General Eaton Is Shrill

Who is General Eaton?

the defeatists!: Hell has just frozen over...: "One week after the president flew to the USS Lincoln in May 2003 to deliver his "Mission Accomplished" speech, the Defense Department ordered Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton to rush from Fort Benning, Ga., to Baghdad. His job: To lead an effort to try to rebuild Iraq's military. "I was very surprised to receive a mission so vital to our exit strategy so late," the now-retired general told The New York Times in an account published Feb. 11...

Here is what he says:

A Top-Down Review for the Pentagon - New York Times: By PAUL D. EATON: DURING World War II, American soldiers en route to Britain before D-Day were given a pamphlet on how to behave while awaiting the invasion. The most important quote in it was this: "It is impolite to criticize your host; it is militarily stupid to criticize your allies."

By that rule, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is not competent to lead our armed forces. First, his failure to build coalitions with our allies from what he dismissively called "old Europe" has imposed far greater demands and risks on our soldiers in Iraq than necessary. Second, he alienated his allies in our own military, ignoring the advice of seasoned officers and denying subordinates any chance for input.

In sum, he has shown himself incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically, and is far more than anyone else responsible for what has happened to our important mission in Iraq. Mr. Rumsfeld must step down.

In the five years Mr. Rumsfeld has presided over the Pentagon, I have seen a climate of groupthink become dominant and a growing reluctance by experienced military men and civilians to challenge the notions of the senior leadership.

I thought we had a glimmer of hope last November when Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, faced off with Mr. Rumsfeld on the question of how our soldiers should react if they witnessed illegal treatment of prisoners by Iraqi authorities. (General Pace's view was that our soldiers should intervene, while Mr. Rumsfeld's position was that they should simply report the incident to superiors.)

Unfortunately, the general subsequently backed down and supported the secretary's call to have the rules clarified, giving the impression that our senior man in uniform is just as intimidated by Secretary Rumsfeld as was his predecessor, Gen. Richard Myers.

Mr. Rumsfeld has put the Pentagon at the mercy of his ego, his cold warrior's view of the world and his unrealistic confidence in technology to replace manpower. As a result, the Army finds itself severely undermanned %u2014 cut to 10 active divisions but asked by the administration to support a foreign policy that requires at least 12 or 14.

Only Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff when President Bush was elected, had the courage to challenge the downsizing plans. So Mr. Rumsfeld retaliated by naming General Shinseki's successor more than a year before his scheduled retirement, effectively undercutting his authority. The rest of the senior brass got the message, and nobody has complained since.

Now the Pentagon's new Quadrennial Defense Review shows that Mr. Rumsfeld also fails to understand the nature of protracted counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq and the demands it places on ground forces. The document, amazingly, does not call for enlarging the Army; rather, it increases only our Special Operations forces, by a token 15 percent, maybe 1,500 troops.

Mr. Rumsfeld has also failed in terms of operations in Iraq. He rejected the so-called Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force and sent just enough tech-enhanced troops to complete what we called Phase III of the war %u2014 ground combat against the uniformed Iraqis. He ignored competent advisers like Gen. Anthony Zinni and others who predicted that the Iraqi Army and security forces might melt away after the state apparatus self-destructed, leading to chaos.

It is all too clear that General Shinseki was right: several hundred thousand men would have made a big difference then, as we began Phase IV, or country reconstruction. There was never a question that we would make quick work of the Iraqi Army.

The true professional always looks to the "What's next?" phase. Unfortunately, the supreme commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, either didn't heed that rule or succumbed to Secretary Rumsfeld's bullying. We won't know which until some bright historian writes the true story of Mr. Rumsfeld and the generals he took to war, an Iraq version of the Vietnam War classic "Dereliction of Duty" by H. R. McMaster.

Last, you don't expect a secretary of defense to be criticized for tactical ineptness. Normally, tactics are the domain of the soldier on the ground. But in this case we all felt what L. Paul Bremer, the former viceroy in Iraq, has called the "8,000-mile screwdriver" reaching from the Pentagon. Commanders in the field had their discretionary financing for things like rebuilding hospitals and providing police uniforms randomly cut; money to pay Iraqi construction firms to build barracks was withheld; contracts we made for purchasing military equipment for the new Iraqi Army were rewritten back in Washington.

