Robert No-Facts is shrill:

Robert Novak: Bashing Bush in Aspen: For two full days, George W. Bush was bashed. He was taken to task on his handling of stem cell research, population control, the Iraq war and, especially, Hurricane Katrina. The critics were no left-wing bloggers. They were rich, mainly Republican and presumably Bush voters in the last two presidential elections.

The Bush-bashing occurred last weekend at the annual Aspen conference sponsored by the New York investment firm Forstmann Little & Co. Over 200 invited guests, mostly prestigious, arrived Thursday night (many by private aircraft) and stayed until Sunday morning for more than golf, hikes and gourmet meals. They faithfully attended the discussions presided over by PBS's Charlie Rose on such serious subjects as "global poverty and human rights" and "the 'new' world economy." The connecting link was hostility to President Bush.

"All discussions are off the record," admonished the conference's printed schedule. Consequently, I will refrain from specifically quoting panelists and audience members. But the admonition says nothing about personal conversations outside the sessions. Nor do I feel inhibited in quoting myself. Even if I am violating the spirit of secrecy rules, revealing criticism of Bush by this elite group, and the paucity of defense for him, is valuable in reflecting the president's parlous political condition.

The Forstmann Little Aspen Weekend is made possible by the generosity of Theodore J. Forstmann, a doughty supporter of supply-side economics and longtime contributor to the Republican Party. Invited guests are drawn from government, diplomacy, politics, the arts, entertainment and journalism.

I was surprised that the program indicated the first panel, on stem cell research, consisted solely of scientists hostile to the Bush administration's position. In the absence of any disagreement, I took the floor to suggest there are scientists and bioethicists with dissenting views.... The response was peeved criticism of my intervention and certainly no support.

I do not see myself as a defender of the Bush presidency, and I am sure the White House does not regard me as such. But as a member of the second panel consisting of journalists, I felt constrained to argue against implications that Hurricane Katrina should cause the president to rediscover race and poverty. My comments again generated more criticism from the audience and obvious exasperation by Charlie Rose. Indeed, after the closing dinner Saturday night, the moderator made clear he was displeased by my conduct.

After the first two panels, I feared I was the odd man out in accepting Teddy Forstmann's invitation. But during a break, one of the president's closest friends -- who had remained silent -- thanked me profusely for my comments. That set a pattern. Throughout the next two days, men and women who were mute publicly thanked me privately for speaking up. When I said nothing during one panel discussion, some people asked me why I was silent.

Longtime participants in Forstmann Little conferences (this was my first and, after this column, probably my last) told me they had not experienced such hostility against a Republican president at previous events. Yet, they were sure a majority of the guests had voted for Bush.

This analysis was reported to me over lunch by a financier who regularly attends these events. When he thanked me for my comments and said he shared my sentiments, I asked why he did not express them publicly at a session. He replied that he did not feel able to articulate what he felt. Critics of the president who are vocal and supporters who are reticent comprise a massive communications failure.

U.S. News & World Report disclosed this week, with apparent disdain, that presidential adviser Karl Rove took time off from the Katrina relief effort to be at Aspen. He was needed as a counterweight. I settled in for serious fireworks, expecting Bush-bashers to assault his alter ego at the conference's final session. However, direct confrontation with a senior aide must have been more difficult than a remote attack on the president. It would be a shame if Rove returned to Washington without informing George W. Bush how erstwhile friends have turned against him.

Texas Grand Jury: shrill and empanelled

Grand Jury deliberations are secret, but we're sure they're saying something like:

Aaaiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh two seconds of deliberation R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaiii! AAAAAAIIIIIIIII!!!!

And when DeLay calls his indictment "partisan", we're pretty sure that means the grand jury went out for drinks afterwards. Party on.

Yes, the Belgravia Dispatch is shrill:

THE BELGRAVIA DISPATCH: Fishback : Even the most committed Rumsfeld-phobe (which I most assuredly am) struggles to believe this:

Another source informs that the word is around that Rumsfeld has taken a strong interest in this. He is quoted as saying "Either break him or destroy him, and do it quickly." And no doubt about it, that is just what they are doing. Expect some trumped up charges against Fishback soon, similar to what they did to Muslim Chaplain Captain James Yee, whom they accused of treason with no solid evidence and then, when those charges evaporated, went on to accuse him of adultery. The bottom line, as the NYT reports today, is that the military and the Bush administration are determined to stop any real investigation about how torture and abuse came to be so widespread in the U.S. military. The scapegoating of retarded underlings like Lynndie England is an attempt to deflect real responsibility for the new pro-torture policies that go all the way to the White House. It's a disgusting cover-up and it rests on breaking the will and resolve of decent servicemen and women brave enough to expose wrong-doing.

Would Rummy, who while despicable on many levels, I wouldn't accuse of being dumb (aside from his dim inability to plan for the post-war and an insurgency), really say "(e)ither break him or destroy him, and do it quickly"? I will say this. If I conclude in the coming days, analyzing data as rationally and reasonably as I can, that a cover-up to silence Fishback is being mounted from the top, that's when I get off the bus.

National Review drives Arnold Kling into shrill unholy madness!

EconLog, NRO babble, Arnold Kling: Library of Economics and Liberty : Why does National Review Online embarrass itself with this sort of economic commentary?

Budget deficits are only too large if they usurp the private economy's need for physical capital and labor, thereby precipitating an inflationary surge.

