We would like to welcome former Bush Speechwriter David Frum, who today joins the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill. Welcome, David! Should you ever feel that your meds need to be adjusted, operators are standing by at 1-877-mad-ness...

David Frum's Diary on National Review Online: By now it should be clear that President Bush's words on the subject of Iraq have ceased connecting with the American public.... Maybe most fatefully: a plurality now say that they believe that the president deliberately misled the country into war....

[S]upporters of the war can do our bit to try to change minds. But the biggest megaphone in the country belongs to President Bush - and much depends on whether he uses it well or badly. He is using it very badly indeed.... Again and again... the president will agree to give what is advertised in advance as a major speech. An important venue will be chosen. A crowd of thousands will be gathered. The networks will all be invited. And after these elaborate preparations, the president says... nothing that he has not said a hundred times before.

If a president continues to do that, he is himself teaching the public and the media to ignore him - especially when the words seem (as his speech yesterday to the VFW seemed) utterly to ignore the past three months of real-world events.

The president could have made news yesterday by itemizing the reasons to regard Iraq more positively than most journalists do... the president could have skipped the good news and delivered a blood, sweat, toils, and tears speech: Yes things are hard, harder in fact than expected, but the stakes remain enormous - and here is why we must win, and why I am determined to fight this thing through to victory. That would be powerful too.

As it is, though, he says nothing, and is perceived to say nothing, and soon nobody will be listening at all, if anybody still is...

Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh David Frum R'lyeh Wagn'nagl Fhtagn!!

Shrillness in Private?

MSNBC "Hardball" host Chris Matthews is disturbed by the number of guests who are being driven to shrill unholy madness by the incompetence and mendacity of this war, yet only able to gibber about it in private...

What I keep doing here is asking people on and off camera who come on this program, high-ranking officers, enlisted, former officers. I get sometimes, not all the time, two different versions, the version they give me on the air and the version they give me the minute when we‘re off the air.

The version they give me when we‘re on the air is gung-ho, we‘re doing the right thing, everything is moving along. The version they give me off the air is, Rumsfeld is crazy. There aren‘t enough troops over there. We‘re not taking this seriously enough, or, we shouldn‘t be there, sometimes.

Colin Powell's ex-Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson is shrill:

Wonkette - Bush Diplomats Bum Real Hard on Cold Steel Facts: Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, interviewed for the upcoming CNN documentary "Dead Wrong--Inside and Intelligence Meltdown," tersely characterizes his role in the preparations for his boss's historic Feb. 14, 2003 UN speech making the case for invading Iraq and unseating Saddam Hussein. "It was," Wilkerson says, "the lowest point of my life." The unsourced materials the administration gave to Powell to present were, Wilkerson recalls, "were anything but an intelligence document"; rather, they were "sort of a Chinese menu from which you could pick and choose."

It proved to be something less than a walk in the park for Powell, too. After the invasion, US troops continued trolling for, and failing to unearth, any evidence of WMDs in occupied Iraq. Powell would get periodic updates to that effect from future Medal of Freedom honoree George "Slam Dunk" Tenet:

"George actually did call the Secretary, and said, 'I'm really sorry to have to tell you. We don't believe there were any mobile labs for making biological weapons,'" Wilkerson says in the documentary. "This was the third or fourth telephone call. And I think it's fair to say the Secretary and Mr. Tenet, at that point, ceased being close."

Senator Chuck Hagel is shrill:

In U.S. heartland, anxiety over Iraq, oil - Yahoo! News: Hagel, a Vietnam veteran, acknowledged the U.S. military presence was becoming harder and harder to justify. He believes Iraq faces a serious danger of civil war that would threaten Middle East stability, and said there is little Washington can do to avert this. "We are seen as occupiers, we are targets. We have got to get out. I don't think we can sustain our current policy, nor do I think we should," he said at one stop....

"The feeling that I get back here, looking in the eyes of real people, where I knew where they were two years ago or a year ago -- they've changed," he said. "These aren't people who ebb and flow on issues. These are rock solid, conservative Republicans who love their country, support the troops and support the president."

Hagel said Bush faced a growing credibility gap. "The expectations that the president and his administration presented to the American people 2 1/2 years ago is not what the reality is today. That's presented the biggest credibility gap problem he's got," he said. "I hope he has some sense that something's going on out in the country, that there's a lack of confidence that has developed in our position."

Brendan Nyhan reads the WSJ editorial page so the rest of us don't have to. He escapes back to the protection of his guard of shoggoths just in time, pursued by the shambling WSJ zombies led by Michael Moore, who shamble forward and chant: "Bush administration fiscal policy is responsible!" "Cutting tax rates raises tax revenues!" "Extending the Bush tax cuts isn't expensive!" and, of course, "BRAINS!!!!"

