OK. That's enough. I'm going shrill this morning.

Fred Hiatt and company appear puzzled:

A Heckuva Claim - washingtonpost.com: Mr. Bush is oblivious to the consequences of his tax cuts. Saturday, January 6, 2007; A16: PRESIDENT BUSH wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday that "it is also a fact that our tax cuts have fueled robust economic growth and record revenues." The claim about fueling record revenue is flat wrong, and it is shocking that the president should persist in making such errors. After all, tax cuts are the central plank of his domestic policy. How can he fail to understand the basic facts about them?...

Perhaps because the news sections of the Washington Post have been faithfully transcribing the Bush administration claims without fact-checking them for seven years?

Most recently we have Peter Baker getting out his scissors and cutting out the fact-checking of Bush's claims that had appeared on the earlier, web-only version of this article, leaving only:

Bush Signals Budget Accord - washingtonpost.com: Bush achieved his goal last year when the deficit fell to $248 billion on the strength of better-than-expected revenue. Bush credits his tax cuts with spurring the economy and in turn producing more tax receipts...

If you p--- in your drinking water, Fred, you shouldn't then complain that its taste is off.

It's time to start putting concrete barriers around Philadelphia. Duncan Black is so shrill as to be one of the Great Old Tentacled Ones:

Eschaton: "Isolationist Left": I'd like to highlight something else [about Jacob Weisberg]. When did the "isolationist Left" become some sort of important force in American politics, or some sort of named movement? I, like most people who did, opposed the Iraq war because it was The Worst Idea Ever transparently marketed with lies swallowed by rubes like Lord Weisberg and embedded in a political campaign which involved impugning the patriotism of, you know, people like me simply because we opposed The Worst Idea Ever.

Isolationism in the US has long found its home on the Right - from opposing entry into WWII to opposing any and all participation in international institutions to Bob Dole's "Democrat wars" to George "We don't do nation building" Bush. Fuck the world, we're taking our ball and going home has long been part of the conservative genetic code.

Now, if you start asserting that the opposite of "isolationism" is "blowing shit up whenever someone makes us mad" and there is nothing else such as, you know, engaging with the world by creating and maintaining and whenever possible working within established international institutions so beloved by that ultimate Truman Democrat known as Harry S. Truman, then there's a case that can be made that there is an "isolationist Left."

If you mean that some people on The Left are so silly and naive to think that sometimes foreign policy decisions - including the beloved Blowing Shit Up one - are made by people who have more narrow interests in mind than the nebulously abstract The National Interest, then I suppose you would be correct that those dirty fucking hippies must be smoking that Isolationist ganja. Stop dropping the brown acid you dirty fucking hippies!

Being less than enthusiastic about blowing shit up does not make one "isolationist," but we are stuck with very silly people like Lord Weisberg who when they look at the Iraq war see little other than a referendum on the brilliance of Lord Weisberg.

Wanker.

Do not--repeat do not--attempt to match Andrew Northrup's level of shrillness unless you are a trained professional and have a paranormal SWAT team standing by:

: Jacob Weisberg attempts to navigate between the in/competence dodges:

Virtually everyone now agrees that the war in Iraq has been a vast mistake. But what, exactly, was the nature of that mistake? The isolationist left and the realist right--George McGovern and Brent Scowcroft--emphasize that our error was intervening in the absence of overwhelming national interest. At the opposite end of the foreign policy continuum, the neoconservatives contend that invading Iraq was a perfectly good idea undermined by incompetent implementation. In the space between are liberal hawks who originally supported the war and a variety of skeptics who didn't. They now tend to agree that the war was both a mistake in theory and a disaster in execution....

But if the invasion of Iraq is mainly a case of bungled execution--a war that, whether justified or not in principle, could have left behind a peaceful, functioning Iraqi state at a tolerable cost--then the isolationist/realist lesson is the wrong one to draw.

Ah, the soft bigotry of low expectations. You could invade the greater Tigris/Euphrates region at any point in human history, and the end result could be a peaceful, functioning Iraqi state at a tolerable cost. I know of no physical law which would prevent it. You get lucky, you work smart, and anything is possible, right? You could invade Sweden tomorrow, re-name it "Iraq", and have yourself a marvelous, if slightly Nordic, Iraqi state. Heck, you could have left the whole mess alone four years ago, and you would have had a relatively peaceful, functioning, pain-in-the-ass Iraqi state (and by the standards of Iraq today, it was practically Sweden) at the extremely tolerable cost of nuthin. This was a very do-able, pretty well un-fuck-up-able plan. Funny story about that....

The standards for judging success have to come from the justifications for the war, or else you end up with some arbitrary mush like "[leave] behind a democratic pro-American peaceful, functioning Iraqi state at a tolerable cost."... From a certain point of view it seems coldly rational to discuss Iraq without digging up all that unpleasant business about al Qaeda, WMD, and imminent gathering threats, but it just doesn't make any sense.