So, as long as there is are any unused resources in the economy, the government should increase spending?

...tax payments simply reduce account balances in the private sector. Nothing "goes" anywhere; the government doesn't "get anything." To reinforce this point, if you pay your taxes in actual cash, or buy Treasury securities (government bonds) with actual cash, the Fed shreds the cash. Likewise, if you donate cash to the federal government for Katrina, it shreds it. In fact, if you take a $100 bill and burn it, you've donated that $100 to Katrina!

I'm sorry, but I've read the preceding paragraph several times, and it makes less sense each time. Same with the following:

Will private borrowers be crowded out [by increased government deficits]? Impossible. The causation is "loans create deposits," as taught on day one of every traditional money and banking class. The act of borrowing itself creates exactly that same amount of new liabilities (deposits). The process is "self funding" and circular, as a matter of accounting. The concept of a "pool of savings" that somehow gets "used up" by borrowers is a throwback to the time of fixed exchange rates and gold standards, and has no application in today%u2019s floating-exchange-rate world.

When I was in grad school, I somehow missed the lecture where they said that government deficits are self-funding in a flexible exchange-rate regime.

I would suggest that NRO clean out its stable of economics writers and instead choose from some of the other bloggers around. James Hamilton or Andrew Samwick or Russ Roberts or Don Boudreaux or Tyler Cowen or Alex Tabarrok.

The incoherent babble that is NRO economics today simply will not do.

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Arnold Kling R’lyeh wagn’nagl fhtagn! Kling fhtagn!! Kling fhtagn!!!

There, there. Now, now. Daniel Gross has made the mistake of reading too far in the pages of National Review, and has succumbed to shrill unholy madness. In the afternoon, we take him off campus down to the Miskatonic River to watch the Ancient Old Ones rend their prey with their tentacles:

Daniel Gross: September 18, 2005 - September 24, 2005 Archives: Who is the biggest nincompoop writing about business and economics on National Review?... Kathryn Jean Lopez makes her bid for greatness today. In a piece about Wal-Mart, she makes it clear that she thinks that everybody working at Wal-Mart has health insurance:

But, the employer of a million people has been known to provide health insurance to over 90 percent of its workers (the others covered by another family member).

Has been known by whom? Not by Judge Richard Posner, who wrote... "Wal-Mart provides health insurance to fewer than half its employees (though, as some critics neglect to note, many of the others are covered by spouses' health insurance or by Medicare), and it charges those employees whom it does cover a significant fraction of the total insurance premiums." Not even Wal-Mart makes such a claim. Lopez could have simply surfed over to Wal-Mart's website and learned that the company has 1.2 million associates and that last year it insured 568,000 associates, or about 47.3 percent. That's substantially less than 90. And if all the others that Wal-Mart wasn't covering were covered by another family member, as Lopez blithely assumes, without citation or evidence, why would Wal-Mart employees and their dependents be enrolled in government-run insurance programs like Medicaid.

You don't need a full-time fact-checker to catch and correct an embarrassing error like this. You just need a sentient human being.

So, do the people who "edit" the content at National Review really also believe that all Wal-Mart employees have health insurance? Will they run a correction? Or do they just lack the intelligence, professional pride, or energy to bother to check.

Say, rather, that they follow the line laid down when their spiritual guide William F. Buckley was hinting we should think seriously about whether George C. Marshall perhaps was a Maoist agent: intelligence and professional pride get in the way of making stuff up, and so are not useful.

Kevin Drum asks a question:

The Washington Monthly: THE F-WORD.... From Andrew Sullivan today:

"CORPORATIST CRONYISM": An arresting analysis of the Bush administration's governing "philosophy." More like Spain and Italy in the 1930s than anything resembling Anglo-American conservatism.

Um, did Sullivan just call Bush a fascist? Just curious....

The answer is, "Yes." Andrew Sullivan did just call George W. Bush a fascist.

Sebastian Mallaby is shrill:

'Whatever It Costs': By Sebastian Mallaby: It's hard to say what's worse: The incompetence of the administration's initial hurricane response or the cowardice of its follow-up. Faced with a small hit to his ratings, the president who once boasted of ignoring polls is rushing to spend billions of other people's dollars on saving his political skin. His philosophy is, "It's going to cost whatever it costs." That phrase should be the title of some future history of the Bush era.

The worst part is, President Bush doesn't even think his splurge will be effective. If he really believed that government could overcome racial inequality by targeting subsidies at minority businesses, he should have rolled out a national program long ago. But he doesn't believe anything of the kind. His promises of racial healing are entirely cynical.

What Bush really believes is that government is ineffective. Or at least that's what he says he believes: Late last week he declared that his (self-) reconstruction program should be financed by cuts in other government spending rather than by tax increases, so as to "maintain economic growth and vitality." In other words, government spending is bad because it's inefficient and wasteful. Leaving money in private hands is intrinsically superior. If Bush believes that, why does he think that government should build whole shantytowns of provisional housing? Why doesn't he believe in the private rental market of the South, which is offering 1.1 million units of vacant property?

Early on after the catastrophe, Small Government Bush suspended a law that props up construction wages paid by federal contractors, with the result that workers in the disaster zone will have less disposable income but government will save money.

One week later, after the panic had set in, Reconstruction Bush was yammering about $5,000 worker recovery accounts, which would come on top of the free government homes and sundry other benefits that the administration is also promising.