Brendan Nyhan: WSJ agitprop on CBO report: The WSJ continues

A second fact you won't see in many other newspapers is that the federal budget deficit has also declined to close to its modern average. CBO says the deficit will fall to 2.7% of national output in the fiscal year that ends at the end of next month. It is expected to continue to fall to 2.4% of GDP next year and 2.0% in 2010, even if the Bush tax rates stay in place.

But... the Journal's 2010 date is cherrypicked -- the effects of extending President Bush's tax cuts... explode over the next five [years]. Once again, the lesson here is simple: never trust the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

A lesson to place alongside "never get involved in a land war in Asia," "never play poker with a man named 'Doc'," and "never accept a battle of wits where iocane powder is a factor."

Gregory Djerejian Is Shrill

He writes:

THE BELGRAVIA DISPATCH: Yesterday: "Last Throes"; Today: "We Cannot Predict the Length...": From the Caspar Star Tribune (Wyoming's News Source!), we have Dick Cheney:

We cannot predict the length or course of the war on terror, but we know for certain with good allies at our side this great nation will persevere and we will prevail.

Translation: I'm not quite man enough to admit I was full of it with the "last throes" comment, so instead I'll talk about 'dictionary meanings' and avoid discussing Iraq in my public utterances (better to conveniently conflate Iraq under the 'war on terror' rubric which, while accurate, nevertheless, shall we say, conveniently elides the main point).

Hardly Churchillian straight-talk, huh? More by way of Roveian 'stay on message' herdism. But these are mediocre times and we, sadly, appear to be led by mediocre men...Look, if our leaders cannot communicate honestly to their public the real state of play with regard to the most pressing issue of the day--well, they will lose the public's trust and the war effort will be increasingly imperiled because of it.

P.S. And no, the oft-heard locution 'as they stand up, we will stand down' just doesn't cut it as a frank assessment of where the war stands. See Fred Kagan below for some of the reasons such utterances are largely chimerical and bogus at this early stage...

We have reserved a bed for him in the Shoggoth Wing.

Baron Samedi! Ogoun Badagris! M'aidez!!

Duncan Black, one of the High Burning Ones of the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill, is alarmed at reports from scouts Mark Thoma and Brad DeLong, returning from in partibus infidelium, that the Bell Curve zombies are active again.

Eschaton: Christ, has that racist claptrap reared its ugly head again? Racists, idiots, or both. You decide... Bell Curve is a groundhog day causing event. Mention it, and the trolls appear saying the book "hasn't been debunked." Point to numerous debunkings and they erect a few mountains of straw. Burn down the straw, and they slink away for a little while, only to return the next time it comes up and they'll start in again, saying the book "hasn't been debunked."...

Led by Michael Barone and David Brooks, they shamble forward, saying things like "Herrnstein and Murray were right!" "There is lots in the Bell Curve that is correct!" "The _Bell Curve_ has not been debunked!" and, of course, "BRAINS!!!!"

The Tigris River Park

Dexter Filkins is shrill:

A Nation in Blood and Ink - New York Times: [I]n this third summer of war, the American project in Iraq has never seemed so wilted and sapped of life. It's not just the guerrillas, who are churning away at their relentless pace, attacking American forces about 65 times a day. It is most everything else, too.

Baghdad seems a city transported from the Middle Ages: a scattering of high-walled fortresses, each protected by a group of armed men. The area between the forts is a lawless no man's land, menaced by bandits and brigands. With the daytime temperatures here hovering at around 115 degrees, the electricity in much of the city flows for only about four hours a day.

With armed guards in tow, I drove across the no man's land the other day to pay a visit to Ahmad Chalabi, the deputy prime minister. Unlike many senior Iraqi officials, who have long since retreated into the Green Zone, Mr. Chalabi still lives in a private home. To get there, you must pass through a series of checkpoints at the outskirts of his neighborhood, manned by guards and crisscrossed by concrete chicanes. At the entrance to Mr. Chalabi's street, there is another checkpoint, made of concrete and barbed wire, and more armed guards. Then, in front of Mr. Chalabi's house, stands yet another blast wall. When Mr. Chalabi walks into his front yard, even inside his own compound, a dozen armed guards surround him....

Americans, here and in the United States, wait for the day when the Iraqi police and army will shoulder the burden and let them go home. One night last month, according to the locals, the Iraqi police and army surrounded the Sunni neighborhood of Sababkar in north Baghdad, and pulled 11 young men from their beds. Their bodies were found the next day with bullet holes in their temples. The cheeks of some of the men had been punctured by electric drills. One man had been burned by acid. The police denied that they had been involved.

"This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened," Adnan al-Dulami, a Sunni leader, said.

For much of last year, the soldiers of the First Cavalry Division oversaw a project to restore the river-front park on the east bank of the Tigris River. Under American eyes, the Iraqis planted sod, installed a sprinkler system and put up swing sets for the Iraqi children. It cost $1.5 million. The Tigris River Park was part of a vision of the unit's commander, Maj. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, to win the war by putting Iraqis to work.

