governing sentencings which occur every day throughout this country. In this case, an experienced federal judge considered extensive argument from the parties and then imposed a sentence consistent with the applicable laws. It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals. That principle guided the judge during both the trial and the sentencing.

Although the President's decision eliminates Mr. Libby's sentence of imprisonment, Mr. Libby remains convicted by a jury of serious felonies, and we will continue to seek to preserve those convictions through the appeals process.

Orin Kerr Is Shrill!

It's the right-wing slime machine done it"

?

The Volokh Conspiracy - - : Politics" and the Libby Prosecution: The Scooter Libby case has triggered some very weird commentary around the blogosphere; perhaps the weirdest claim is that the case against Libby was "purely political."  I find this argument seriously bizarre. As I understand it, Bush political appointee James Comey named Bush political appointee and career prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the Plame leak. Bush political appointee and career prosecutor Fitzgerald filed an indictment and went to trial before Bush political appointee Reggie Walton. A jury convicted Libby, and Bush political appointee Walton sentenced him. At sentencing, Bush political appointee Judge Walton described the evidence against Libby as "overwhelming" and concluded that a 30-month sentence was appropriate. And yet the claim, as I understand it, is that the Libby prosecution was the work of political enemies who were just trying to hurt the Bush Administration.  I find this claim bizarre. I'm open to arguments that parts of the case against Libby were unfair. But for the case to have been purely political, doesn't that require the involvement of someone who was not a Bush political appointee? Who are the political opponents who brought the case? Is the idea that Fitzgerald is secretly a Democratic party operative? That Judge Walton is a double agent? Or is the idea that Fitzgerald and Walton were hypnotized by "the Mainstream Media" like Raymond Shaw in the Manchurian Candidate? Seriously, I don't get it.

Keith Olbermann Is Shrill!

Olbermann's views on the Libby pardon:

The Carpetbagger Report » Blog Archive » ‘I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job’: Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on what is, in everything but name, George Bush’s pardon of Scooter Libby.

“I didn’t vote for him,” an American once said, “But he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.” That — on this eve of the Fourth of July — is the essence of this democracy, in 17 words. And that is what President Bush threw away yesterday in commuting the sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

The man who said those 17 words — improbably enough — was the actor John Wayne. And Wayne, an ultra-conservative, said them when he learned of the hair’s-breadth election of John F. Kennedy instead of his personal favorite, Richard Nixon, in 1960.

“I didn’t vote for him but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.” The sentiment was doubtlessly expressed earlier. But there is something especially appropriate about hearing it, now, in Wayne’s voice: The crisp matter-of-fact acknowledgment that we have survived, even though for nearly two centuries now, our commander in chief has also served, simultaneously, as the head of one political party and often the scourge of all others.

We as citizens must, at some point, ignore a president’s partisanship. Not that we may prosper as a nation, not that we may achieve, not that we may lead the world, but merely that we may function.

But just as essential to the 17 words of John Wayne is an implicit trust, a sacred trust: that the president for whom so many did not vote can in turn suspend his political self long enough, and for matters imperative enough, to conduct himself solely for the benefit of the entire republic.

Our generation’s willingness to state “We didn’t vote for him, but he’s our president, and we hope he does a good job” was tested in the crucible of history, and earlier than most.

And in circumstances more tragic and threatening. And we did that with which history tasked us. We enveloped our president in 2001. And those who did not believe he should have been elected — indeed those who did not believe he had been elected — willingly lowered their voices and assented to the sacred oath of nonpartisanship.

And George W. Bush took our assent, and reconfigured it, and honed it, and shaped it to a razor-sharp point and stabbed this nation in the back with it. Were there any remaining lingering doubt otherwise, or any remaining lingering hope, it ended yesterday when Mr. Bush commuted the prison sentence of one of his own staffers.

Did so even before the appeals process was complete. Did so without as much as a courtesy consultation with the Department of Justice. Did so despite what James Madison — at the Constitutional Convention — said about impeaching any president who pardoned or sheltered those who had committed crimes “advised by” that president.

Did so without the slightest concern that even the most detached of citizens must look at the chain of events and wonder: To what degree was Mr. Libby told, “Break the law however you wish — the president will keep you out of prison”? In that moment, Mr. Bush, you broke that fundamental compact between yourself and the majority of this nation’s citizens, the ones who did not cast votes for you.