If Bush used this moment as he used the aftermath of Sept. 11, some of this spending could be forgiven. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon exposed the nation's complacency about terrorism; Bush stepped forward and changed that. In a similar way, Hurricane Katrina exposed the complacency of our business-as-usual attitude toward domestic government. Bush has barely noticed.

The complacency begins with the appalling state of federal staffing. It's not just that the hapless former boss of the Federal Emergency Management Agency knew more about horses than floods. It's that the government agencies that must now manage relief are missing senior officials, either because their confirmations have been held up in the Senate or because the administration has yet to appoint anyone. As The Post reported last week, seven of the top positions at the Department of Housing and Urban Development stand vacant. Perhaps it's no surprise that the administration has cooked up its crazy shantytown proposal.

This staffing crisis is well known; two months before the 2001 attacks, about half of the national security positions stood empty. But Katrina creates an opportunity to tackle the problem. The federal government needs to be returned to an earlier era, when more executive-branch positions went to career civil servants who didn't need to be confirmed and didn't owe their jobs to college roommates. Bush hasn't even raised this issue.

Katrina also exposed the corruption in the way government dispenses money. The levees around New Orleans were inadequate not because the nation spends too little on water infrastructure; far from it. They were inadequate because water funds are allocated by cronyism rather than by cost-benefit analysis. On any honest crunching of the numbers, fortifying New Orleans looked like an excellent investment. But undeserving projects hogged all the money because they had more powerful sponsors in Congress. Bush hasn't breathed a word about this scandal.

Or take the perverse state of federal flood insurance. Because the program is subsidized, the feds are effectively paying people to build vulnerable houses on the beach; then they bail out flood victims whether or not they've actually signed up and paid their premiums. You might think that Katrina has driven home this lesson once and for all. Bush shows no sign of having grasped it.

Most seriously of all, Katrina exposed the government's incapacity to prepare for emergencies. The failure of response to a predicted flood in New Orleans is only the tip of the iceberg. Name just about any potential disaster, from a bioterrorism attack to avian flu, from an interruption in the flow of Saudi oil to a crash in the dollar. Are the feds prepared? Of course not. They are not even preparing for problems that are 100 percent assured, such as the coming baby bust.

After the terrorist attacks of 2001, Bush rose to the challenge -- perhaps rather too vigorously. After Katrina, he's lost his political nerve and all sense of the big picture. The hurricane has exposed our government as complacent, corrupt and unprepared; it has also created a brief and fleeting chance to launch bold reforms. Yet Bush seems content to accept business as usual. He will sit back and wait for disasters, then write large checks. Hey, it's going to cost whatever it costs. Is this supposed to be leadership?

I sense it will be a long time before Fareed Zakaria votes for a Republican:

MSNBC - Leaders Who Won't Choose : President Bush explains that he will spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding the Gulf Coast without raising any new revenues. Republican leader Tom DeLay declines any spending cuts because "there is no fat left to cut in the federal budget." This would be funny if it weren't so depressing. What is happening in Washington today is business as usual in the face of a national catastrophe. The scariest part is that we've been here before. After 9/11 we have created a new government agency, massively increased domestic spending and fought two wars. And the president did all this without rolling back any of his tax cuts--in fact, he expanded them--and refused to veto a single congressional spending bill. This was possible because Bush inherited a huge budget surplus in 2000. But that's all gone. The cupboard is now bare.

Whatever his other accomplishments, Bush will go down in history as the most fiscally irresponsible chief executive in American history. Since 2001, government spending has gone up from $1.86 trillion to $2.48 trillion, a 33 percent rise in four years! Defense and Homeland Security are not the only culprits. Domestic spending is actually up 36 percent in the same period. These figures come from the libertarian Cato Institute's excellent report "The Grand Old Spending Party," which explains that "throughout the past 40 years, most presidents have cut or restrained lower-priority spending to make room for higher-priority spending. What is driving George W. Bush's budget bloat is a reversal of that trend." To govern is to choose. And Bush has decided not to choose. He wants guns and butter and tax cuts.

People wonder whether we can afford Iraq and Katrina. The answer is, easily. What we can't afford simultaneously is $1.4 trillion in tax cuts and more than $1 trillion in new entitlement spending over the next 10 years.... Robert Hormats of Goldman Sachs has pointed out that previous presidents acted differently. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt cut nonwar spending by more than 20 percent, in addition to raising taxes to finance the war effort. During the Korean War, President Truman cut non-defense spending 28 percent and raised taxes to pay the bills. In both cases these presidents were often slashing cherished New Deal programs that they had created.... The U.S. Congress is a national embarrasment, except that no one is embarrassed. There are a few men of conscience left, like John McCain, but McCain's pleas against pork seem to have absolutely no effect. They are beginning to have the feel of a quaint hobby, like collecting exotic stamps.

Today's Republicans believe in pork, but they don't believe in government. So we have the largest government in history but one that is weak and dysfunctional. Public spending is a cynical game of buying votes or campaign contributions, an utterly corrupt process run by lobbyists and special interests with no concern for the national interest. So we shovel out billions on "Homeland Security" to stave off nonexistent threats to Wisconsin, Wyoming and Montana while New York and Los Angeles remain unprotected. We mismanage crises with a crazy-quilt patchwork of federal, local and state authorities--and sing paeans to federalism to explain our incompetence. We denounce sensible leadership and pragmatism because they mean compromise and loss of ideological purity. Better to be right than to get Iraq right....