General Chiarelli left Iraq this year, and the American unit that took over had other priorities. The sod is mostly dead now, and the sidewalks are covered in broken glass. The sprinkler heads have been stolen. The northern half of the park is sealed off by barbed wire and blast walls; Iraqis are told stay back, lest they be shot by American snipers on the roof of a nearby hotel...

This Year's Miskatonic Visiting Scholars Include

Ginmar is back from Iraq and is a Senior Heresiarch in the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill:

ginmar: How to lose a war in a few easy steps: Sadr's men have formed Sharia courts in southern Iraq and have passed sentences and performed executions. Amongst the victims which I personally know of were an unmarried pregnant woman and her four-year old child. The mother was executed in the street with three shots while her child watched. Then the little boy's throat was cut. It takes a fairly long time to die that way. One wonders what his moderate father would think of such things. One knows what Sistani thinks of it: reportedly Sadr was summoned to Sistani's presence in the fall of 04 and reamed out for visiting such destruction on the Iraqi people.

What does this have to do with war? This is what happens when there is no plan for what follows a war, even a successful one. The tribal structure of Iraq complicates matters to an amazing degree, and it's apparent that this was not factored in when plans were made. The tribes took control of their regions eagerly as they had not been able to do when Saddam was in power. In the vacuum created by Saddam's ouster, this control felt like management.... Most critically, maintaing a peace after a war becomes something extremely complicated in a tribal society. In a Muslim tribal society, divided between Sunnis and Shi'ites that has been invaded by a largly Christian country the need for delicacy over rides all others. When one can observe US MPs subduing suspects by placing their feet on them, one can only realize that not enough training was done prior to invasion....

To win the peace, we should have promptly increased troop strength by about two hundred thousand to adequately secure the borders and restore order.... Without enough troops, the country was not secure or safe, and this has increased exponentially. We cannot guard the border; we cannot patrol enough streets and highways. We cannot hear every grievance, much less fix them. The insurgents kill at least one US soldier per day, and at least a couple Iraqi civilians for every soldier.

Prior to the war, civilians enjoyed relative safety. Please note the use of the word relative. Hussein could and did seize people and his sons were notorious for their raping and murdering. The mass graves have been over-reported: the one in Hilla last year contained four hundred bodies. Against that one has to contrast the effects of the bomb in Hilla in February of this year: 125 people died. Do good intentions make these people any less dead?... You patrol the streets, you seal the borders, you get the infrastructure up and running again. You keep the population safe and you let them know that things will be better and that, most of all, the war is over. Instead the war continues....

If we could go back in time, we would have a quarter million more troops flood the country after Baghdad's fall, to line the border and secure the museums, the palaces, the bases, and the weapons. No ammo depot in the country would have been unguarded.... Without security you can accomplish nothing. Security cannot be provided without certain numbers of troops. Therefore you must establish security first. Otherwise you tread water, and the water is heavily mined. We could still turn the sitution around in Iraq if we had enough troops, but the thing to be kept in mind is that we created this situation, we must fix it, and we cannot do it with the numbers we currently have---or don't have. Putting those boots on the ground, however, would mean admitting to any number of fallacies. Some people think that is too high a price to pay.

Perhaps those people should have a nice long chat with Cindy Sheehan and re-assess their concept of the price one pays for war.

Dog Days in Arkham!

Here in picturesque Arkham, Massachusetts:

the dog days have set in in earnest.

It was 99F yesterday--but with the humidity it felt like 109F. The fountain pool in front of our tall steel-and-glass building here at Miskatonic University became dangerously hot, and the Watcher in the Water--used to Antarctic temperatures and so unsettled at the best of times--became... well, I don't want to say anything to scare the freshmen. Suffice to say that the opening of a transdimensional portal to the planet Mr. Stross mentioned in his admirable little book soon cooled things off enough to calm it... or, rather, them... down. So forget I mentioned it.

Nevertheless, Paul Krugman is shrill, and so all is right with the world: Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Krugman R'lyeh Wagn'nagl Fhtagn!! Krugman Fhtagn!! Krugman Fhtagn!! KRUGMAN FHTAGN!!!!!!:

Social Security Lessons - New York Times: I'd like to revisit Social Security for a moment, because it's important to remember what Mr. Bush tried to get away with. Many pundits and editorial boards still give Mr. Bush credit for trying to "reform" Social Security. In fact, Mr. Bush came to bury Social Security.... Over time, the Bush plan would have transformed Social Security from a social insurance program into a mutual fund, with nothing except a name in common with the system F.D.R. created.