In that moment, Mr. Bush, you ceased to be the president of the United States.

In that moment, Mr. Bush, you became merely the president of a rabid and irresponsible corner of the Republican Party.

And this is too important a time, Sir, to have a commander in chief who puts party over nation. This has been, of course, the gathering legacy of this administration. Few of its decisions have escaped the stain of politics. The extraordinary Karl Rove has spoken of “a permanent Republican majority,” as if such a thing — or a permanent Democratic majority — is not antithetical to that upon which rests our country, our history, our revolution, our freedoms.

Yet our democracy has survived shrewder men than Karl Rove. And it has survived the frequent stain of politics upon the fabric of government. But this administration, with ever-increasing insistence and almost theocratic zealotry, has turned that stain into a massive oil spill.

The protection of the environment is turned over to those of one political party who will financially benefit from the rape of the environment.

The protections of the Constitution are turned over to those of one political party who believe those protections unnecessary and extravagant and quaint. The enforcement of the laws is turned over to those of one political party who will swear beforehand that they will not enforce those laws.

The choice between war and peace is turned over to those of one political party who stand to gain vast wealth by ensuring that there is never peace, but only war.

And now, when just one cooked book gets corrected by an honest auditor, when just one trampling of the inherent and inviolable fairness of government is rejected by an impartial judge, when just one wild-eyed partisan is stopped by the figure of blind justice, this president decides that he, and not the law, must prevail.

I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war. I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient. I accuse you of causing in Iraq the needless deaths of 3,586 of our brothers and sons, and sisters and daughters, and friends and neighbors. I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but sincerely motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but to stifle dissent. I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of creating the very terror you claim to have fought. I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents. I accuse you of handing part of this republic over to a vice president who is without conscience and letting him run roughshod over it.

And I accuse you now, Mr. Bush, of giving, through that vice president, carte blanche to Mr. Libby to help defame Ambassador Joseph Wilson by any means necessary, to lie to grand juries and special counsel and before a court, in order to protect the mechanisms and particulars of that defamation with your guarantee that Libby would never see prison and, in so doing, as Ambassador Wilson himself phrased it here last night, of becoming an accessory to the obstruction of justice.

When President Nixon ordered the firing of the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre” on October 20th, 1973, Cox initially responded tersely, and ominously.

“Whether ours shall be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and, ultimately, the American people.”

President Nixon did not understand how he had crystallized the issue of Watergate for the American people. It had been about the obscure meaning behind an attempt to break in to a rival party’s headquarters, and the labyrinthine effort to cover up that break-in and the related crimes.

And in one night, Nixon transformed it. Watergate — instantaneously — became a simpler issue: a president overruling the inexorable march of the law, insisting — in a way that resonated viscerally with millions who had not previously understood — that he was the law.

Not the Constitution. Not the Congress. Not the courts. Just him. Just, Mr. Bush, as you did, yesterday.

The twists and turns of Plamegate, of your precise and intricate lies that sent us into this bottomless pit of Iraq; your lies upon the lies to discredit Joe Wilson; your lies upon the lies upon the lies to throw the sand at the “referee” of prosecutor Fitzgerald’s analogy, these are complex and often painful to follow and too much, perhaps, for the average citizen.

But when other citizens render a verdict against your man, Mr. Bush, and then you spit in the faces of those jurors and that judge and the judges who were yet to hear the appeal, the average citizen understands that, Sir.

It’s the fixed ballgame and the rigged casino and the prearranged lottery all rolled into one, and it stinks.

And they know it.

Nixon’s mistake, the last and most fatal of them, the firing of Archibald Cox, was enough to cost him the presidency. And in the end, even Richard Nixon could say he could not put this nation through an impeachment. It was far too late for it to matter then, but as the decades unfold, that single final gesture of nonpartisanship, of acknowledged responsibility not to self, not to party, not to “base,” but to country, echoes loudly into history.

