Bruce Schneier is one of us now:

Unchecked presidential power : The result is that the president's wartime powers, with its armies, battles, victories, and congressional declarations, now extend to the rhetorical "War on Terror": a war with no fronts, no boundaries, no opposing army, and -- most ominously -- no knowable "victory." Investigations, arrests and trials are not tools of war. But according to the Yoo memo, the president can define war however he chooses, and remain "at war" for as long as he chooses. This is indefinite dictatorial power. And I don't use that term lightly; the very definition of a dictatorship is a system that puts a ruler above the law. In the weeks after 9/11, while America and the world were grieving, Bush built a legal rationale for a dictatorship. Then he immediately started using it to avoid the law.

This is, fundamentally, why this issue crossed political lines in Congress. If the president can ignore laws regulating surveillance and wiretapping, why is Congress bothering to debate reauthorizing certain provisions of the Patriot Act? Any debate over laws is predicated on the belief that the executive branch will follow the law.This is not a partisan issue between Democrats and Republicans; it's a president unilaterally overriding the Fourth Amendment, Congress and the Supreme Court. Unchecked presidential power has nothing to do with how much you either love or hate George W. Bush. You have to imagine this power in the hands of the person you most don't want to see as president, whether it be Dick Cheney or Hillary Rodham Clinton, Michael Moore or Ann Coulter. Laws are what give us security against the actions of the majority and the powerful. If we discard our constitutional protections against tyranny in an attempt to protect us from terrorism, we're all less safe as a result.

Barron's is shrill:

moquol - Journal - Impeach : So sez Barron's:

Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation. They ought to investigate it, consider it carefully and report either a bill that would change the wiretap laws to suit the president or a bill of impeachment.

Norm Ornstein is shrill:

NORM ORNSTEIN, AEI scholar: : I think if we're going to be intellectually honest here, this really is the kind of thing that Alexander Hamilton was referring to when impeachment was discussed.

The Los Angeles Times is shrill:

Editor in chief - Los Angeles Times : ONE OF THE PERKS OF being commander in chief is that you get to edit the Constitution, even the Bill of Rights, from time to time. That is in essence the legal justification offered by the Bush administration for its authorization of a secret program to wiretap, without any court order, international communications of individuals within the United States suspected of ties to terrorist groups.

The FISA courts are notoriously accommodating to government requests, which can be made even after the eavesdropping has taken place. Nonetheless, Bush claims they're not nimble enough to be effective in the war on terror. Yet if that's the case, why is the government still relying on them in the domestic context? What if you had two suspected Al Qaeda cells communicating with each other within the United States? If the current setup is so cumbersome, the president should have pushed for a change in the law. The fact that he instead made a secret decision to cut out judicial oversight of wiretaps may have had more to do with the White House's desire to expand executive power than with any real shortcomings in the process.

Senior Shoggoth Susan Madrack informs us that Federalist Society honcho Bruce Fein sees George W. Bush as a clear and present danger to the rule of law:

Susan Madrack : Thankfully, many principled conservatives see the inherent constitutional threat to the Bush Doctrine. Federalist Society honcho Bruce Fein in today's Moonie Times:

President Bush presents a clear and present danger to the rule of law. He cannot be trusted to conduct the war against global terrorism with a decent respect for civil liberties and checks against executive abuses. Congress should swiftly enact a code that would require Mr. Bush to obtain legislative consent for every counterterrorism measure that would materially impair individual freedoms.

The war against global terrorism is serious business. The enemy has placed every American at risk, a tactic that justifies altering the customary balance between liberty and security. But like all other constitutional authorities, the war powers of the president are a matter of degree. In Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer (1952), the U.S. Supreme Court denied President Harry Truman's claim of inherent constitutional power to seize a steel mill threatened with a strike to avert a steel shortage that might have impaired the war effort in Korea. A strike occurred, but Truman%u2019s fear proved unfounded.

Neither President Richard Nixon nor Gerald Ford was empowered to suspend Congress for failing to appropriate funds they requested to fight in Cambodia or South Vietnam. And the Supreme Court rejected Nixon's claim of inherent power to enjoin publication of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War in New York Times v. United States (1971).

Mr. Bush insisted in his radio address that the NSA targets only citizens "with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. Before we intercept these communications, the government must have information that establishes a clear link to these terrorist organizations...."