Donald Rumsfeld demands more than loyalty. He wants fealty. And he has hired men who give it. Consider the new secretary of the Army, Francis Harvey, who when faced with the compelling need to increase the service's size has refused to do so. He is instead relying on the shell game of hiring civilians to do jobs that had previously been done by soldiers, and thus keeping the force strength static on paper. This tactic may help for a bit, but it will likely fall apart in the next budget cycle, with those positions swiftly eliminated.

So, what to do?

First, President Bush should accept the offer to resign that Mr. Rumsfeld says he has tendered more than once, and hire a man who will listen to and support the magnificent soldiers on the ground. Perhaps a proven Democrat like Senator Joseph Lieberman could repair fissures that have arisen both between parties and between uniformed men and the Pentagon big shots.

More vital in the longer term, Congress must assert itself. Too much power has shifted to the executive branch, not just in terms of waging war but also in planning the military of the future. Congress should remember it still has the power of the purse; it should call our generals, colonels, captains and sergeants to testify frequently, so that their opinions and needs are known to the men they lead. Then when they are asked if they have enough troops -- and no soldier has ever had enough of anything, more is always better -- the reply is public.

Our most important, and sometimes most severe, judges are our subordinates. That is a fact I discovered early in my military career. It is, unfortunately, a lesson Donald Rumsfeld seems incapable of learning.

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

Peggy Noonan Realizes She Has Conned Herself--and Says That She Wouldn't Have Voted for Bush If She'd Known Who He Was

She looks at Bush fiscal policy and joins the Ancient, Occult, and Hermetic Order of the shrill, saying that if she'd known who George W. Bush really was she wouldn't have voted for him:

OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan: Hey, Big Spender Should we have known that President Bush would bust the budget?: Thursday, March 16, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST: This week's column is a question, a brief one addressed with honest curiosity to Republicans. It is: When George W. Bush first came on the scene in 2000, did you understand him to be a liberal in terms of spending?

The question has been on my mind since the summer of 2005 when, at a gathering of conservatives, the question of Mr. Bush and big spending was raised.... Everyone murmured about... how the president "spends like a drunken sailor except the sailor spends his own money." And then someone, a smart young journalist, said, (I paraphrase), But we always knew what Bush was. He told us when he ran as a compassionate conservative. This left me rubbing my brow in confusion. Is that what Mr. Bush meant by compassionate conservatism?

That's not what I understood him to mean. If I'd thought he was a big-spending Rockefeller Republican.... I wouldn't have voted for him.... I didn't understand Mr. Bush's grand passion to be cutting spending.... But he did present himself as a conservative... conservatism is hostile, for reasons ranging from the abstract and philosophical to the concrete and practical, to high spending and high taxing....

How did this happen? In the years after 9/11 I looked at Mr. Bush's big budgets, and his expansion of entitlements, and assumed he was sacrificing fiscal prudence--interesting that that's the word people used to spoof his father--in order to build and maintain, however tenuously, a feeling of national unity. I assumed he wanted to lessen bipartisan tensions when America was wading into the new world of modern terrorism. I thought: This may be right and it may be wrong, but I understand it.... Mr. Bush will never have to run again, and he is in a position to come forward and make the case, even if only rhetorically, to slow and cut spending. He has not. And there's no sign he will....

Mr. President:

Did you ever hold conservative notions and assumptions on the issue of spending? If so, did you abandon them after the trauma of 9/11? For what reasons, exactly? Did you intend to revert to conservative thinking on spending at some point? Do you still? Were you always a liberal on spending? Were you, or are you, frankly baffled that conservatives assumed you were a conservative on spending? Did you feel they misunderstood you? Did you allow or encourage them to misunderstand you?

What are the implications for our country if spending levels continue to grow at their current pace?

What are the implications for the Republican party if it continues to cede one of the pillars on which it stood?

Did compassionate conservatism always mean big spending?