Even Richard Nixon knew it was time to resign. Would that you could say that, Mr. Bush. And that you could say it for Mr. Cheney. You both crossed the Rubicon yesterday. Which one of you chose the route no longer matters. Which is the ventriloquist, and which the dummy, is irrelevant. But that you have twisted the machinery of government into nothing more than a tawdry machine of politics is the only fact that remains relevant.

It is nearly July Fourth, Mr. Bush, the commemoration of the moment we Americans decided that rather than live under a king who made up the laws, or erased them, or ignored them — or commuted the sentences of those rightly convicted under them — we would force our independence and regain our sacred freedoms.

We of this time — and our leaders in Congress, of both parties — must now live up to those standards which echo through our history. Pressure, negotiate, impeach: get you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney, two men who are now perilous to our democracy, away from its helm.

And for you, Mr. Bush, and for Mr. Cheney, there is a lesser task. You need merely achieve a very low threshold indeed. Display just that iota of patriotism which Richard Nixon showed on August 9th, 1974.

Resign.

And give us someone — anyone — about whom all of us might yet be able to quote John Wayne, and say, “I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.”

Duncan Black Is Shrill!

Wendy Shalit--sister of the notorious Ruth Shalit and wingnut extraordinaire--prompts him to ask:

Shallitery: Where are the cloning vats where these people are created?

Greg Mitchell Is Shrill!

Really shrill: it's Michael Gordon and the Bush administration that have done it:

Consider the Source: 'NYT' Reporter Targets Iran: As if he hadn’t done enough damage already, helping to promote the American invasion of Iraq with deeply flawed articles in The New York Times, Michael R. Gordon is now writing scare stories that offer ammunition for the growing chorus of neo-cons calling for a U.S. strike against Iran – his most recent effort appearing just this morning.

What’s most lamentable is that editors at The New York Times, who should have learned their lessons four years ago, are once again serving as enablers.

The Times carried Gordon’s latest opus at the top of its front page today. The Washington Post, in contrast, carried the same claims by an American military spokesman, in an article by Joshua Partlow, on page A8. After a brief accounting of the military's assertion, Partlow devotes much of the rest of the story to a general war roundup (including news of civilians south of Baghdad killed by our bombs).

The latest official effort to blame-blame Iran so that perhaps we can bomb-bomb Iran revolves around new claims by Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner that the deaths of five American soldiers in Karbala in January were actually plotted by Iranian militants. Gordon’s breathless article first appeared on the Times’ site yesterday with absolutely no caveats – revealing his true motives and standards. "In effect, American officials are charging that Iran has been engaged in a proxy war against American forces for years," Gordon declared.

Perhaps even his editors were concerned or embarrassed. The same story suddenly gained a couple of qualifiers, though not nearly enough, later yesterday (first spotted by Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald), and then got enlarged somewhat today, and with the byline of Burns added to Gordon's.

The story even has a lead character reminiscent of “Curveball” and “Baseball Cap Guy” from Judy Miller's reporting on Iraq in 2003.

Our new star informer is a Lebanese citizen named Ali Musa Daqdug aka “Hamid the Mute” who supposedly (this is all coming from Gen. Bergner) has a “24-year history in Hezbollah....The general said Mr. Daqdug had been sent by Hezbollah to Iran in 2005 with orders to work with the Quds Force, an elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, to train 'Iraqi extremists.'”

The Times article contains a number of howlers delivered with all seriousness. Here’s one: “General Bergner, seemingly keen to avoid a renewal of the criticism that the American command has used the allegations of Iranian interference here to lend momentum to the Bush administration’s war policy, declined to draw any broader political implications, although he did say that American intelligence indicated that ‘the senior leadership in Iran is aware of this activity.’”

That’s topped by this, in explaining that “Hamid the Mute” had suddenly started talking: “The official said the shift had been achieved without harming Mr. Daqduq. ‘We don’t torture,’ the official said. ‘We follow scrupulously the interrogation techniques in the Army’s new field manual, which forbids torture, and has the force of law.’”

You may recall that this past February, Gordon had trumpeted the charge that Iran was now supplying a new form of IED -- or as the Times put it, the “deadliest weapon aimed at American troops” in Iraq. This charged, promoted by the U.S. military and given prominent play by the Times, also came at a time of rising calls for taking action against Iran. Experts subsequently disputed key parts of evidence cited by Gordon and the charge largely subsided – until now.