But there are no checks on NSA errors or abuses, the hallmark of a rule of law as opposed to a rule of men. Truth and accuracy are the first casualties of war. President Bush assured the world Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 invasion. He was wrong. President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared Americans of Japanese ancestry were security threats to justify interning them in concentration camps during World War II. He was wrong. President Lyndon Johnson maintained communists masterminded and funded the massive Vietnam War protests in the United States. He was wrong. To paraphrase President Ronald Reagan's remark to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, President Bush can be trusted in wartime, but only with independent verification.

The NSA eavesdropping is further troublesome because it easily evades judicial review. Targeted citizens are never informed their international communications have been intercepted. Unless a criminal prosecution is forthcoming (which seems unlikely), the citizen has no forum to test the government%u2019s claim the interceptions were triggered by known links to a terrorist organization.

Mr. Bush acclaimed the secret surveillance as "crucial to our national security. Its purpose is to detect and prevent terrorist attacks against the United States, our friends and allies." But if that were justified, why was Congress not asked for legislative authorization in light of the legal cloud created by FISA and the legislative branch's sympathies shown in the Patriot Act and joint resolution for war? FISA requires court approval for national security wiretaps, and makes it a crime for a person to intentionally engage "in electronic surveillance under color of law, except as authorized by statute."

Mr. Bush cited the disruptions of "terrorist" cells in New York, Oregon, Virginia, California, Texas and Ohio as evidence of a pronounced domestic threat that compelled unilateral and secret action. But he failed to demonstrate those cells could not have been equally penetrated with customary legislative and judicial checks on executive overreaching.

The president maintained that, "As a result [of the NSA disclosure], our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk." But if secrecy were pivotal to the NSA's surveillance, why is the president continuing the eavesdropping? And why is he so carefree about risking the liberties of both the living and those yet to be born by flouting the Constitution's separation of powers and conflating constructive criticism with treason?

Last year Kevin Drum sneered at Jonathan Alter's lack of shrillness:

Back in 2004, I took a swipe at Newsweek's Jonathan Alter for not being forthright enough about expressing his real opinion of George Bush...

But now, Kevin says, Jonathan Alter's level of shrillness is off-scale high:

The Washington Monthly: We're seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator.... Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story%u2014which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year%u2014because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker.... If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there may even be articles of impeachment introduced....

Hell. If twenty Republican representatives with either a concern for separation of powers, a regard for the Constitution of the United States, or a sense that this ought to be a free country eat their wheaties some morning, there will be articles of impeachment introduced.

Welcome, Jonathan! Alter Ftagn!

William Arkin of the Washington Post--ooops! we're not supposed to say that, are we?--William Arkin of WPNI is shrill:

Early Warning by William M. Arkin - washingtonpost.com : The New York Times and the government may not want to say the obvious, that by and large, it is Muslims in America who are being monitored in the 9/11 Order. It is not the liberal or the literary in the back of the New York City taxicab that is the target. It is the driver.

If the government is going to find the next Mohamed Atta in our midst, it is going to do so, it thinks, through the intercepted phone call to uncle Mohamed in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. It is going to correlate the purchase, the airline ticket, the license plate at the Mosque.

What has happened since the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks is as pernicious and as damaging as any abuse or panic or misstep of the past: We must pledge allegiance to a certain post 9/11 Order, abandon the rule of law, compromise our values, turn against our neighbors, enlist in a clash of civilizations, all in the name of defeating the terrorists.

We are being asked to destroy our country in order to save it.

Dan Nexon joins the Order of the Shrill. Welcome, Dan. Don't worry. With a little practice you'll be able to tackle prey with the suckers on your tentacles as well as the rest of us.

The Duck of Minerva: States of exception : Those conservatives who defend the President's actions have lost their collective minds. We can debate the appropriateness of impeachment, but what does the conservative movement stand for anymore if it will put up with this - let alone every other instance in which the Republican leadership has shown a complete disregard for its stated principles? Lower taxes and crony capitalism? As Brad DeLong often says, on far shakier grounds: "Impeach him. Impeach him now."