Weisberg continues.... So, again, if we decide to ignore the fact that Kosovo had a coherent justification, and Iraq didn't, then yeah, the primary remaining difference is that the Kosovo war was not run by total morons, a staffing decision which everyone outside the Bush administration agrees was wise.... [N]otably absent from Weisberg's list of recent wars is Afghanistan, because it really shows the pointlessness of [Weisberg's] entire exercise. If we ignore the reasons for things, the primary difference between Iraq and Afghanistan is, well, not a whole lot. Afghanistan is not on its way to peace or functionality any more than Iraq is. But while the conditions in both countries are similarly awful, it is generally agreed that Afghanistan - while totally fucked up in execution - is not a strategic failure, because the justification for the war was clear, and, by these clear standards, an (incomplete) victory was achieved. Meanwhile Iraq has morphed from a mission with a surplus of grand goals into this desperately muddled hunt for ponies....

I know a lot of people, including some real goddamn idiots, and yet not one of them would describe a position on Iraq which completely ignores the reasons for invading as being in the "middle" of anything.... [Weisberg] is taking great pains to marginalize the opinion that the disaster in Iraq (and beyond) is to a very significant degree the result of fundamental problems with the way the Bush administration uses American power. And this was a position which was being put forth, in real time, by people between (and even beyond, if you can imagine such country) those far-out marginal figures McGovern and Scowcroft.... Opposition to the invasion came from any number of places, and one of those was from the tradition of post-WWII American statecraft and the admittedly nebulous understanding of this tradition by most of the public - the middle, for whatever it's worth, by any measure. The idea that the invasion of Iraq was just a badly-run version of Kosovo is a half-truth with some currency in certain circles, although it's not exactly what you'd call "mainstream". Wave your Freak Flag, man!

Why does she call herself "LizardBreath" anyway?

Unfogged: Thank Goodness The Media Is In The Tank For The Democrats. Because otherwise all these powerful truths Ryan Lizza told us in the Week In Review today might seem to pose problems for us.

1. Apparently A number of the new representatives elected last fall were all butch and shit, to the point that some nitwit named John Lapp is calling them "Macho Dems";
2. This sort of manliness in our candidates is all artificial strategy -- apparently before this election, all Democrats were effete nancy-boys, or, worse, actual women;
3. But it's risky -- that 'gender gap' that works for the Democrats is due solely to the fact that women won't vote for candidates that are insufficiently feminine -- women are going to leave the party in droves if we keep on running men for office without castrating them first;
4. And anyway, once Democrats start running any Real Men^TM for office, voters will notice that some of our leaders aren't Real Men^TM, and will refuse to vote for them, meaning that Clinton and Pelosi, (and, oddly, Obama, who seems to be insufficiently butch for Lizza's tastes) are doomed.

So, the Democrats have been scorned by the voters for our effeteness in the past, but any attempt to butch up is totally fake and doomed because women only voted Democratic because Democrats were effete and anyway we won't go whole hog and purge all the girls and wimps from the party. God, I love the political guidance I get from reading the Times.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

---

UPDATE: The Unfogged commenters go to town in a typical display of shrillness, as they move Ryan Lizza to the "Extreme Journamalists" list and chain him in the pit:

1 Same as it ever was: Democrats are all wimpy fags. Except the women, who are hairy-legged, unfeminine lesbians.

Posted by: apostropher | Link to this comment | 01- 7-07 4:15 PM

2 And the blacks, of course, whose sexuality is twice as threatening.

Posted by: apostropher | Link to this comment | 01- 7-07 4:16 PM

3 But threatening in that unmasculine kind of way -- just not Alpha, IYKWIM.

Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 7-07 4:18 PM

4 I can't see Lizza writing something like this in TNR. He must know he's full of shit, and not care.

Posted by: David Weman | Link to this comment | 01- 7-07 4:20 PM

5 Yeah, I saw that piece and thought, "I am not going to read that, as it will merely raise my blood pressure in horrible ways." Looks like I was right. The Times has a rich and obnoxious history with this kind of process-analysis piece. Bleah.

Posted by: redfoxtailshrub | Link to this comment | 01- 7-07 4:22 PM

6 Lapp needs to shut up. I also like Schumer and Emanuel being described as "throwbacks to the era when tough-guy Democrats were urban ethnic politicians, like Dan Rostenkowski and Tip O'Neill." Ryan, sweetheart, when people talk about "tough guy" urban ethnics they don't mean Harvard educated Jews from Park Slope. Or Sarah Lawrence-educated Jews from Lincoln Park.