Gordon, of course, is the same Times reporter who, on his own, or with Miller, wrote some of the key yet badly misleading or downright inaccurate -- articles about Iraqi WMDs in the run-up to the 2003 invasion.



Gordon, in fact, wrote with Miller the paper's most widely criticized -- even by the Times itself -- WMD story of all, the Sept. 8, 2002, “aluminum tubes” story that proved so influential, especially since the administration embraced it lovingly on TV talk shows.



>When the Times eventually carried an editors’ note that admitted some of its Iraq coverage was wrong and/or overblown, it criticized two Miller-Gordon stories, and noted that the Sept. 8, 2002, article on page one of the newspaper "gave the first detailed account of the aluminum tubes. The article cited unidentified senior administration officials who insisted that the dimensions, specifications and numbers of tubes sought showed that they were intended for a nuclear weapons program."



>This, of course, proved bogus.



The paper's “mea-culpa” story dryly observed: "The article gave no hint of a debate over the tubes," adding, "The White House did much to increase the impact of The Times article."

Gordon also wrote, following Secretary of State Colin Powell's crucial, and appallingly wrong, speech to the United Nations in 2003 that helped sell the war, that "it will be difficult for skeptics to argue that Washington's case against Iraq is based on groundless suspicions and not intelligence information."

>That MIller-Gordon Sept. 8, 2002, article also included this: “Iraq's nuclear program is not Washington's only concern. An Iraqi defector said Mr. Hussein had also heightened his efforts to develop new types of chemical weapons....

”Hard-liners are alarmed that American intelligence underestimated the pace and scale of Iraq's nuclear program before Baghdad's defeat in the gulf war. Conscious of this lapse in the past, they argue that Washington dare not wait until analysts have found hard evidence that Mr. Hussein has acquired a nuclear weapon. The first sign of a 'smoking gun,' they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.”

>

Writing at the Times' "The Lede" blog on its Web site, the paper's Mike Nizza states that the question of exactly who the "Quds" force is working for remains unanswered, if the exchange with Gen. Bergner was any guide. He then quotes a transcript.

Gen Bergner: “Our intelligence reveals that senior leadership in Iran is aware of this activity.”
Q “Can you define senior leadership?”
Gen. Bergner: “I think I’ll leave it at that.”
Q: “Would you exclude the supreme leader?”
Gen. Bergner: “I’ll leave it at ’senior leadership in Iran’”?
Q: “Put it this way: Do you think it’s possible that he doesn’t know?”
Gen. Bergner: ‘’That would be hard to imagine.”

Nizza then comments, "A tough question indeed: from intelligence to imagination in four steps."

Jimmy Madison Is Shrill!

From KagroX:

Daily Kos: Just sayin': The following is from a report written and released by the Judiciary Committee in 1974 in the aftermath of the Watergate crisis.

In the [Constitutional] convention George Mason argued that the President might use his pardoning power to "pardon crimes which were advised by himself" or, before indictment or conviction, "to stop inquiry and prevent detection." James Madison responded:

[I]f the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds [to] believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty...

Madison went on to [say] contrary to his position in the Philadelphia convention, that the President could be suspended when suspected, and his powers would devolve on the Vice President, who could likewise be suspended until impeached and convicted, if he were also suspected...

Ezra Klein Is Shrill!

Ezra Klein writes:

Ezra Klein: Lizza to the New Yorker: Congratulations to Ryan Lizza, who'll be replacing Jeffrey Goldberg as The New Yorker's Washington correspondent. Goldberg was always an odd fit for that job, given his evident distaste for the actual mechanics of American politics. He's much happier promoting disastrous wars and demagoguing Democrats for insufficient levels of hawkery than actually digging into the innards of a campaign. Lizza, by contrast, is a real live political reporter, and he should improve the magazine's political coverage substantially. Goldberg's heading to The Atlantic, where he'll assumedly join Robert Kaplan in writing very long stories about the upsides of American imperialism, and, usefully, they won't have to pretend to actually be about the 2008 Democratic race. By all accounts, Goldberg is very skilled at reporting from the Middle East, as opposed to jamming his opinions on the Middle East into other types of reporting, so these are good moves all around.