Hilzoy is shrill. She calls for the impeachment of George W. Bush:

The Washington Monthly : I just wanted to echo what Shakespearer's Sister said about the report that Bush signed an order allowing the NSA to spy on US citizens without a warrant. This is against the law... the law forbids warrantless surveillance of US citizens, and it provides procedures to be followed in emergencies that do not leave enough time for federal agents to get a warrant. If the NY Times report is correct, the government did not follow these procedures. It therefore acted illegally.

Bush's order is arguably unconstitutional as well: it seems to violate the fourth amendment, and it certainly violates the requirement (Article II, sec. 3) that the President "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."

I am normally extremely wary of talking about impeachment. I think that impeachment is a trauma for the country, and that it should only be considered in extreme cases. Moreover, I think that the fact that Clinton was impeached raises the bar as far as impeaching Bush: two traumas in a row is really not good for the country, and even though my reluctance to go through a second impeachment benefits the very Republicans who needlessly inflicted the first on us, I don't care. It's bad for the country, and that matters most.

But I have a high bar, not a nonexistent one. And for a President to order violations of the law meets my criteria for impeachment... it's not as though warrants are hard to get, or the law makes no provision for emergencies. Bush could have followed the law had he wanted to. He chose to set it aside.

And this is something that no American should tolerate. We claim to have a government of laws, not of men. That claim means nothing if we are not prepared to act when a President (or anyone else) places himself above the law. If the New York Times report is true, then Bush should be impeached.

The Armchair Capitalists read National Review--and their brains explode:

Armchair Capitalists: The National Review Is Fun : The 50th Anniversary issue especially has some real gems. Like Ramnesh Ponnuru arguing for the coherency of conservatives in that....wait for it....conservatives take the American Founders seriously. Not that there is any particular piece of wisdom we can learn from the past, but that conservatives engage in a conversation with the Founders. Sure they may emphasize different things, but what's important is that they respect the Founders. Now this has the slight problem that suddenly American conservatism has been defined to be entirely distinct from conservatism in every other country -- and in fact has nothing in common with conservatism in any other country, which is odd, to say the least. And trying to differentiate this from liberals is rather strained. Plus it is just odd: I've always understood conservatism to either be a statement about human nature or a respect for tradition. Tradition not in terms of what some random dead dudes wrote down, but as in what has worked in society before -- and what is perceived to make it work today.

Maybe Yog-Sothoth will clean up the mess...

Unholy Keening Heard From the Newsweek Offices

What the heck is keening? We don't know. But boy is there a lot of it floating out of the 3rd floor of the Newsweek windows of Newsweek's offices. Shrill. So very, very shrill.

Bush likes to say that his hero is Ronald Reagan, a true-blue conservative who knew his own mind. But Reagan also knew when to compromise, and when he got into trouble early in his second term, he reached out for help, making a moderate, former senator, Howard Baker, his chief of staff. The chance that George W. Bush will give a top White House job to an establishment moderate (say, Brent Scowcroft, his father's national-security adviser) is about the same as that Texas will become a province of France.

The Bulldog Manifesto is really shrill:

The Bulldog Manifesto : The question always comes up-- "Is the president stupid, or is he just heartless?" Does he make mistakes because he lacks the sufficient skill to manage his position, or does he make decisions selfishly, with kindless indifference towards those outside his own "circle of friends"?....

At first glance, it may seem hard to tell. But when all signs point to a war in Iraq that is so unwinnable that the current "stay the course" policy seems to be trumped by the common housefly's "repetitive-crash-into-same-glass-window" exit strategy, one must wonder whether Bush Co., is genuinely that fucking stupid.

Looking back, there is no way in hell they could have genuinely believed that we would be greeted in Iraq as liberators. No fucking way. They can't be that dumb.

There is no way that they could have reasonably believed that Iraq was trying to acquire fissile material from Niger. No way.

There is no way they could have believed we are in the "last throes" of the insurgency. No way.

There is no way they could have believed Iraq was friendly with al-Qaeda prior to the American invasion. Nope.

There is no fucking way in hell that they could have genuinely believed that Iraq was an immediate threat to attack us. NO WAY IN HELL!

There is no way these fuckers can try to say that they "never expected" that terrorists would fly planes into buildings. Yeah right!

As Bush said so eloquently, "There's an old saying in Tennessee... I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee... that says, fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me... you can't get fooled again."