Now Peggy Noonan and the rest of the plastic Republican chattering teeth did not think back in 2000 that Bush's "compassionate conservatism" meant that he was a spender, they thought it meant that he was a liar--and that they were in on the con. The Bush budget strategy, they thought at the time, had four components:

1. Highball estimates of future budget surpluses in order to make it look like there's more room for tax cuts than there was.
2. Lowball the costs of the tax cuts by telling people that the AMT will be repealed when you calculate the magnitude of their tax cut and yet keeping the AMT in effect when calculating the revenue cost of the tax cut.
3. Call yourself a "compassionate conservative" to convince voters you don't want to make elderly emphysema patients front the money for their oxygen cylinders.
4. Then, when deficits reemerge, say: "Oh. What a surprise. We have to cut way back on federal services and programs after all."

That's the David Stockman quadrille. They thought Bush was lying to everybody else--that, as Andrew Sullivan liked to put it:

Some... get steamed because Bush has obscured this figure or claimed his tax cut will cost less than it actually will, or because he is using Medicare surplus money today that will be needed tomorrow and beyond.... [T]hey miss the deeper point... Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smoke screen of 'compassionate conservatism'.... B.S. is necessary for any vaguely successful retrenchment of government power in an insatiable entitlement state.... I just hope the smoke doesn't clear before the spenders get their hands on our wallets again.

Now they are surprised--and shrill--to learn that George W. Bush was lying to them too.

I'm not surprised that she too has been driven to shrill unholy madness by this act of Bushian mendacity. Her copy of the Krugmanomicon is on its way. We ask her to report in her giant evil cephalopod form to Fort Lauderdale, to swim with the dolphins.

Larry Kudlow Joins the Ancient, Hermetic, and Occult Order of the Shrill

Yes. He calls for the Democrats to retake control of Congress this year:

The RCP Blog: A Pathetic State of Affairs - By Larry Kudlow: The Senate budget resolution now in play has dropped Bush's entitlement savings according to Budget Chairman Judd Gregg. Plus, Republican senators are trying to front-load new pork into the resolution even though Gregg wants to hold the line (at least on that).

After all the GOP Congressional talk about newfound budget-cutting religion, including earmark transparency and reform, so far they have produced nothing.

People like Arlen Specter, and many others, are still trying to get their pet projects funded. So, what else is new?

Gregg has thrown in the towel on mandatory spending cuts because he says he doesn't have the votes. Well then, I don't think that the American people should "have the votes" to keep the Republicans in charge of the Senate--or the House for that matter.

Larry: I'm sorry, but we've run out of space. You'll have to hot-bunk in with Shub-Ascalatl for a while, as you get used to your new state of shrill unholy madness.

Sandra Day O'Connor Joins the Order of the Shrill!

Nina Totenberg reports:

The Raw Story | Retired Supreme Court Justice hits attacks on courts and warns of dictatorship: Supreme Court justices keep many opinions private but Sandra Day O'Connor no longer faces that obligation. Yesterday, the retired justice criticized Republicans who criticized the courts. She said they challenge the independence of judges and the freedoms of all Americans. O'Connor's speech at Georgetown University was not available for broadcast but NPR's legal correspondent Nina Totenberg was there.

Nina Totenberg: In an unusually forceful and forthright speech, O'onnor said that attacks on the judiciary by some Republican leaders pose a direct threat to our constitutional freedoms. O'Connor began by conceding that courts do have the power to make presidents or the Congress or governors as she put it "really, really angry." But, she continued, if we don't make them mad some of the time we probably aren't doing our jobs as judges, and our effectiveness, she said, is premised on the notion that we won't be subject to retaliation for our judicial acts. The nation's founders wrote repeatedly, she said, that without an independent judiciary to protect individual rights from the other branches of government those rights and privileges would amount to nothing. But said O'Connor as the founding fathers knew statutes and constitutions don't protect judicial independence, people do.

And then she took aim at former GOP house leader Tom DeLay... she quoted his attacks on the courts at a meeting of the conservative Christian group Justice Sunday last year when DeLay took out after the courts for rulings on abortions, prayer and the Terri Schiavo case. This, said O'Connor was after the federal courts had applied Congress' onetime only status of Schiavo as it was written. Not, said O'Connor, as the congressman might have wished it were written. This response to this flagrant display of judicial restraint, said O'Connor, her voice dripping with sarcasm, was that the congressman blasted the courts.