Posted by: Katherine | Link to this comment | 01- 7-07 4:23 PM

7 I agree with 4. This article was intensely disappointing. The whole time I was thinking "This is nothing new, you Maureen Dowd impersonator." "This is nothing new, except that these guys didn't emerge from the labor union movement." "This is nothing new, and you must realize it because of that mention of Dan Rostenkowski on the first page." "This is nothing new; did you miss the fact that Pelosi is the FIRST woman leader of the Dems, not the twenty-eighth?"

Posted by: Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 01- 7-07 4:23 PM

8 I can imagine thinking, in New York or Washington, that such an article would be read as merely amusing, with a glancing almost-truth here or there that would make the jaded readers whom journalists encounter on the cocktail circuit smirk a bit. If I thought that was the only consequence of writing such an article, I would be very wrong, of course. (Maureen Dowd, your conscience is calling on line three, please.)

Posted by: Vorticists | Link to this comment | 01- 7-07 4:25 PM

9 As I said elsewhere, Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, and Golda Meir should have taught those people something. But they didn't. As Somerby says, they write to scripts, and they'll keep writing to the same script as long as they can get away with it.

The media now lags behind popular opinion on many topics, but they still project their own preconceptions onto The American People, while at the same time claiming to be objective and maybe even liberal themselves, and also subtly hinting that while they disagree with The American People (who are idiots), they really can't disagree with them because that would be elitist.

A tangled mess of corruption and lies.

Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 7-07 4:31 PM

Bruce Bartlett continues to be shrill:

Bruce Bartlett - Times Select - New York Times Blog: Bush Recycles the Trash: George W. Bush has not been known as a great proponent of recycling -- except when it comes to ideas. It seems he has never proposed a single one that he doesn't think deserves repeated consideration, no matter how hopeless or discredited it may be. Bush proved this again on Wednesday... laid out some areas where he believes that he and the Democratic Congress can work together, which consist entirely of recycled ideas that even the Republican-controlled Congress rejected.

Bush's biggest pitch was for line-item veto authority. Rather than explain all the problems with this idea, I will simply direct readers to my March 15, 2006, post on this Web site. You see, Bush made exactly the same proposal last year and it sank without a trace -- mainly because every budget expert knows that its impact would be extremely limited.... [E]armarks, which Bush presumably would use his line-item veto to erase, make up at most one percent of the budget, and no one is suggesting that every one of them is without merit and should be abolished.... At the very least, the idea of making the line-item veto a key presidential initiative in the seventh year of an administration is uncreative....

Bush said in his op-ed that... his tax cuts had "fueled robust economic growth and record revenues."... However, if you ask most economists, they will more than likely say that the robust growth we have today is simply due to the normal workings of the business cycle -- what goes down eventually goes up again. If any governmental action deserves credit, it would be the Federal Reserve's monetary policy.... Studies of the Kennedy tax cut in the 1960s and the Reagan tax cut in the 1980s show that perhaps a third of the gross cost of a tax rate reduction might be recouped through stronger growth. No serious person believes that across-the-board tax cuts of the sort that Bush proposed ever recoup 100 percent of their gross cost.... Professor Andrew Samwick of Dartmouth, who served as chief economist of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, said this to his former colleagues about Bush's claim:

You are smart people. You know that the tax cuts have not fueled record revenues. You know what it takes to establish causality. You know that the first order effect of cutting taxes is to lower tax revenues. We all agree that the ultimate reduction in tax revenues can be less than this first order effect, because lower tax rates encourage greater economic activity and thus expand the tax base. No thoughtful person believes that this possible offset more than compensated for the first effect for these tax cuts. Not a single one.

Again, I couldn't have said it better myself.

Could any organization other than the Washington Post employ a man like this, a man who drives the esteemed Minipundit further into shrill unholy madness:

Minipundit: The Fallacies of Liberal Hawkery: Quoth Jacob Weisberg:

[N]othing that went wrong in Iraq, including the Sunni-Shiite civil whatever, was fated or inevitable. The difference between Kosovo and Iraq isn't between a country that wanted peace and one that didn't. It was a matter of better management and better luck. To assume that American intervention can't work ignores the relative success of recent "wars of choice" in Bosnia and Kosovo (leaving aside the more debatable propositions of Somalia, Haiti, and Panama).

I agree that if Clinton had run the Iraq operation with UN support and a UN peacekeeping force with the same troop-to-citizen ratio as the forces in Bosnia and Kosovo, a Dayton-style deal might have been possible and a semi-stable Iraq could have resulted. But this does not mean that any liberal had any business being half-way sympathetic to the war in the fall of 2002.... Bosnia and Kosovo had troop-to-citizen ratios of roughly 1:50. In... Iraq, that means half a million troops. The US, as should be obvious now, does not have half a million troops at its disposal, and did not in late 2002. If a troop force of that size were to be scrounged together, it would need sizable contributions from other nations. This was simply not going to happen - the French, Germans, Russians, and Chinese all refused, rightly, to buy the administration's arguments.... Almost as importantly, this lack of international support doomed the intervention's chance of getting UN backing, which would have given it the legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqi people and undermined perceptions of the enterprise as "imperialist" or oil-driven. The fact that internationally respected UN peacekeeping forces are running the show in Bosnia and Kosovo has contributed in no small measure to the success of those two operations....