[W]e need government. We already pay for it. Can somebody help us get our money's worth?

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Zakaria R’lyeh wagn’nagl fhtagn!

The Press: So Not Shrill It's Exasperating

What a bizarre reality we live in where the most powerful person in the world can pretend to not know something in such a transparent and hamfisted way and not get called out for it:

Mr. Bush, surveying storm damage in Gulfport, Miss., initially brushed aside reporters' questions about Mr. Brown's resignation.

"I was spending time with people," he said, referring to his tours of the devastated areas in New Orleans and elsewhere in the Gulf Coast region. "It was unbelievable. So, I can't comment on something that you may know more about than I do."

The president said he had not discussed the resignation with Mr. Brown or Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, which oversees FEMA. He said that he would speak to Mr. Chertoff later from Air Force One.

"Maybe you know something I don't know," he said to reporters asking about the resignation. "There will be plenty of time to figure out what went right and what went wrong. There's time to try to blame somebody but they want to get their lives back together."

Seriously, does anyone who has covered Washington politics for more than fifteen nanoseconds believe that Bush didn't force Brown to resign? I mean, I kinda feel sorry that Bush had to break his "no one gets fired no matter how criminally negligent you are" policy--plus, he probably already scheduled the medal ceremony that will now have to be cancelled. But the fact that no one pointed out Bush's obvious disingenuous behavior shows the American press core has hit a new low.

Translation: You spineless hosers.

Cato's Doug Bandow is shrill:

cantonrep.com : Administration is always surprised, never accountable, Friday, September 9, 2005 By Doug Bandow: WASHINGTON -- Is George W. Bush a serious person? It's not a question to ask lightly of a decent man who holds an office worthy of respect. But it must be asked. No one "anticipated the breach of the levees," he said, after being criticized for his administration's dilatory response to the suffering in New Orleans. A day later, he told his director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration, Michael Brown: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

The most important duty at the moment obviously is to respond to the human calamity left by Hurricane Katrina, not engage in endless recriminations. But it is not clear that this president and this administration are capable of doing what is necessary. They must not be allowed to avoid responsibility for the catastrophe that has occurred on their watch.... In 2001, George Bush's FEMA cited a hurricane hit on New Orleans as one of the three top possible disasters facing the United States. No wonder that the New Orleans Times-Picayune, its presses under water, editorialized that "No one can say they didn't see it coming."...

[C]onsider the president's belief that Brown has been doing a great job. Brown declared last Thursday -- the fourth day of flooding in New Orleans -- that "the federal government did not even know about the convention center people until today." Does the head of FEMA not watch a television, read a newspaper, talk to an aide, check a Web site or have contact with anyone in the real world?... But no one has been held accountable for anything.

The administration set this pattern long ago: It is constantly surprised and never accountable.... The administration underestimated the problem, failed to plan for the predictable aftermath, and refused to accept responsibility for its actions -- just like when the president took America into war based on false and distorted intelligence. Then the administration failed to prepare for violent resistance in Iraq. The Pentagon did not provide America's soldiers with adequate quantities of body armor, armored vehicles and other equipment. New terrorist affiliates sprang up, new terrorist recruits flooded Iraq, and new terrorist attacks were launched around the world, all contrary to administration expectations. In none of these cases has anyone taken responsibility for anything...

Stephen Bainbridge is shrill:

ProfessorBainbridge.com: Iraq and Katrina : Remember when I said George Bush was pissing away the concervative moment by his mishandling of the Iraq war and its aftermath? I figured only the rabid Bush-haters on the left and paleo-right would make a connection between Iraq and Hurricane Katrina, so I decided to leave that meme to them. Until now.The deployment of thousands of National Guard troops from Mississippi and Louisiana in Iraq when Hurricane Katrina struck hindered those states' initial storm response, military and civilian officials said Friday.

Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said that "arguably" a day or so of response time was lost due to the absence of the Mississippi National Guard's 155th Infantry Brigade and Louisiana's 256th Infantry Brigade, each with thousands of troops in Iraq. "Had that brigade been at home and not in Iraq, their expertise and capabilities could have been brought to bear," said Blum.

Blum said that to replace those units' command and control equipment, he dispatched personnel from Guard division headquarters from Kansas and Minnesota shortly after the storm struck. ... "Iraq and other overseas commitments do not inhibit our ability to sustain this effort here at home," Blum said in an interview with three reporters who flew to Bay St. Louis with him Friday from Washington. (Link)

Even if Iraq won't prevent us from sustaining the response to Katrina, for a senior military official with Blum's evident experience to admit that it delayed the response is a pretty stunning admission. It's probably going to give the criticism of the administration and the GOP real traction with people of good sense and good will ... as it should.

Trent Lott is still shrill:

Lott responds to Brown being relieved of duties - The Clarion-Ledger : Statement from U.S. Sen. Trent Lott regarding the decision to relieve FEMA Director Michael Brown of overseeing Katrina relief efforts: "Something needed to be done. While I have been hesitant to publicly criticize Michael Brown, my staff and I had already concluded that FEMA was overwhelmed, undermanned and not capable of doing its job. My office has been successful in working directly with administration officials in Washington, instead of FEMA, to bring relief to Mississippians impacted by Hurricane Katrina. And we have worked with generous corporations, businesses and charities in funneling targeted relief to Mississippians where it is needed. Something needed to happen. Michael Brown has been acting like a private, instead of a general. When you're in the middle of a disaster, you can't stop to check the legal niceties or to review FEMA regulations before deciding to help Mississippians knocked flat on their backs. FEMA needs to just say 'yes' and get it done. I'm hopeful we'll see some changes in that direction after today's announcement."