In addition to misrepresenting his goals, Mr. Bush repeatedly lied about the current system. Oh, I'm sorry - was that a rude thing to say? Still, the fact is that Mr. Bush repeatedly said things that were demonstrably false and that his staff must have known were false.... [T]he administration politicized the Social Security Administration and used taxpayer money to promote a partisan agenda. Social Security officials participated in what were in effect taxpayer-financed political rallies, from which skeptical members of the public were excluded....

[This] is still going on. Last week Jo Anne Barnhart, the commissioner of Social Security, published an op-ed article claiming that Social Security as we know it was designed for a society in which people didn't live long enough to collect a lot of benefits. "The number of older Americans living now," wrote Ms. Barnhart, "is greater than anyone could have imagined in 1935." Now, it turns out that an article on the Social Security Administration's Web site, "Life Expectancy for Social Security," specifically rejects the idea the Social Security was originally "designed in such a way that few people would collect the benefits," and the related idea that the system faces problems from "a supposed dramatic increase in life expectancy in recent years." And the current number of older Americans as a share of the population is just about what the founders of Social Security expected. The 1934 report... projected that 12.7 percent of Americans would be 65 or older by the year 2000. The actual number was 12.4 percent....

[T]he campaign for privatization provided an object lesson in how the administration sells its policies: by misrepresenting its goals, lying about the facts and abusing its control of government agencies. These were the same tactics used to sell both tax cuts and the Iraq war. And there are two reasons to study that lesson. One is to be prepared.... [T]here's still room for another big domestic initiative, probably tax reform. Forewarned is forearmed: the real goals of reform won't be as advertised, the administration will say things about the current system that aren't true, and the Treasury Department will function in a purely partisan capacity...

Remember: for those of you on a tight budget, "used" copies of the Krugmanomicon can be acquired at little more than half price at al-Hazred's felafel cart.

You Open the Transdimensional Portal with the Eldritch Horrors You Have!!

Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Rumsfeld R'lyeh Wagn'nagl Fhtagn!! Rumsfeld Fhtagn!! Rumsfeld Fhtagn!! RUMSFELD FHTAGN!!!!!!

U.S. Struggling to Get Soldiers Improved Armor - New York Times: MICHAEL MOSS: [T]he Pentagon is struggling to replace body armor that is failing to protect American troops from the most lethal attacks by insurgents. The ceramic plates in vests worn by most personnel cannot withstand certain munitions the insurgents use. But more than a year after military officials initiated an effort to replace the armor with thicker, more resistant plates, tens of thousands of soldiers are still without the stronger protection because of a string of delays in the Pentagon's procurement system....

"We are working as fast as we can to complete it as soon as we can," Maj. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sorenson, the Army's deputy for acquisition and systems management, said Wednesday in an interview at the Pentagon.... [B]ody armor remains critical to the military's goals in Iraq. Gunfire has killed at least 325 troops, about half the number killed by bombs, according to the Pentagon.... [T]he Pentagon is relying on a cottage industry of small armor makers with limited production capacity. In addition, each company must independently come up with its own design for the plates, which then undergo military testing. Just four vendors have begun making the enhanced armor, according to military and industry officials.... "Nobody is happy we haven't been able to do it faster," Maj. Gen. William D. Catto, head of the Marine Corps Systems Command, said Wednesday in the interview. "If I had the capability, I'd like to see everybody that needs enhanced SAPI to have it and at the rate we have now, we're going to have months before we get the kind of aggregate numbers we want to have," General Catto said, referring to the thicker plates, known as the Enhanced Small Arms Protective Insert. "That's just a fact of life because of the raw materials paucity and the industrial base."...

Body armor arose as an issue in Iraq shortly after the invasion in March 2003, when insurgents began attacking American troops who had been given only vests and not bullet-resistant plates. The Army had planned to give the plates only to frontline soldiers. Officials now concede that they underestimated the insurgency's strength and commitment to fighting a war in which there are no back lines. The ensuing scramble to produce more plates was marred by a series of missteps in which the Pentagon gave one contract to a former Army researcher who had never mass-produced anything. He was allowed to struggle with production for a year before he gave up. An outdated delivery plan slowed the arrival of plates that were made. In all, the war was 10 months old before every soldier in Iraq had plates in late January 2004...

>

Four months later, the Pentagon quietly issued a solicitation for the enhanced plates that would resist stronger attacks. At the same time, it worked to make improvements to the vests, including adding shoulder and side protection...

A Warning for New Members of the Crew Team

If a giant cephalopod grabs your ore while you are out on the Miskatonic River, let it have the oar. I speak from experience. It's better if you don't try to wrestle it.

In other news, The Blogging of the President reports that its favorite weblog include:

The Blogging of the President: ...the now on hiatus Shrill blog, partially because its time is past...

The time for Shrillblog is never past! The fact that its editors are too far gone in shrill unholy madness to reliably post is a problem. But we will rise again!