Ex-right-wing moonbat Dennis the Peasant has had enough: he has joined the reality-based community and succumbed to shrill unholy madness. Welcome, Dennis! Collect your black robe, your hand of glory, and your copy of the *Krugmanomicon* from the registrar, and report to the newly-enlarged Randolph Carter Tower for further instructions.

Dennis The Peasant: About Politics... : I'm starting to get some"Hey, the whole Roger Simon/Pajamas Media thing has been fun, but when are going to get back to the serious and/or necessary business of ragging on Kerry/Dean/Clinton/Reid and their evil minions Kevin Drum/Josh Marshall/Markos Moulitsas?" Glad you asked. The answer? Probably never.

Sorry, but I'm really past the point where I can defend either the Bush Administration and/or Congressional Republicans and maintain either my sense of dignity or a straight face. Let's face it, those boys have Screwed The Pooch. Big-time.... So, as far as I am concerned, if the citizenry, in its collective wisdom, decides to start throwing The Bastards out in 2006, so be it. The Republican Party will have earned that. And I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I can think of anything that warrants the defense of people like Duke Cunningham. I'll leave that to folks like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin... people who at least can earn a dishonest buck doing it.

I didn't join the Republican Party to encourage institutional corruption, massive deficits and mindless governmental secrecy. If I'd wanted that, I'd have dismissed Ronald Reagan as a dimwit and voted for Walter Mondale and the Democrats.

You want me to defend the Republicans? Fine, find me some defensible Republicans and I will.

Warning: Mark Mitchell of CJR has been driven completely insane by reading Ben Stein in the Sunday New York Times. Do not approach. Call for help from trained professionals:

CJR Daily: The Sunday Times Rocks!!! : Hey everybody!! You'll never guess what we've been doing on Sundays. We've been reading the New York Times business pages!!!!!!! ... ha-ha-ha! ... don't ask us why ... maybe it's because it's been, like, TOTALLY freezin' outside and Sunday is THE worst day for watching TV. :( It's like, geez, there's NOTHING on, except the Sabbath Gasbags who dominate the morning news/talk shows, and the occasional New York Giants game, which, let's face it, has its own built-in stupor-inducing effect.

Anyway, the best thing about the Sunday Times is this writer they have named Ben Stein. His job is to write about financial and business stuff. But he makes everything really simple so even we can understand it. And you know what he used to do? He was that totally funny actor who played the math teacher on "The Wonder Years." That show was sooooooo funny!!

This last Sunday, Ben wrote a really great article about this economist dude named Milton Friedman. Even before he became an actor, Ben's mom and dad introduced him to all sorts of really famous people -- even Richard Nixon!!

Well, as it turns out, Milton Friedman is the smartest friend who Ben ever "inherited from his parents." And the whole point of Ben's story is that he was supposed to go to Milton's birthday party this week but instead he had to go "preach the good gospel of freedom and gratitude at the University of Utah." We're not exactly sure what that meant, but it reminded us of that "Wonder Years" episode where Kevin's birthday party was scheduled for the same day as Paul's bar mitzvah. That was friggin' hilllariass! LOL.

Jim Henley takes up residence as Waterboarding-isn't-torture Visiting Fellow at Miskatonic University:

Unqualified Offerings: : Triumph of the Shrill (Shills): This blog, over the years, has made a lot of arguments and dealt with a lot of arguments. But I have no obligation to waste my time on flim-flam. The people I call shills don't "address arguments" themselves. They cast aspersions, yank side issues center-stage, and take innuendo for debate. For these people patriotism is simply the cracker in a circle jerk of self-righteousness and hubris. Matt Welch has been respectful of these people to a fault, but it has earned him nothing in the way of consideration - a choice between today's party line and a friend of years' standing who flouts it is no choice at all. "Slime and defend," baby.

I owe these people nothing. By now, the ones who were ever going to have their Come to Jesus moment have had them. The rest will spend their political lives hunting scapegoats among their own people for the failure of their big ideas. I've never once demanded that anybody crawl back to geopolitical sanity tearing their forelocks and begging I, Zeuslike, forgive them. Not my place. I've simply thought, and maybe said, something like"Dude. Good to have you back." There's been quite a lot of "coming home" from my fellow citizens, which is what has the die-hards so frantic.