Rod Dreher of National Review is shrill:

The Corner on National Review Online : THE COST OF CRONYISM [Rod Dreher]It would be very wrong, I believe, to let the ignominious Michael Brown be the scapegoat for FEMA's sins. Check out this front-pager from the WaPo. Turns out that a raft of FEMA's top leaders have little or no emergency management experience, but are instead politically well connected to the GOP and the White House. This is a scandal, a real scandal.

How is it possible that four years after 9/11, the president treats a federal agency vital to homeland security as a patronage prize?

With that thought, he begins to approach the heart of Bushism. He needs to stop thinking immediately, or he will join us in shrill unholy madness.

Law Professor Breaks It Down, Breaks Down

University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos looked into FEMA head Mike Brown's background and found... pocket lint?

When Brown left the iaha four years ago, he was, among other things, a failed former lawyer--a man with a 20-year-old degree from a semi-accredited law school who hadn't attempted to practice law in a serious way in nearly 15 years and who had just been forced out of his job in the wake of charges of impropriety. At this point in his life, returning to his long-abandoned legal career would have been very difficult in the competitive Colorado legal market. Yet, within months of leaving the IAHA , he was handed one of the top legal positions in the entire federal government: general counsel for a major federal agency. A year later, he was made its number-two official, and, a year after that, Bush appointed him director of FEMA.

It's bad enough when attorneys are named to government jobs for which their careers, no matter how distinguished, don't qualify them. But Brown wasn't a distinguished lawyer: He was hardly a lawyer at all. When he left the IAHA , he was a 47-year-old with a very thin resumé and no job. Yet he was also what's known in the Mafia as a "connected guy." That such a person could end up in one of the federal government's most important positions tells you all you need to know about how the Bush administration works--or, rather, doesn't.

Yes, Professor Campos, sometimes when you look at nothingness the nothingness looks back at you, with an annoying CNN ticker under it, no less.

Trent "I Like Strom Thurmond Because He Thinks Lynching Should Not Be a Federal Crime" Lott has joined the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill

POPLARVILLE, Mississippi (CNN): Lott said he has been trying to get FEMA to send 20,000 trailers "sitting in Atlanta" to the Mississippi coast, and he urged President Bush during a meeting Monday to intervene. He said FEMA has refused to ship the trailers until contracts are secured. "FEMA and MEMA need to be saying, 'Yes' to Mississippi's needs, not,'No.,' the former majority leader said in a written statement.

"Mississippians are homeless, hungry and hurting." Similar stories of governmental red tape have been reported elsewhere, including a case of 100 surgeons and paramedics hindered from caring for hurricane victims in rural Mississippi.... "This is an emergency situation without peer, like nothing our generation has ever encountered," Lott said. "If suffering people along the Gulf Coast, from Mobile to New Orleans, are going to recover as soon as possible, we'll need an unprecedented public and private effort that can't be hampered by a process geared toward much lesser disasters."

Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Trent Lott R'lyeh Wagn'nagl Fhtagn! Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Trent Lott R'lyeh Wagn'nagl Fhtagn!! Lott Fhtagn!!! LOTT FHTAGN!!!!

With Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott among the shrill, can Tom Delay be far behind?

Gregory Djerejian crosses the Krugman barrier and is finally, totally shrill!

Welcome Gregory! Report with your duffle bag to the Shoggoth Wing for your formal initiation into the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill:

THE BELGRAVIA DISPATCH: President "Heck of a Job" Bush: Well, it's not unbelievable, sadly. It has become standard operating procedure with this Administration. Colossal missteps are made (no serious attention paid to what might happen if the levees were breached, no thought of moving to expeditiously evacuate the Superdome, no apprecation that basic law and order might be grossly imperiled if the city became submerged in floodwaters, no contingency planning for an insurgency in Iraq, no appreciation of the full ramifications of tossing aside the Geneva Conventions) and time and again there is a staggering lack of accountability.

Well, here at B.D. we're sick of the empty bear hugs and cutesy nicknames, the circle the wagons damage control mentality, cheap ass-covering and rampant buck-passing, the guitar-strumming and talk of Trent Lott's porch looking all antebellum swell post reconstruction and Kennebunkport 'let them move to Texas' insouciance. Above all else, B.D is sick of the sheer spectacle of grim incompetence that humiliated this nation as New Orleans descended into mayhem reminiscent of wartime Haiti or Liberia--with hundreds if not thousands perhaps needlessly dying because of government ineptitude (though the human toll would be immense even if the planning and governmental reaction had been far superior).

There was massive culpability, to be sure, at the local and state level as well. But, make no mistake, the federal response during the first week was grotesquely amateur. Particularly with FEMA, of course, but also at the now so risibly named Department of Homeland Security. The government failed in its most fundamental duty--ensuring the basic physical safety of its citizens. And it failed miserably.

Does anyone have confidence that, tomorrow say, if Tulsa or Peoria or Dallas or Chicago where attacked by a chemical or biological weapon--that our government would be able to mount an effective response? I certainly don't. After all, the government knew a Category 4 or 5 was about to slam into New Orleans. There won't be any such warning issued by al-Qaeda, of course. I'd like a tri-state national emergency area declared, as Newt Gingrich has suggested, with Rudy Giuliani in charge of mounting a massively ambitious reconstruction project through the Gulf Coast.