Neoconservative Eliot Cohen Is Really Shrill

The word was always that Eliot Cohen was a very smart man, and a wise one--even though he was, for some impossible-to-grasp reason, a neoconservative. Here the Belgravia Dispatch catches him crossing the aisle back to the reality-based community. He is shrill. He is really shrill. This is deer-stuck-in-the-headlights shrillness:

THE BELGRAVIA DISPATCH: A Neo-Con Speaks Out: Eliot Cohen speaks very openly to the WaPo in a short Q&A. It has become increasingly rare to find bright (neo)conservatives willing to buck party orthodoxy and the approved talking points ("last throes"!)--who have the requisite integrity to be honest and forthright about some of the missteps that have rendered so difficult the Iraq effort.

Excerpts:

But a pundit should not recommend a policy without adequate regard for the ability of those in charge to execute it, and here I stumbled. I could not imagine, for example, that the civilian and military high command would treat "Phase IV" -- the post-combat period that has killed far more Americans than the "real" war -- as of secondary importance to the planning of Gen. Tommy Franks's blitzkrieg. I never dreamed that Ambassador Paul Bremer and Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the two top civilian and military leaders early in the occupation of Iraq -- brave, honorable and committed though they were -- would be so unsuited for their tasks, and that they would serve their full length of duty nonetheless. I did not expect that we would begin the occupation with cockamamie schemes of creating an immobile Iraqi army to defend the country's borders rather than maintain internal order, or that the under-planned, under-prepared and in some respects mis-manned Coalition Provisional Authority would seek to rebuild Iraq with big construction contracts awarded under federal acquisition regulations, rather than with small grants aimed at getting angry, bewildered young Iraqi men off the streets and into jobs.

I did not know, but I might have guessed.

Another passage:

Question: Your son is an infantry officer, shipping out soon for Iraq. How do you feel about that?

Cohen: Pride, of course -- great pride. And fear. And an occasional burning in the gut, a flare of anger at empty pieties and lame excuses, at flip answers and a lack of urgency, at a failure to hold those at the top to the standards of accountability that the military system rightly imposes on subalterns.

It is a flicker of rage that two years into an insurgency, we still expose our troops in Humvees to the blasts of roadside bombs -- knowing that even the armored version of that humble successor to the Jeep is simply not designed for warfare along guerrilla-infested highways, while, at the same time, knowing that plenty of countries manufacture armored cars that are. It is disbelief at a manpower system that, following its prewar routines, ships soldiers off to war for a year or 15 months, giving them two weeks of leave at the end, when our British comrades, more experienced in these matters and wiser in pacing themselves, ship troops out for half that time, and give them an extra month on top of their regular leave after an operational deployment.

It is the sick feeling that churned inside me at least 18 months ago, when a glib and upbeat Pentagon bureaucrat assured me that the opposition in Iraq consisted of "5,000 bitter-enders and criminals," even after we had killed at least that many. It flames up when hearing about the veteran who in theory has a year between Iraq rotations, but in fact, because he transferred between units after returning from one tour, will go back to Iraq half a year later, and who, because of "stop-loss orders" involuntarily extending active duty tours, will find himself in combat nine months after his enlistment runs out. And all this because after 9/11, when so many Americans asked for nothing but an opportunity to serve, we did not expand our Army and Marine Corps when we could, even though we knew we would need more troops.

A variety of emotions wash over me as I reflect on our Iraq war: Disbelief at the length of time it took to call an insurgency by its name. Alarm at our continuing failure to promote at wartime speed the colonels and generals who have a talent for fighting it, while also failing to sweep aside those who do not. Incredulity at seeing decorations pinned on the chests and promotions on the shoulders of senior leaders -- both civilians and military -- who had the helm when things went badly wrong. Disdain for the general who thinks Job One is simply whacking the bad guys and who, ever conscious of public relations, cannot admit that American soldiers have tortured prisoners or, in panic, killed innocent civilians. Contempt for the ghoulish glee of some who think they were right in opposing the war, and for the blithe disregard of the bungles by some who think they were right in favoring it. A desire -- barely controlled -- to slap the highly educated fool who, having no soldier friends or family, once explained to me that mistakes happen in all wars, and that the casualties are not really all that high and that I really shouldn't get exercised about them.

There is a lot of talk these days about shaky public support for the war. That is not really the issue. Nor should cheerleading, as opposed to truth-telling, be our leaders' chief concern. If we fail in Iraq -- and I don't think we will -- it won't be because the American people lack heart, but because leaders and institutions have failed. Rather than fretting about support at home, let them show themselves dedicated to waging and winning a strange kind of war and describing it as it is, candidly and in detail. Then the American people will give them all the support they need. The scholar in me is not surprised when our leaders blunder, although the pundit in me is dismayed when they do. What the father in me expects from our leaders is, simply, the truth -- an end to happy talk and denials of error, and a seriousness equal to that of the men and women our country sends into the fight...

Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Eliot Cohen R'lyeh Wagn'nagl Fhtagn!! Cohen Fhtagn!! Eliot Fhtagn!!

Dr. Shrill, Report to the Pentagon, Stat

Who's complaining about government-sanctioned torture? Why yes, it's Burton J. Lee III, President George H.W. Bush's personal physician.

America cannot continue down this road. Torture demonstrates weakness, not strength. It does not show understanding, power or magnanimity. It is not leadership. It is a reaction of government officials overwhelmed by fear who succumb to conduct unworthy of them and of the citizens of the United States.

Zbigniew Brzezinski Is Shriller than Ever!

Zbigniew Brzezinski is shriller than ever!

Bush's hollow fiction of Iraq war: Like a novelist who wishes to inject verisimilitude into his fiction, George W. Bush, US president, began his speech on Iraq with a reference to a historical fact all too tragically well known to his audience. The evocation of the monstrous crime of September 11 2001 served as his introduction to the spin that followed: that Iraq was complicit in 9/11 and thus, in effect, attacked the US; that the US had no choice but to defend itself against Iraq's aggression; and, finally, that if America does not fight terrorists in Iraq, they will swarm across the ocean to attack America.

Since fiction is not ruled by the same standards as history, Mr Bush was under no obligation to refer to his own earlier certitude about Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" (or, rather, to their embarrassing absence), or to the inept sequel of the initially successful US military campaign; or to the fact that the occupation of Iraq is turning it into a huge recruitment centre for terrorists. Similarly, there was no need to deal with the perplexing fact that the Iraqi insurgency does not appear to be in "its last throes", or with the complex choices that the US now confronts.

But a more disturbing aspect of the speech was the absence of any serious discussion of the wider regional security problems and their relationship to the Iraqi conundrum. That connection poses the danger that America risks becoming irrelevant to the Middle East -- largely through Mr Bush's own doing. Much depends on how long the US pursues unrealistic goals in Iraq. And on whether the US becomes seriously engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, on how the US relationship with Iran is managed and on how the advocacy of democracy in the Middle East is pursued. The reality in Iraq is that 135,000 American soldiers cannot create a stable "democracy"in a society rent by intensifying ethnic and religious conflicts. US military commanders, contradicting Mr Bush, have publicly stated that the insurgency is not weakening. It is useful to recall in this regard Henry Kissinger's wise observation (made in regard to the war in Vietnam but pertinent here) that guerrillas are winning if they are not losing. The longer US troops are involved in Iraq, the more victory will remain "on the horizon" -- that is, a goal that recedes as one moves towards it...

Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Joe Gandelman R'lyeh Wagn'nagl Fhtagn!! Ganelman Fhtagn!! Gandelman Fhtagn!!

Joe Gandelman is a professional voice. His schtick on the internet is that of a professional moderate voice, someone who is reasonable, who avoids the excesses of partisanship, who takes a deep breath and realizes that there are two sides to every story and that we need to be... calm, reasonable, and thoughtful always.

He reads Peggy Noonan.

His brain explodes.

Now he is one of us! Embrace your destiny! Feel the power of Shrillness!

Welcome to the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill, Mr. Gandelman--those of us who have been driven into shrill unholy madness by the mendacity, stupidity, incompetence, recklessness, and idiocy of the Bush administration and its allies. Your personal copy of the Krugmanomicon (along with additional promotional material containing many valuable offers) is on its way. Do not read more than ten pages a day, under pain of falling even further into shrill unholy madness. Your rank is Palaeozoic Tentacled Swamp-Dweller, 2nd Class. When in your non-human form, remember not to devour any endangered amphibians. Pray vainly to the dead, uncaring stars at least once a month, preferably when the moon is in the second decant.

Clear the weekend of July 37 for the annual Miskatonic University summer conference, barbecue (don't ask), and wine-tasting. Driving directions to picturesque Arkham, Massachusetts will follow. A side-trip to Tanglewood for the concerts is recommended, but beware Shoggoths on the road near South Campus at moonrise. And remember: Yog-Sothoth is the Gatekeeper!

Joe Gandelman: Peggy Noonan's latest Wall Street Journal column reads as if it's a satire piece— but, no, folks it is 100 percent for real. It's truly hard to believe it is. Before we even discuss it we MUST say a few things:

1. This is the last column of her's we'll read. We already subscribe to Mad Magazine and although her writing is a bit funnier, we get more variety in Mad. And we suspect if the column below was submitted as a satire, Mad would reject it for being too off-the-wall. The Onion? Her column isn't quite cutting edge enough.
2. In all seriousness, her newest column echoes the bitter, angry, attack-mode words of former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein and overall near-hysteria on the part of far right conservatives, Watergate-era officials and talk show hosts who are using the revelation of key source Deep Throat as a chance to rebattle Nixon's impeachment, argue it was all liberal plot, a media plot and suggest that the REAL villains weren't the people in the administration abusing the American people's trust by misusing the government and lying (the word is ACCURATE here because the tapes proved it) but those who dared to bring Nixon down. These GOPers convieniently forget the Republican PATRIOTS such as Barry Goldwater who let Nixon know it was time to go.