But fewer and fewer of the diehards by vocation or avocation are going to be able to make it. In addition to the pride - How easy is it to renounce years of advocacy? - the most prominent hawks are tremendously invested in their positions financially now. No one reads Hugh Hewitt for style. No one gives a shit what Charles Johnson thinks about the latest movies. No one tunes in because the twists and turns of Glenn Reynolds's mind fascinate them. Their readership tunes in to feel good about their positions, biases and resentments. We know what happened to Andrew Sullivan's audience when he began merely to equivocate from unstinting support for the Great Work of continuing the beatings until morale improves - it deserted him in droves. The same fate awaits the next Loyalist who shirks. They would be stripped of their pajamas. Whether they're directly on the take or just implicitly, the shills are shills. They've done what they love and the money has followed.

Martin van Creveld is really shrill!

Forward Newspaper Online: Costly Withdrawal Is the Price To Be Paid for a Foolish War By Martin van Creveld November 25, 2005: The question is no longer if American forces will be withdrawn, but how soon -- and at what cost.... Confronted by a demoralized army on the battlefield and by growing opposition at home, in 1969 the Nixon administration started withdrawing most of its troops in order to facilitate what it called the "Vietnamization" of the country.... [T]his is not a pleasant model to follow, but no other alternative appears in sight.

Whereas North Vietnam at least had a government with which it was possible to arrange a cease-fire, in Iraq the opponent consists of shadowy groups of terrorists with no central organization or command authority.... [S]imply abandoning equipment or handing it over to the Iraqis, as was done in Vietnam, is simply not an option.... [T]he new Iraqi army is less skilled, less cohesive and less loyal to its government than even the South Vietnamese army was.... Washington might just as well hand over its weapons directly to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Clearly, then, the thing to do is to forget about face-saving and conduct a classic withdrawal....

American forces will have to fall back on Baghdad. From Baghdad they will have to make their way to the southern port city of Basra, and from there back to Kuwait, where the whole misguided adventure began.... A withdrawal probably will require several months and incur a sizable number of casualties. As the pullout proceeds, Iraq almost certainly will sink into an all-out civil war from which it will take the country a long time to emerge -- if, indeed, it can do so at all. All this is inevitable and will take place whether George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice like it or not.... A continued military presence, made up of air, sea and a moderate number of ground forces, will be needed.

First and foremost, such a presence will be needed to counter Iran, which for two decades now has seen the United States as "the Great Satan." Tehran is certain to emerge as the biggest winner from the war -- a winner that in the not too distant future is likely to add nuclear warheads to the missiles it already has.... [A] divided, chaotic, government-less Iraq is very likely to become a hornets' nest. From it, a hundred mini-Zarqawis will spread all over the Middle East, conducting acts of sabotage and seeking to overthrow governments in Allah's name....

Maintaining an American security presence in the region.... will involve many complicated problems.... Such an endeavor, one would hope, will be handled by a team different from -- and more competent than -- the one presently in charge of the White House and Pentagon.

For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.

Now this is, even by my standards, very shrill. Has Martin van Creveld simply caught an extreme case of the madness to which we have all succumbed as a result of the incompetence, malevolence, mendacity, and stupidity of George W. Bush and his administration? Or is van Creveld hearing things about the White House--through his own military-academic and Israeli-security networks--even more terrifying and devastating than I am hearing through my networks.

The Bush administration: worse than you can imagine, even after taking account of the fact that it is worse than you can imagine.

Stratfor: Shrill

In Monday's Geopolitical Intelligence Report, Stratfor's George Friedman takes time out from job searches in 16th century Florence to reveal that he has been driven completely mad -- mad, he tells you -- by the incompetence and disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration.

When people talk about intelligence failures, they inevitably speak about the WMD issue. That was trivial, however, compared to the failure of the U.S. intelligence community to discover that the Baathists had planned for continued warfare after the fall of Baghdad.

...

Moreover, they failed to consider that the behavior of forces defending Iraq's seizure of Kuwait during Desert Storm might be different than the behavior of forces resisting American occupation of Iraq proper.

...

The administration cannot admit what is self-evident: it does not have the ability, by itself, to break the back of the Sunni insurrection.

...

The problem the Bush administration has -- and it is a problem that dates back to the beginning of the war -- is its inability to articulate the reality. The United States is not staying the course. It has not been on course -- if by "course" you mean what was planned in February 2003 -- for two years.