I want to see adults at the helm, I want to see competence, I want to see seriousness of resolve and purpose, rather than clueless figures like Mike Brown being told they are doing a "heck of a job." I'll have my own in depth analysis of Katrina very soon, hopefully tomorrow night (I've been travelling non-stop since the disaster hit), but suffice it to say for now that, like David Brooks, B.D. has reached his "bursting point." See you tomorrow.

Andrew Sullivan assures us that--unlike, say, Paul Krugman--he is not a Bush hater:

www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish: FIRE BROWN NOW: More support here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Again, this covers the spectrum from left to right, except for the most shameless of the Bush partisans. And again: few of these people are exempting the local authorities for dereliction of duty either. But the feds dropped the ball. Maybe this time - for the first time - this administration will actually show accountability. Update: more Brown resignation calls here and here.... BUSH WILL INVESTIGATE HIMSELF: This is becoming a farce. Can anyone put him in touch with reality?.... BROWN WAS TOLD: Rich Lowry has more devastating details on Brown's incompetence.... FEMA VERSUS RELIEF: A round-up of some of the most head-smacking stories of incompetence....

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "3:32 P.M. [Monday] Ben Morris, Slidell mayor: We are still hampered by some of the most stupid, idiotic regulations by FEMA. They have turned away generators, we've heard that they've gone around seizing equipment from our contractors. If they do so, they'd better be armed because I'll be damned if I'm going to let them deprive our citizens. I'm pissed off, and tired of this horseshit."... THREE SOPHOMORES SAVED SEVEN PEOPLE: But the feds were helpless. If you're not outraged yet, read this story. Money quote: "We found it absolutely incredible that the authorities had no way to get there for four or five days, that they didn't go in and help these people, and we made it in a two-wheel-drive Hyundai." But this is the Bush administration, buddy. They still haven't secured the road to the Baghdad airport, remember? (Hat tip: Alex Whalen.).... FIRE BROWN NOW: More blogger pressure to get rid of an unqualified boob who got the job because it was previously held by his college room-mate can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and, especially, here....

THE BIG UNEASY: A 2003 study reveals the precariousness of New Orleans and the impossibility of adequately protecting it in time for Katrina. All the more reason that evacuation plans should have been ready to go, in place and, if not, for swift federal rescue efforts. (Hat tip: Porkopolis.)... UPDATE ON NORTHCOM: Carpetbagger corrects to say that it was FEMA and not the president who did not give the necessary order to get to work.... FIRE MICHAEL BROWN II: "If Mike Brown is left in place, it is more than saying he did a "heck of a job", it means that by the standards of our times, a "heck of a job" means abject failure. We can do better, and we should force our leaders, no matter what their position is or party they belong to, to do better." - restlessmania....

"LET THEM MOVE TO TEXAS": Barbara Bush has her Marie Antoinette moment: "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this --this is working very well for them." Personally, I still can't sleep for anticipating Trent Lott's "fantastic new porch."... FIRE BROWN NOW: Jeff Jarvis adds his voice. If you're a blogger - right, left or center - and have called for him to be fired, let me know. I'll link.... FIRE BROWN NOW: The Times-Picayune joins the chorus.... DID CHERTOFF LIE? He said Katrina's impact on New Orleans' levees was unexpected. The man who briefed him before Katrina hit says otherwise. Is Chertoff simply lying his way out of trouble?...

BLAMING THE LOCALS: That's the Bush strategy. And the local authorities did indeed fail badly.... But a disaster of this magnitude is obviously beyond the scope of a single mayor or governor. And it became clear very quickly to anyone with a modem or a TV that a disaster was happening. The federal officials are on record denying the calamity even as CNN and Fox were broadcasting it. Chertoff is still denying that anyone foresaw such a scenario even as Brown has said they were on the verge of a plan for dealing with it; and anyone with Google can see umpteen predictions, warnings and analysis of just such a scenario for years. The president told Diane Sawyer that no one anticipated the breach of the levees - about the dumbest thing he has said since the "Mission Accomplished" fiasco. Today, the WaPo, in the piece cited above, has this: "As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said." Hmm. As a reader pointed out, the record shows she did such a thing the previous Saturday. And that Bush had declared one the next day. When the administration's excuses are this patently thin - and contradict each other - you know that this time, even Karl Rove cannot blame someone else....

FIRE MICHAEL BROWN: Here's a great blog post about the blithering idiot, Michael "heck of a job" Brown, hired with no credentials to run a critical agency at a time of national peril. I guess some of us pundits bear the blame. We should have known that someone who had been fired for being unable to run an Arabian Horse Association had the job of responding to a national disaster in the war on terror. He was hired because a Bush crony, Joe Allbaugh (also hired because he was a major Bush fundraiser) liked him. The good ol' boy network at its most brazen. If the president wants to recover even a little from what has happened to his reputation, he has to fire Brown. Now. That's the test of whether he gets it.... This is a competence issue. It's a question of national security. Fire Brown now.... EMAIL OF THE DAY: "I spent my graduate school career studying hurricanes. At each conference I went to, starting in the late 90s, the panels talked about their thoughts on the most vulnerable city in America, on their nightmare scenario: it was always New Orleans.... FEMA and other agencies should have had concrete plans on how to deal with this eventuality. They've been shown to have none that could get aid to the city faster than nearly 4 days after the storm ended....

