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

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

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

Here's the tape:

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

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

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

Now we can resume:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Ashcroft Threatened to Resign

Gavin McNett writes:

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

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

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

Lisa Shiffren Drives Matthew Yglesias and Commentors Shrill!

Yglesias writes:

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

And commentors:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At Eschaton:

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

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

Andrew Sullivan channels Juan Cole. Both are shrill:

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

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

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

Dana Milbank Drives Mark Kleiman Shrill!

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

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

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

The story starts and ends with nasty, feeble humor:

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

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

Ha. Ha. Ha.

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

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

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

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

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

Greenwald starts by quoting Klein today:

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

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

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

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

Here's Klein from 1.1 Friedman units ago:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starring the Heinz and Bush families:

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

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

The Journamalism of NPR Drives Lance Knobel Shrill!

He writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bill Gross Joins the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill

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

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

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

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

The Cossack Works for the Czar, Fred!

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

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

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

Matthew Yglesias Reads the New Republic

It drives him shriller than ever:

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

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

Keith Olbermann Is Shrill

The Poor Man directs us to:

Davey Hume Is Shrill!

One of our oldest members:

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

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

But Duncan Black Is Shrill!

At Eschaton:

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

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

Matthew Yglesias Is Not Shrill Today, But Is Snarky

Yglesias writes:

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