Welcome, George. Feel free to give your coat to the doorshoggoth.

Eric Umansky is really shrill. He fears that what General Petraeus and others are doing in Iraq is to train Iranian-allied Fedayeen Death Commandos:

Eric Umansky: 'Training' Iraqi Forces Won't Do It : James Fallows' opus on how the U.S. has FUBARed training Iraq's army has been rightly getting a lot of attention. But there's one thing I think it misses.... If the U.S. helps create 'capable' soldiers... loyal to, say, their own Shiite militia, is that a net positive? From Newsday....

[P]olice commandos. In combat uniforms, bulletproof vests and wrap-around sunglasses or ski masks, they muscle through Baghdad's traffic jams in police cars or camouflage-painted pickup trucks... part of the Iraqi security forces... blamed for a wave of kidnappings and executions around Baghdad since the spring. One such group, the Volcano Brigade, is operating as a death squad, under the influence or control of Iraq's most potent Shia factional militia, the Iranian-backed Badr Organization, said several Iraqi government officials and western Baghdad residents.... In the past year, the U.S. military has helped build up the commandos under guidance from James Steele, a former Army Special Forces officer who led U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in El Salvador in the 1980s. Salvadoran army units trained by Steele's team were accused of a pattern of atrocities.... The [new] Volcano Brigade was built up under the current, Shia-led government and "is mostly made of men from the Badr militia," said a Shia source close to the unit. Like most of a dozen people interviewed about the commandos, he asked not to be named for fear of being killed....

Insisting--hoping--that the U.S. can "train" Iraqi forces to drop their ethnic loyalities is strikes me as nothing more than an assumption, an assumption upon which much of the U.S.'s chance for 'success' rests.... Peter Galbraith's piece in the New York Review of Books... there is no "Iraqi" army; there are basically only units loyal to their own ethnicities...

Progress Toward Further Dimensions of Yet More Intense Shrill Bush-Related-Madness-Activities

Robert Moomaw directs us to the extremely sharp-eyed James Fallows, whose shrill screeds of Bush-hatred redefine the genre:

The Blog | James Fallows: What Bush Isn't Addressing on Iraq | The Huffington Post : It would be nice if, even once, the Bush administration addressed the strongest version of the case against its Iraq-and-terrorism policy, rather than relying on bromides ("fight them there, so we don't have to fight them here") and knocking down straw men ("some say Iraqis don't deserve freedom...").... On available evidence, the President himself has not grasped the essential criticism of moving against Iraq when he did: that a war in Iraq undercut the broader and longer term war against Islamic terrorism. Not in one speech, not in one interview or off-hand remark, not in one insider account of White House deliberation has there been the slightest indication that President Bush recognizes this concept sufficiently to offer a rebuttal to it.

Someone who does recognize that distinction is Donald Rumsfeld, who raised exactly this concern... that the United States might be creating terrorists even faster than it was killing them.... Paul Wolfowitz's answer would also be fascinating to hear -- but he is off to other projects now.... As for an answer from Dick Cheney, dream on. So when the President decided on Friday to "respond to the critics" of his Iraq policy, naturally he did nothing of the kind. For the record, here are the three biggest, most obvious points not even addressed in his speech:

1) Everybody was not, in fact, working from the same misleading information. The administration's line about WMD these days is: OK, we might have been wrong -- but everybody was wrong.... [A]t the time, [however,] Administration officials were most emphasically NOT saying "hey, we're all operating in the dark here." The implied message of every briefing for reporters, every speech to the public, and every background session with legislators, was: If you knew what we knew, then you'd be as alarmed as we are. That was the message of Dick Cheney's statement that "there can be no doubt" that Iraq "now" had weapons of mass destruction, of Condi Rice's warning about the mushroom cloud, and of Colin Powell's presentation to the UN....

2) To say that Saddam Hussein might have been a threat is not to say that we had to invade when we did. The Administration had two responses when asked in 2003 "what's the rush?"... the troops were in place, they couldn't wait forever, soon it would be hot.... This obviously is a "Guns of August" style of reasoning: the trains are moving toward the front, so we might as well start World War I. The other response was: we've waited 12 years, why wait any more? The answer to that was, first, that Iraq was now crawling with weapons inspectors... and, second, that beginning a war could touch off a lot of messy complications left out of the optimistic war scenarios.