...Here are a few excerpts for the latest attack on the 91-year-old former second in command at the FBI who we now know was Deep Throat:

Was Mr. Felt a hero? No one wants to be hard on an ailing 91-year-old man. We're SURE, Ms. Noonan was shedding tears as she began to start her part of the parade of GOPers seeking the equivilent of revenge on Felt for his role in the Watergate stories. MORE:

Mr. Felt no doubt operated in some perceived jeopardy and judged himself brave.

No, Ms. Noonan: MILLIONS of Americans even today consider him brave. That includes many in the Republican party who, to judging by our emails, are aghast at the spectacle of fellow GOPers going after Felt and defending Nixon's Watergate behavior. It's GOP hacks — those who put loyaly to their party and to one man before the country's sacred democracy — who are out there using every argument possible to go after Felt and try to polish up the buried corpse of Nixon...

He had every right to disapprove of and wish to stop what he saw as new moves to politicize the FBI. But a hero would have come forward, resigned his position, declared his reasons, and exposed himself to public scrutiny. He would have taken the blows and the kudos. (Knowing both Nixon and the media, there would have been plenty of both.) Heroes pay the price. Mr. Felt simply leaked information gained from his position in government to damage those who were doing what he didn't want done. Then he retired with a government pension. This does not appear to have been heroism, and he appears to have known it. Thus, perhaps, the great silence.

A hero who was President... wouldn't have put the country through the agony that Nixon put the US through — until patriotic Democrats and REPUBLICANS had to march into his office to his office to tell him there was no hope due to the "smoking gun" tapes that had just come out.... Doesn't she and Stein realize what they're saying? Republican Gerald Ford REPLACED Nixon. So she and Stein are suggesting Ford was incompetent. Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State under Ford. She she's suggesting Kissinger was an incompetent. The fallacy of this argument is so stupifying it defies description.... The GOP has many thoughtful people, who cooly make their party's arguments with logic. Noonan, Stein and Buchanan, in particular, now deserve a room on Mars with Dennis Kucinich and Alan Keyes. They are entertaining but truly not to be taken seriously as thinkers or analyists anymore. They have become self-parodies.

But HERE is where Noonan has made yours truly decide pass on reading anything she writes in the future (of course, she may threaten to stop reading The Moderate Voice, but we will press on with life somehow):

Were there heroes of Watergate? Surely many unknown ones, those who did their best to be constructive and not destructive, those who didn't think it was all about their beautiful careers. I'll give you a candidate for great man of the era: Chuck Colson. Colson functioned in the Nixon White House as a genuinely bad man, went to prison and emerged a genuinely good man. He told the truth about himself in "Born Again," a book not fully appreciated as the great Washington classic it is, and has devoted his life to helping prisoners and their families. He paid the price, told the truth, blamed no one but himself, and turned his shame into something helpful. Children aren't dead because of him. There are children who are alive because of him.

So COLSON is the hero [of Watergate]. Note that Colson went to prison FIRST and was born again, wrote a book, etc. Colson didn't do anything in the White House to come forward with what he knew. Nor did he do anything to halt the unfolding scandal. Nor did he march into Nixon's office and tell him the proper thing was to resign.... [Colson] is a Republican, worked for Nixon and isn't a liberal. He is on Noonan's "team" while Felt was working against her "team."

Do THINKING conservatives realize how badly this makes people in their camp look?.... Hero? Maybe Felt wasn't perfect. But, no, Peggy and Ben, don't blame Felt for genocide, since Ford and Kissinger WERE THE ONES running foreign policy when Nixon resigned.... No matter what charges you throw at this 91-year-old man, he proved more of a patriot in the Watergate era than the people who were abusing government power, lying to Congress and in front of television cameras and who eventually had to go to jail because they were CONVICTED of crimes — or who didn't go to jail because they were pardoned...

Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Gandelman R'lyeh Wagn'nagl Fhtagn!! Ganelman Fhtagn!! Gandelman Fhtagn!!

Shrillness Vacation Report

Yes, the members of the Order are phoning this in live, from middle-America, where we've been taking a long deserved vacation from reality.

Who else is taking a vacation? Why, it's former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who isn't answering his phone because he's on a beach. Wait, no, he isn't on a beach, he just isn't answering the phone because then he might have to explain why he isn't recommending John Balton for the job of U.N. ambassador.

Does he secretly love John but not feel comfortable recommending a guy who admits to getting his "information" from groups that State has classified as terrorist groups?