Furthermore, there was no indication in fall 2002 that Bush was anywhere near as competent as Clinton. By that time, he had already botched Tora Bora, as well as countless domestic policy programs. It is especially shocking that self-described liberals like Weisberg would be willing to trust someone who had previously shown such a total lack of ability in all realms of governing with such a delicate task. Weisberg and other liberal hawks assumed that a man they knew was massively incompetent would be capable of invading and pacifying a country of 25 million without much international support or troop contributions. It is hard to see why such silly Panglossian hope should not reflect badly on them...

Gal Beckerman has now joined the ranks of those suffering from shrill unholy madness, due to the "lazy" "reporting" of the Washington Post's Lois Romano:

CJR Daily: WaPo's Obama Piece Takes Old News, Adds Nada: The article is lazy. It presents no new information, restating what is in a memoir that most political watchers (not to mentions the 800,000 people who have bought the book) were well aware of. It creates an issue and then speculates about it. "Obama's revelations were not an issue during his Senate campaign two years ago," the reporter, Lois Romano writes. "But now his open narrative of early, bad choices, including drug use starting in high school and ending in college, as well as his tortured search for racial identity, are sure to receive new scrutiny." Um, like the scrutiny the Post itself is instigating?

Besides trying to spin controversy out of thin air, Romano fails to find a single person, even in the GOP, who thinks that what Obama did thirty years ago when he was in high school will be an issue.... (Note to Post editors: any article that has within it a description of the news it reports as "old" probably should not be on the front page.)...

She watches as the corpse of Gerald Ford gets medieval on his fellow Republicans:

Stained Glass and Strained Egos - New York Times: Mr. Ford's interview with Michael Beschloss published in Newsweek, in which he blamed Ronald Reagan for costing him the 1976 election by challenging his nomination and then failing to hit the trail for him.

It was good of Mr. Ford to bring 41 and 43 together in a solemn respite from their uneasy competition over Iraq.... [George H.W. Bush] watched Rummy and Henry the K, both of whom had treated Poppy with such veiled contempt, as though he were a feather duster. "Those vicious Moktada-loving Shiites dancing around Saddam's dead body prove that Brent and I were right." Lynne Cheney glared at Poppy [Bush] as he gave his eulogy, knowing that he privately thinks that the vice president has destroyed not only Iraq and American foreign policy.... Condi [Rice]... drooping with the inchoate fear that her nearby erstwhile mentor, Brent Scowcroft, had been right about Iraq after all.

As Poppy spoke from the altar, praising Mr. Ford's generosity, he must have been mulling that his predecessor was ungenerous in spitting on him from the grave. Mr. Ford told Mr. Beschloss that Bush Senior had sold out the party to the hard right and had taken a phony, pandering position on abortion. Poppy had to have enjoyed watching Dr. K get up and lavish praise on his old boss, after Mr. Ford had sniggered to Bob Woodward that the "coy" Bavarian diva had "the thinnest skin of any public figure I ever knew."

W... curdled inside about[Ford's]... telling Mr. Woodward that it had been "a big mistake" on the part of W., Dick Cheney and Rummy to justify the Iraq war with nonexistent W.M.D. "I just don't think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security," he said....

Rummy.... "I've been gone three weeks and things are really looking up in Iraq."...

James Baker.... "I tried to help you out, son, but you're too dang stubborn. Or 'resolute,' as you say. Stubolute. A clear case of TMC -- too much Cheney"...

Chris Floyd is driven shrill by the New York Times:

Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque - High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium - Home: "Rush to Hang Hussein Was Questioned" (New York Times):

This is a very curious story. Some of it is probably true, some of it is patently false – and all of it is a massive, panicky CYA job by American officials. However, through the heavy fog of this assemblage of spin, it seems fairly obvious what has really happened: the same group of dim-witted fools, ideological cranks and violent sectarians who have driven the whole misbegotten enterprise in Iraq came up with yet another plan that they thought was a great idea. But as always, it turned out to be a botched job that has made a hellish situation even worse.

Two things stand out in this story by Burns and Santora – or rather, two salient facts lurk behind the furious spin that the reporters have assembled.

First, that despite all the protestations by U.S. officials here, it was the Americans who actually had the final say in letting the execution go forward. And second, the rank lawlessness of the execution is in fact a direct emulation of American "democracy" under the Unitary Executive Decidership of George W. Bush.