This is the crucial point: Every aspect about managing occupied Iraq could have turned out better with more time... line up Arabic-speaking or Islamic allies... get adequate U.S. troops on the scene... protecting the power system, the hospitals... the public infrastructure....

3) As for managing Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, there is no shared blame at all. The Bush Administration owns every aspect of this disastrously bungled situation. The failure to stop the looting; the deliberately low-ball on the number of occupying troops; the rash decision to disband the Iraqi army; the inattention to how quickly American "liberators" would become "occupiers"; the lassitude about recruiting or training enough Arabic speakers or getting serious about developing an Iraqi force -- on these and a dozen other familiar points, the Administration cannot possibly say, "Hey, everybody was wrong." These were the decisions of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, in many cases bulldozing or ignoring contrary views from within the military and other parts of the government. Or, I guess the reality is: the Administration could "possibly" say this. They just couldn't say it honestly.

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Do it now.

The shrill Bush-hating ulullations of Fred Kaplan rend the night beneath the dead, uncaring stars:

Parsing Bush's new mantra. By Fred Kaplan: President George W. Bush has suddenly shifted rhetoric on the war in Iraq. Until recently, the administration's line was basically, "Everything we are saying and doing is right."... Now, though... a new line is being trotted out: "Yes, we were wrong about some things, but everybody else was wrong, too, so get over it."... [D]oes Bush have a point? Did everybody believe, in the run-up to the war, that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction? And are Bush's Democratic critics, therefore, hypocritically rewriting history?...

As with many of the president's carefully worded speeches... this one contains fragments of truth... but they serve only to disguise the larger falsehoods and deceptions.

Let's go to the transcript:

Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs.

This is not true. Two bipartisan panels have examined the question of how the intelligence on Iraq's WMDs turned out so wrong. Both deliberately skirted the issue of why.... There's something misleading about Bush's wording on this point, as well: The investigation "found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments." The controversy concerns pressure from the White House and the secretary of defense to form the judgments--that is, to make sure the agencies reached specific judgments--not to change them afterward.

They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein.

This is an intriguingly ambiguous statement.... Most of the world's intelligence agencies figured Saddam Hussein would like to have weapons of mass destruction. If he means an assessment of Saddam Hussein's capabilities, though, he's wrong: Several countries' spy agencies never bought the notion....

They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing the development and possession of weapons of mass destruction.

This, too, is misleading. These resolutions called on Saddam to declare the state of his WMD arsenal and, if he claimed there was no such thing, to produce records documenting its destruction.

[M]any of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: "When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security."

Bush's opponent, Sen. John Kerry, did utter these words, possibly to his later regret. Still the key phrase is "to use force if necessary." Kerry has since said--as have many other Democrats who voted as he did--that they assumed the president wouldn't use force unless it really was necessary....

That's why more than a hundred Democrats in the House and Senate--who had access to the same intelligence--voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.

This is the crucial point: these Democrats did not have "access to the same intelligence." The White House did send Congress a classified National Intelligence Estimate... [which] did not cite the many dissenting views within the intelligence community. The most thorough legislators, for instance, were not aware until much later of the Energy Department's doubts that Iraq's aluminum tubes were designed for atomic centrifuges--or of the dissent about "mobile biological weapons labs" from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research....

In Saddam's case, many of us outsiders (I include myself among them) figured he'd had biological and chemical weapons before; producing such weapons isn't rocket science; U.N. inspectors had been booted out of Iraq a few years earlier; why wouldn't he have them now? What we didn't know--and what the Democrats in Congress didn't know either--was that many insiders did have reasons to conclude otherwise. There is also now much reason to believe that top officials--especially Vice President Dick Cheney and the undersecretaries surrounding Donald Rumsfeld in the Pentagon--worked hard to keep those conclusions trapped inside.

President Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, said today that the arguments over how and why the war began are irrelevant. "We need to put this debate behind us," he said. But the truth is, no debate could be more relevant now. As the war in Iraq enters yet another crucial phase--with elections scheduled next month and Congress finally taking up the issue of whether to send more troops or start pulling them out--we need to know whether the people running the executive branch can be trusted, and the sad truth is that they cannot be.

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Impeach them now.