Or could it be that he thinks the appointment of someone who has been so openly hostile to the U.N. would only confirm the rest of the world's rather tenuous opinion of us? Who's to say? Why not send Nixon to China? Well, other than that Nixon is dead. But Kofi might be up for some ping-pong.

So, for extreme indifference in the line of a job reference check, we hereby induct former Secretary of State Powell, Order of the Shrill, Order of the Shill, into the Order of the I Didn't Bring My Cell Phone I'm On Vacation, and the Order For Another Pina Colada.

Entire English Language To Join The Shrill?

Now that William Safire has stepped down from as the Times' hallucination columnist, we're wondering if it's safe for the entire English language to join the Order. Here's an example of the thinking:

In tomorrow's State of the Union speech, President Bush will no doubt escalate his campaign to replace Social Security with private retirement accounts. We don't know exactly what he'll say, but we're willing to bet that he won't say "private accounts," even though privatization is exactly what he's calling for, and exactly how he and other administration officials have described their scheme hundreds of times before. But the polls and focus groups that Mr. Bush says he ignores show that the public doesn't like to hear the word "private" when the topic is Social Security. So the administration now scrupulously uses the label "personal accounts," and in a 104-page book on selling the plan, it urges Congressional Republicans to do the same.

Whatever happens, we're fairly confident the SotU will use the English language, and the English language won't be happy about being used.

Just When You Thought The Smackdown Couldn't Get Any Harsher...

Our dear leader delivers what might just be the most obvious and eloquent refutation of the Bush cabal's Social Security 'plan'. It's so pretty, so simple, and so damning that it could only have come from the grand master and original gangsta of the Order! It makes your skin tingle.

John Kay Is Shrill!

Writing in the Financial Times, he calls the Bush administration "despicable":

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Columnists - John Kay: Pension 'crisis' helps create one : Like most advanced economies, America faces demographic problems. The numerous baby boomers, the generation born in the 25 years after the second world war, will soon retire. Their fewer children and grandchildren will have to bake their bread and nurse their illnesses. The US is relatively well placed to deal with these problems. Population imbalances are less severe than in Japan and most of Europe. And the budgetary implications are less acute: although America spends a lot on medical care, the retirement income the state provides is relatively low. Moreover, bipartisan reform in the 1980s put America's social security system on a robust footing. Contributions were increased to build up surpluses to meet the growth in retirement benefits. These surpluses will continue to accumulate until around 2018 and then, on current projections, will be run down over the following 25 years. Since longevity continues to increase and America's growing income inequality means that the contribution base is growing less rapidly than national income, it will be necessary to reform the system to ensure its viability in the second half of the 21st century. But the Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next 50 years the present system will receive contributions averaging 14.02 per cent of relevant income and pay out 14.29 per cent. So why does the second term Bush administration, which does not seem to care about the real and immediate budget deficit in its principal activities, regard the funding of social security as its most urgent economic problem? I have been poring over these figures wondering if, from a distance of several thousand miles, there is something I have missed. But there does not seem to be. The numbers are not controversial: the same ones are used by the people who say there is an urgent need for reform. The interesting question they raise is not: "What should be done about social security?" It is this: "Why is this minor and distant issue subject to such intense political attention?" There is a book on my shelves published in 1982, called The World Crisis in Social Security. I now feel slightly ashamed of my contribution to that volume. Not because of its content: my criticisms foreshadowed sensible reforms for Britain that were implemented soon after. Rather I feel ashamed for my youth and naivety and my failure to understand the game in which I was being asked to play. A retreat from public sector pension provision might create a large flow of money into the stock market. This prospect leaves financial institutions salivating. So it has always been easy to obtain funding for projects such as The World Crisis in Social Security and much of this funding has been channelled through America's rightwing think-tanks. Greed in the investment community is conjoined with the principled opposition of those for whom America's social security system, popular though it may be with voters, is the legacy of that detested socialist Franklin D. Roosevelt. Every pension system has weaknesses and there are always honest but simple scholars who can be encouraged to point them out. Hence my agreeable trip to Washington to debate "the world crisis in social security". I was joined by others who could tell of deficiencies in the pension systems of France, of Germany, and the public system of the US itself. After decades of this propaganda, it is not surprising that most people are convinced that there is indeed a world crisis in social security. It is like having a surveyor continually crawling over your house. Once every defect has been pointed out, repeatedly, even the most robust of occupiers will believe their home is on the point of collapse. The distasteful aspect of this campaign is not its effect on public debate. Politicians and policy analysts ought to be able to distinguish substance from puffery, and reality from misinformation, although there is a marked tendency for them to see only facts and figures to which they are ideologically predisposed. But the endless talk of crisis undermines the confidence of ordinary people in their security in old age and, most of all, in the ability of government to provide it. People who talk of the crisis in social security help create that very crisis. And, despicably, that is what some of these people intend.