The latter point brings out some of the bitter black comedy in the story, where Burns and Allen – sorry, Burns and Santora – convey the words of a "senior Iraqi official" eager to tote PR water for the American bosses:

Told that Mr. Maliki wanted to carry out the death sentence on Mr. Hussein almost immediately, and not wait further into the 30-day deadline set by the appeals court, American officers at the Thursday meeting said that they would accept any decision but needed assurance that due process had been followed before relinquishing physical custody of Mr. Hussein.

"The Americans said that we have no issue in handing him over, but we need everything to be in accordance with the law," the Iraqi official said. “We do not want to break the law."

You must admit this is rich: Bush officials – creators of the special "military tribunals" for their special, made-up category of "enemy combatants" who can be jailed indefinitely without trial or charges or even killed, all at the arbitrary order of the omnipotent president – fretting over "due process" for Saddam Hussein. American citizens are no longer guaranteed due process – which is now solely in the Decider's gift – but we are to believe that Saddam's rights were uppermost in occupier's mind before his execution.

Well, who knows? Maybe this is one of the true bits of the story. It may well be that Bush was more concerned with Saddam's legal niceties than those of his own citizens; after all, he and Saddam have much more in common than Bush does with the overwhelming majority of Americans. They love power, love torture, love blood to be spilled at their command, see themselves as world-historical figures, great warriors inspired by God, etc.

But of course, it's far more likely that these concerns over "due process" are ex post facto fictions. At least at the highest levels. It could well be that some of the American officials on the ground realized how utterly stupid it was to rush Saddam's execution and hold it on one of Islam's highest holy days, and to let the hanging itself turn into a farce, with hecklers from Motqada al-Sadr's gang allowed in to thug it up. So yes, there may be a germ of truth in these butt-covering exercises. But obviously, if any such officials really exist, they were overruled by Washington – as always is the case with any U.S. official who has the slightest knowledge of the realities in Iraq.

After all, why should any Bush minion fret over the execution procedure? As a Maliki mouthpiece points out, Saddam was tried and convicted under a "special tribunal" operating outside the ordinary Iraqi justice system – exactly like Bush's "military tribunals." Why shouldn't the Iraqis make up the law as they go along, just like their liberators? These crocodile tears over "due process" for Saddam mask a deep and sinister hypocrisy.

I think this is how the deal went down, more or less. Maliki – the leader of a faction of violent sectarians – wanted Saddam hanged right away, as an Eid holiday gift to his base, as stated in the story. In response to this, Bush Faction leaders said, Well, OK, why not? Bush too wanted Saddam killed as a blood sacrifice to his base. U.S. officials on the ground – the ones who will have to deal with the backlash – tried to make the best of a bad situation and at least delay the execution. But they were overruled – not by Maliki, as the story ludicrously suggests – but by the White House.

For the overriding fact remains: the execution on Saturday could not have been carried out at that time, and in that manner, without approval from Washington.

Now, we don't want to fall into the fallacy here that ascribes omnipotent power to the Bush Faction, as if they exercised absolute control over events in Iraq. Clearly, events there have outrun the Bushists control almost from the very beginning. (They are, however, responsible for all the events that have grown out of the war, which they launched, very deliberately, in the full knowledge that it was not necessary.)

But in this particular case, they did have control of events – because they had literal, physical control of Saddam's body. (A control they continued to exercise after the execution, by the way, transporting the corpse to its resting place by an American helicopter. It seems the "sovereignty" of the Iraqi government in this case lasted only for the brief time it took for the hanging.) Saddam could not have been hanged by the Maliki government if the Americans had not physically turned him over to the executioners, who did their work under American auspices, on an American base.

If U.S. officials – those with any real power, that is – had had genuine concerns about the timing of the execution, they could have simply refused to turn Saddam over until, say, after Eid or at some other point. What could Maliki have done about it? Nothing.

The fact is, the leaders of the Bush Administration wanted Saddam dead, sooner rather than later. So they let Maliki kill him. They are doubtless glad to let Maliki take the heat for the botchery – thus the insultingly crude stories about Bush and his gang wringing their hands and whimpering, goodness gracious me, we didn't want it to happen this way, but what we could do? That big bad Maliki threw his weight around, and we had to give in.

No, despite the noble stenography of Burns and Santora, the facts are plain: Saddam was killed on Saturday because – or whatever reason, or reasons, or no clear reason at all -- the Bush White House wanted it to be so. If they hadn't, it wouldn't have happened.

He? She? It? writes:

Daily Kos: How's It Feel, Jim Baker?: Those of us who have protested the idiocy in Iraq from even before the first hint of "Shock" or the first glimpse of "Awe" know what it is to have the spittle of the Bush administration running down our faces. We know how it feels to be told we're on the side of Saddam and Osama. We know how it feels to be told our view doesn't count, that we're not real Americans.