THE DISCONNECT: CNN - which has just had one of its finest hours - puts together a string of quotes from officials compared with what their own reporting showed at the time. The gap between Bush rhetoric and reality in America is stunning. Now transpose that to Iraq. And worry.... MICHAEL BROWN: The feckless FEMA head was basically fired from his previous job. A simple test of whether this administration has any understanding of even basic accountability will be if he remains in his job once this disaster is over. And of course, Bush will never, can never, fire anyone for incompetence.... QUOTE OF THE DAY: "What is highly surprising now is the disintegration of the administration's mask of competence and confidence, as New Orleans sinks day by day into squalor and savagery, a shocking panorama of unrelieved human suffering." - Camille Paglia, today. Surprising? Well, I guess their mask has now slipped. I should clarify my comments of the last couple days. None of this is good news. The death toll because of the administration's incompetence is a human tragedy. At a deeper level, as a believer that we have to win in Iraq, I worry that the public's trust in anything this administration says about reality may soon disappear altogether. The will we need to persevere in Iraq depends to some extent on trust in the administration. The trust, already battered, may now collapse. This calamity happened in a region where support for the president was relatively strong. It benefits none of us - least of all the beleaguered Iraqis - that this has happened and is still happening. But we know now at least how the citizens of Iraq must feel - besieged, bereft of sufficient security, and reassured by smug Bush administration pabulum. They're on their own, just as surely as the remaining citizens of New Orleans were left to fend for themselves. But, hey, stuff happens, doesn't it?...

QUOTE OF THE DAY II: "'The good news is - and it's hard for some to see it now - that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house - there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch.' (Laughter)." - president George W. Bush, today. Just think of that quote for a minute; and the laughter that followed. The poor and the black are dying, dead, drowned and desperate in New Orleans and elsewhere. But the president manages to talk about the future "fantastic" porch of a rich, powerful white man who only recently resigned his position because he regretted the failure of Strom Thurmond to hold back the tide of racial desegregation....

I'm not a Bush-hater. I backed the war. Initially, I trusted and supported this president to the hilt at a time of great danger. But I was forced to back Kerry of all people because Bush's gross incompetence at a time of national peril was simply too great a risk to continue...

What would he write if he were a Bush hater?

Kevin Drum is shriller than ever!

He writes:

The Washington Monthly: BUSH AND KATRINA.... For what it's worth, I'd like to make absolutely clear why I hold George Bush accountable for the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.... I don't blame him for being on vacation... for a certain amount of chaos in the initial response... for rolling FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security... for focusing more on terrorism than on natural disasters. That was a natural reaction to 9/11. Nor do I think that Bush doesn't care about natural disasters....

Rather, what happened was a series of decisions... that taken together made Katrina more damaging than it had to be.... These decisions were deliberate and disastrous, and that's why I think Bush deserves a large part of the blame for what happened....

January 2001: Bush appoints Joe Allbaugh, a crony from Texas, as head of FEMA. Allbaugh has no previous experience in disaster management.

April 2001: Budget Director Mitch Daniels announces the Bush administration's goal of privatizing much of FEMA's work. In May, Allbaugh confirms that FEMA will be downsized: "Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program...." he said. "Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level."

2001: FEMA designates a major hurricane hitting New Orleans as one of the three "likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country."

December 2002: After less than two years at FEMA, Allbaugh announces he is leaving to start up a consulting firm that advises companies seeking to do business in Iraq. He is succeeded by his deputy and former college roommate, Michael Brown, who has no previous experience in disaster management and was fired from his previous job for mismanagement.

March 2003: FEMA is downgraded from a cabinet level position and folded into the Department of Homeland Security. Its mission is refocused on fighting acts of terrorism.

2003: Under its new organization chart within DHS, FEMA's preparation and planning functions are reassigned to a new Office of Preparedness and Response. FEMA will henceforth focus only on response and recovery.

Summer 2004: FEMA denies Louisiana's pre-disaster mitigation funding requests. Says Jefferson Parish flood zone manager Tom Rodrigue: "You would think we would get maximum consideration....This is what the grant program called for. We were more than qualified for it."

June 2004: The Army Corps of Engineers budget for levee construction in New Orleans is slashed. Jefferson Parish emergency management chiefs Walter Maestri comments: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay."

June 2005: Funding for the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is cut by a record $71.2 million. One of the hardest-hit areas is the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which was created after the May 1995 flood to improve drainage in Jefferson, Orleans and St. Tammany parishes.

August 2005: While New Orleans is undergoing a slow motion catastrophe, Bush mugs for the cameras, cuts a cake for John McCain, plays the guitar for Mark Wills, delivers an address about V-J day, and continues with his vacation. When he finally gets around to acknowledging the scope of the unfolding disaster, he delivers only a photo op on Air Force One and a flat, defensive, laundry list speech in the Rose Garden.

So: A crony with no relevant experience was installed as head of FEMA. Mitigation budgets for New Orleans were slashed even though it was known to be one of the top three risks in the country. FEMA was deliberately downsized as part of the Bush administration's conservative agenda to reduce the role of government. After DHS was created, FEMA's preparation and planning functions were taken away.

Actions have consequences. No one could predict that a hurricane the size of Katrina would hit this year, but the slow federal response when it did happen was no accident. It was the result of four years of deliberate Republican policy and budget choices that favor ideology and partisan loyalty at the expense of operational competence. It's the Bush administration in a nutshell.