But for the guy who dragged Bush's lazy ass from Florida to the White House, that big loogie right between the eyes has to be a surprise.

Less than a month ago, the Iraq Study Group issued its report calling for, among other things, a phased reduction of US troops with emphasis on training Iraqis, substantive talks with Iraq's neighbors, and diversion of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan to help save an increasingly difficult situation in that country. Since then, the decider has had a tough time making, you know, a decision. But after talking to his buds and cutting a few cords of brush, he's come to a decision.

The decision, Jimmy, is that you're as stupid as the rest of us. In talks with the BBC a Bush administration official has indicated that not only will there be no serious talks with Syria and Iran, and not only will Bush be calling for an escalation of the war in Iraq, but he's not intending to devote any additional troops to training. Rather than take the one step that might eventually lend some modicum of progress, Bush is going to deliver a half hour address "explaining in detail" how another 20 or 30 thousand troops, doing the same thing that they're doing now, is the way to go.

The BBC has been told by a senior administration source that the speech setting out changes in Mr Bush's Iraq policy is likely to come in the middle of next week.

Its central theme will be sacrifice.

Sacrifice? Only for the troops, as Bush appears ready to order up a extra helping of what he's already seen.

The speech, the BBC has been told, involves increasing troop numbers.

The exact mission of the extra troops in Iraq is still under discussion, according to officials, but it is likely to focus on providing security rather than training Iraqi forces.

The proposal, if it comes, will be highly controversial.

Already one senior Republican senator has called it Alice in Wonderland.

Here, Mr. Baker, you can borrow my handkerchief.

It's all Victor Davis Make Mine A Double Hanson's fault:

TBogg - "...a somewhat popular blogger": It is very possible that Victor Davis Make Mine A Double Hanson was suffering drunken blackouts during the eighties. How else to reconcile this:

One of the most depressing sights of the entire Saddam postmortem were the clips shown ad nauseam of all the dignitaries, diplomats, and obsequious reporters who in years past trekked to Baghdad to flatter or to pay homage to this creepy mass murderer. Watching a younger Kofi Annan, Lindberg like, pump Saddam's hand, smiling and offering blandishments was sickening. Surely the world can learn from this sordid spectacle, and not repeat the same mistake with Ahmadinejad and Assad. Their demise will come soon enough, and only the clips and outtakes of the appeasers will remain.

It is getting so that the cheap anti-American rhetoric from Europe and the Middle East about our purported complicity in killing a mass murderer should be worn as a badge of honor. We caught him, turned him over for a transparent trial, and ensured he would never murder again. So the question remains: where is the true morality-building this killer's bunkers, selling him weapons, taking his oil-or putting him in a noose?

With this:

Perhaps the most memorable of these roles came during the Reagan administration, when Rumsfeld was named special presidential envoy to the Middle East. According to the Washington Post and others, Rumsfeld was a major proponent of the Reagan administration's support of Iraq and its dictator Saddam Hussein.

As a conciliatory gesture, the U.S. removed Iraq from its list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1982, paving the way for Rumsfeld to visit Baghdad in 1983, about the midpoint of the decade-long Iran-Iraq war.

At the time, intelligence reports indicated the Iraqis were using illegal chemical weapons against Iran "almost daily." During several trips to Iraq, Rumsfeld told government officials that the U.S. would consider an Iraqi loss to Iran a major strategic defeat. In a personal meeting with Saddam Hussein in December 1983, Rumsfeld told the Butcher of Baghdad that the U.S. wanted to restore full diplomatic relations with Iraq.

In 2002, Rumsfeld tried to put a gloss on this meeting by claiming that he warned Hussein against using banned weapons, but that claim was unsupported by the State Department's notes on the meeting.

As a result of the openings created by Rumsfeld's diplomatic triumphs, U.S. companies were recruited and encouraged, both covertly and overtly, to ship poisonous chemicals and biological agents to Iraq, by the administrations of both Reagan and George Bush Sr. Care packages to Saddam included sample strains of anthrax and bubonic plague, and components which would be used to develop nerve poisons like sarin gas and ricin.

It's not like Victor Davis to skim over anything that might possibly make his point look ridiculous as well as the work of a hack at the top of his game. I guess he started hitting the Zimas early this New Year's Eve...

Max Sawicky is shrill:

MaxSpeak, You Listen!: THAT WAS DIEM, THIS IS NOW (II):

Jim Henley is really shrill today:

:[T]the US and its Iraqi allies chose to try Saddam on one of his relatively minor crimes because if they did so they could get him safely hung before they had to try him for the major ones, the gas attacks and massacres that happened during The Years of Playing Footsie with the United States. The Dujail reprisals were a war crime, no doubt about it, a bigger sham of justice than Saddam's own trial, by two orders of magnitude. They were also the sort of war crime that people like Ralph Peters and a hundred other pundits and parapundits think the United States should be committing. Every time you read a complaint about "politically correct rules of engagement" you are reading someone who would applaud a Dujail-level slaughter if only we were to perpetrate it. Those are the people who are happiest of all about tonight's execution. Smells like - victory! It's the pomander they don against the stench.

Gerald Ford was too smart not to be shrill. Good to know he still had all his wits about him:

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: December 24, 2006 - December 30, 2006 Archives: Woodward's latest in WaPo...

Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. "I don't think I would have gone to war," he said a little more than a year after President Bush had launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford's own administration.

In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford "very strongly" disagreed with the current president's justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney -- Ford's White House chief of staff -- and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford's chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.

"Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said. "And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do."

In a conversation that veered between the current realities of a war in the Middle East and the old complexities of the war in Vietnam whose bitter end he presided over as president, Ford took issue with the notion of the United States entering a conflict in service of the idea of spreading democracy.

The interview was embargoed until after Ford's death.

Greg Sargent is really shrill. It/s Kathleen Hall Jamieson's fault:

The Horse's Mouth: Sit down, everyone. I think I've found what is far and away the most perfect example of "no-matter-how-bad-it-gets-it's-helpful-to-Bush" punditry ever produced anywhere. It comes courtesy of Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Jamieson appears to believe that the fact that the Iraq quagmire has gotten so bad offers hidden political benefits to the President in that it will make Americans more receptive to Bush's imminent solutions to it:

Even with that seemingly no-win set of expectations, the president does have room to succeed, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania...

What people want is to hear Bush explain a clear route to an honorable outcome -- one in which it is clear that the war left Iraq and the U.S. better off, Jamieson said.

"There are times when a country roots for a leader. I think that's what happening with this," Jamieson said. "A lot of people who voted for Democrats want the president to succeed. I think he has some advantage coming in, because the public so desperately wants success."

Bush has an advantage "coming in"? Do we really believe that the American public is so dumb that it's forgotten that Bush created this problem? This one really does capture punditry at its worst: It's completely, even laughably divorced from reality, and contains no discernible desire to root opinion in anything resembling empirical evidence.

It's Joe Lieberman's fault:

Eschaton: Getting So Much Better All the Time: Except it's getting worse. Never fear, though, the very serious Joe Lieberman (CFL-CT) said this in July:

BRIDGEPORT %u2014 U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman believes the U.S. will withdraw a "solid' contingent of its military forces in Iraq by the end of the year because of gains made by the Iraqi armed forces. "There really has been progress made by the Iraqi military," Lieberman said Tuesday during a meeting with the Connecticut Post's editorial board. "Two-thirds of it could stand on its own or lead the fight with our logistical support." The three-term U.S. senator said he believes a complete withdrawal is possible by late 2007 or early 2008...

Duncan Black is shrill:

Eschaton: As we've seen with both neoconservative hawks and liberal hawks, they're never wrong and the mess they've created will always justify the continued mess. Brookings' Michael O'Hanlon has informed us that "2007 will be make or break time in Iraq." Actually, that's not true, as tends to happen with this issue he informed us that it will "very likely" be "make or break time." A year from now we'll find out that no, 2008 is Pony Time. And O'Hanlon also tells us that if 2007 leans towards break instead of make, there are some wonderful New Ideas to try like, say, "a plan to help people to where they feel safer within the country." Which, once you run that through the Quiet American decoder ring, actually means "forced ethnic partition and mass relocation." Because once we do that there will surely be nothing to fight about anymore. Whatever. And this is the Left Flank of acceptable elite discourse on the subject, almost 4 years after the dirty f------ hippies were proved f------ right.

Leon Panetta Causes a Shrillness Meltdown

It's Atrios. Condition shrillitical. Pray to the FSM that he makes even a partial recovery:

Eschaton: LISTEN TO ATRIOS, DAMNIT: I'm not one to hit the caps lock or refer to myself in the third person, but this just about caused a meltdown:

WASHINGTON -- Iraq Study Group member Leon E. Panetta believed that his panel's unanimous bipartisan recommendations about a new way forward in Iraq would give President Bush the political cover needed for a dramatic policy shift. So the former chief of staff to President Clinton has watched with alarm as Bush this week signaled that he may reject suggestions about diplomacy and withdrawing most US troops from Iraq by 2008.

Bush has even criticized the idea that the group was providing a "graceful exit" from the war -- which is what Panetta and other panel members figured Bush most wanted.

How is that little old me, one of the blogosphere's most disreputable rabid lambs, understands what's going a hell of a lot better than The Wise Old Men of Washington? Really, I'm just aghast at this. Bush has made it quite clear for months and years that leaving is losing. My brilliant insight isn't based on my ability to look deep into his soul, it is based on my ability to hear what he has said over and over again.