Daniel Froomkin is really shrill:

Dealing With Political Disaster: President Bush somehow missed the significance of what was happening on the Gulf Coast last week as he and his political guru, Karl Rove, flitted between Texas and California and, finally, Washington. But now, facing what is clearly a full-scale political disaster, Rove and a handful of other masterful political operatives have gone into overdrive. They are back in campaign mode.This campaign is to salvage Bush's reputation. Like previous Rove operations, it calls for multiple appearances by the president in controlled environments in which he can appear leader-like. It calls for extensive use of Air Force One and a massive deployment of spinners.

It doesn't necessarily include any change in policy. It certainly doesn't include any admission of error.

It utilizes the classic Rovian tactic of attacking critics rather than defending against their criticism -- and of throwing up chaff to muddle the issue and throw the press off the scent.

It calls for public expressions of outrage over the politicization of the issue and of those who would play the "blame game." While at the same time, it is utterly political in nature and heavily reliant on shifting the blame elsewhere.

But in some ways, this post-Katrina campaign poses Bush's aides with unprecedented challenges.

The problem -- an achingly slow federal response to what has turned out to be one of the greatest natural disasters this country has ever faced -- can be traced at least in part to one of the Bush White House's most defining characteristics: The protective bubble within which the president operates.

Bush's aides intentionally keep him mentally and physically aloof from any ugliness -- political or otherwise. It lets them keep tight control over the presidential imagery and stay on message.

But inside his bubble, Bush first failed to recognize what was becoming clear to almost anyone watching the news: That Americans needed help. And in his two meticulously staged visits to the Gulf Coast on Friday and Monday, it is precisely because Bush was kept so far away from dissension or mess that he appeared so out of touch.

He cracked jokes on Friday, including one about his drinking days in New Orleans, but has yet to confront the true horror of the situation so widely seen on TV. He has yet to acknowledge the disgrace of a major American city being rendered uninhabitable on his watch. He has yet to come face to face with people left to suffer for days in hellish conditions and explain to them why their government failed them. And he has yet to demonstrate the strength that Americans require from their president in a time of crisis.

This crisis finds the president looking impotent at best, incompetent at worst. And there is an element of whining to Bush's refusal to shoulder his responsibility -- especially should the press continue to make it clear how intensely he and his top aides are trying to pass the buck...

Joe Gandelman is shriller than ever:

The Moderate Voice - ...."sat on a wall....": All of the Presidents during our lifetime -- Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F Kennedy, LBJ, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, the first George Bush and Bill Clinton -- would have immediately rallied the nation, focused the national need to help victims, taken firm hold of federal rescue-aid machinery, and subsequently symbolized the strength, sincerity, and efficiency of the American Presidency and the federal government during a time of crisis.

This wasn't done.

And what did they say about Humpty Dumpty?

I'm afraid he's too far gone into shrill unholy madness to claim to be a "moderate voice" anymore. His weblog needs a new title--badly. For he is one of those who has been driven insane by the mendacity, incompetence, and malevolence of George W. Bush and his administration.

Newt Gingrich recognizes that the Bush administration is incompetent to preserve our security:

Newt Gingrich: I think it puts into question all of the Homeland Security and Northern Command planning for the last four years, because if we can't respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we're prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?

Welcome, Mr. Gingrich, to the Ancient and Honorable Order of the Shrill!

Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Newt Gingrich R'lyeh Wagn'nagl Fhtagn!! Gingrich Fhtagn! Gingrich Fhtagn!! Gingrich Fhtagn!!! GINGRICH FHTAGN!!!!

The Manchester Union Leader is shrill:

The Union Leader and New Hampshire Sunday News - 01-Sep-05: AS THE EXTENT of Hurricane Katrina's devastation became clearer on Tuesday -- millions without power, tens of thousands homeless, a death toll unknowable because rescue crews can't reach some regions -- President Bush carried on with his plans to speak in San Diego, as if nothing important had happened the day before.

Katrina already is measured as one of the worst storms in American history. And yet, President Bush decided that his plans to commemorate the 60th anniversary of VJ Day with a speech were more pressing than responding to the carnage.

A better leader would have flown straight to the disaster zone and announced the immediate mobilization of every available resource to rescue the stranded, find and bury the dead, and keep the survivors fed, clothed, sheltered and free of disease...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shrillness in Private?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Senator Chuck Hagel is shrill:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gregory Djerejian Is Shrill

He writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baron Samedi! Ogoun Badagris! M'aidez!!

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

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

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

The Tigris River Park

Dexter Filkins is shrill:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Year's Miskatonic Visiting Scholars Include

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dog Days in Arkham!

Here in picturesque Arkham, Massachusetts:

the dog days have set in in earnest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

>

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

A Warning for New Members of the Crew Team

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

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

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

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

Neoconservative Eliot Cohen Is Really Shrill

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

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

Excerpts:

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

I did not know, but I might have guessed.

Another passage:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Shrill, Report to the Pentagon, Stat

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

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

Zbigniew Brzezinski Is Shriller than Ever!

Zbigniew Brzezinski is shriller than ever!

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

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

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

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

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

He reads Peggy Noonan.

His brain explodes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shrillness Vacation Report

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

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

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

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

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

Entire English Language To Join The Shrill?

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

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

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

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

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