It's possible the ISG could've provided cover for Bush to shift from "stay the course!" to something slightly different, but only if that slightly different thing didn't involve, you know, leaving. Bush has made that perfectly clear repeatedly. Leaving is losing. Staying is winning. It's that simple.

...adding, the main issue is that there was no way the ISG was going to achieve desired change simply by "providing cover." To the extent that they could they had to try to force his hand. If they'd had the 6 weeks+ of media hype with Broderella and the gang falling all over themselves to praise their brilliance, and then they'd laid the nuclear "get the f--- out NOW you goddamn moron!" smackdown (in slightly more diplomatic language) on Bush, then maybe, just maybe, they'd have caused a big enough earthquake to force a sensible change.

I don't think a "get the f--- out NOW you goddamn moron!" smackdown would have had any effect. It would have had to be an "impeach this mofo NOW!" smackdown. That might have made a difference.

New Frontiers of Shrillness

Holden doesn't have to write anything to be shrill. All he has to do is quote George W. Bush:

First Draft - Your President Speaks!:

Excuses, Excuses

I put off my speech -- actually, I was quite flexible about when I was going to give my speech, to begin with -- and one of the main reasons why is I really do want the new Secretary of Defense to have time to get to know people and hear people and be a part of this deliberation. And he will not be sworn in until next Monday. I also -- one of the interesting things about this experience is that there's a lot of ideas and a lot of opinions. And I want to make sure I hear from as many of those ideas and opinions as possible.

People Got To Understand

But one thing people got to understand is we'll be headed toward achieving our objectives.

"Energy" = Oil -- What It's All About

Moderate people -- moderate governments in the Middle East would be making irrational decisions about their future. It would be a disaster for governments that have got energy resources to be in the hands of these extremists. They would use energy to extract blackmail from the United States. And when you couple all that with a regime that is -- doesn't like the United States having a nuclear weapon, you can imagine a world of turmoil.

Wrong Ira_

It's in Saudi's interest, it's in Jordan's interest, it's in the Gulf Coast countries' interest that there be a stable Iran, an Iran that is capable of rejecting Iranian influence -- I mean, Iraq that is capable of rejecting Iranian influence.

I Have A Theory That Is Mine

And as I deliberate the way forward, I keep in mind that we've got brave souls that need -- to need to know that we're in this fight with a strategy to help them achieve the objectives that we've got.

Still No Sign Of Reality

Q As you give the new Defense Secretary time to get more in the mix, what is the strategy that you're looking to build? Is it a military strategy for success in Iraq, or a political one?

THE PRESIDENT: I think that our military cannot do this job alone. Our military needs a political strategy that is effective. And that includes things such an oil law passed by the Iraqis that basically says to the people, all of you, regardless of where you live or your religion, get to share in the bounty of our nation. It requires a reconciliation effort, including a rational de-Baathification law.

Q That's not something you can do with your new strategy, is it?

THE PRESIDENT: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely, I can do that with my strategy. I mean, it is -- I can hold people to account. It's something the military recognizes that they're not -- that's not their job, it's my job to convince the Maliki government to make the hard decisions necessary to move his country forward.

Atrios Is Not Shrill Enough!

Atrios writes:

Eschaton: Stay the Course: The ISG had one chance (not a big chance, I admit, but a chance) to force a policy change. That was to clearly, and in no uncertain terms, advocate the policy that a strong majority of Americans want - a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. They failed to do that, and now they're going to wonder why The Decider is filing their recommendations in the circular filing cabinet:

Former White House advisers to George H.W. Bush are keenly disappointed and concerned about the current President Bush's initial reaction to the report by the Iraq Study Group. They consider him rather dismissive of the group's conclusions, issued yesterday, which include the view that current Iraq policy is failing. The group recommends a variety of important changes, such as assigning U.S. troops to play more of an advisory and training role and less of a combat role. The ISG also recommends that the United States withdraw most of its combat brigades by early 2008 and that the administration increase diplomatic efforts, including starting talks with Iran and Syria and energetically working toward an Israeli-Palestinian solution.

"We have a classic case of circling the wagons," says a former adviser to Bush the elder. "If President Bush changes his policy in Iraq in a fundamental way, it undermines the whole premise of his presidency. I just don't believe he will ever do that." White House advisers say Bush won't react in detail to the ISG report for several weeks, while he assesses it and awaits various internal government reports on the situation from his own advisers. Bush tells aides he doesn't want to "outsource" his role as commander in chief. Some Bush allies say this is a way to buy some time as the president tries to decide how to deal with rising pressure to alter his strategy in Iraq and hopes the critical media focus on the Iraq war will soften.

Atrios is insufficiently shrill. Baker's one chance to affect the world was not to advocate a timetable for withdrawal. Baker's one chance to affect the world was to advocate the resignation of George W. Bush--that might have created some motion.