It gets worse, she said, noting that death threats against judges are increasing. It doesn't help, she said, when a high-profile senator suggests there may be a connection between violence against judges and decisions that a senator disagrees with. She didn't name him, but it was Texas senator John Cornyn who made that statement, after a Georgia judge was murdered in the courtroom and the family of a federal judge in Illinois murdered in the judge's home. O'Connor observed that there have been a lot of suggestions lately for so-called judicial reforms, recommendations for the massive impeachment of judges, stripping the courts of jurisdiction and cutting judicial budgets for punishing offending judges. Any of these might be debatable, she said, as long as they are not retaliation for decisions that political leaders disagree with.

I, said O'Connor, am against judicial reforms driven by nakedly partisan reasoning. Pointing to the experience of developing countries and former communist countries where interference with an independent judiciary has allowed dictatorship to flourish, O'Connor said we must be ever-vigilant against those who would strongarm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies. It takes a long of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, she said, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.

Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.

Welcome, Justice O'Connor! We have reserved the Chaos Suite for you. You can pick up your robe... oh, I see you have your robe...

Unqualified Offerings Is Shrill

We welcome Jim Henley, Grand Heresiarch and High Tentacled One of the Ancient, Occult, and Hermetic Order of the Shrill:

Ia Henley!! Ia Fhtagn!!: Outraged Moderate got hold of Steven Cambone’s handwritten notes of his meeting with Donald Rumsfeld from the afternoon of September 11, 2001. The notes confirm CBS News’ report of September 4, 2002 that, at that meeting, Rumsfeld was already thinking of using the atrocities as an excuse to go to war with Iraq. It’s important to stress: Rumsfeld is not wondering if Iraq did it; he’s wondering if it can look enough like Iraq did it to pin the blame there.

It can’t be stressed enough: the Pentagon was aflame; there was smoke pouring from a hole in the Pennsylvania fields and the World Trade Center complex was belching its ghastly cloud, and already our rulers were thinking not, who is to blame? but what can we get away with? What will the still-bubbling fat of the murdered serve to cook?

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

Francis Fukuyama is Shrill and Unbalanced?

Strange times: Francis Fukuyama, intellectual Godfather to the Neoconservative movement, appears to be writing obituary notices for the Bush doctrine. Next he'll be howling at the moon, having been driven to shrill unholy madness by the sheer disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration.

The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem. But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before.

...

This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration's incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. The war's supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform. While they now assert that they knew all along that the democratic transformation of Iraq would be long and hard, they were clearly taken by surprise.

...

It is hard to read these lines without irony in the wake of the global reaction to the Iraq war, which succeeded in uniting much of the world in a frenzy of anti-Americanism.

Michael Hirsh is Shrill!

It appear's that Newsweek's Michael Hirsh has been driven to shrill unholy madness by the incompetence of the George W. Bush administration. Don't believe us? See for yourself.

How then did we arrive at this day, with anti-American Islamist governments rising in the Mideast, bin Laden sneering at us, Qaeda lieutenants escaping from prison, Iran brazenly enriching uranium, and America as hated and mistrusted as it ever has been? The answer, in a word, is incompetence.

William M. Arkin Is Shrill!

He curses the inhabitants of the Pentagon:

Early Warning by William M. Arkin - washingtonpost.com : Pentagon Fails on Roadside Bombs:The roadside bomb threat in Iraq made national news last weekend when an IED seriously injured ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt while they were embedded with the U.S. military. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, according to the Defense Department, 51 percent of 1,735 combat deaths and two-thirds of 16,500 injuries are due to roadside bombs.

Some in the military are grousing about wall to wall coverage of Woodruff and Vogt, and the suggestion that "press folks are more important than mere military folks." What soldiers need to understand is that not only were Woodruff and Vogt in Iraq to report on those very folks, but if they have anger and frustration about the threats in Iraq, they should focus their ire on the Pentagon and the bureaucracy and not on the media.

The Pentagon's inability to competently deliver help to soldiers in the field is partly due to its insane propensity to create ad hoc organizations to address a problem and then constantly reorganize at the drop of a hat.... In December, Rumsfeld appointed retired Army Gen. Montgomery Meigs to head the Pentagon's efforts to deal with the problem, essentially firing the one star running the program and admitting that a number of diffuse and uncoordinated efforts had failed to produce either the technology or the tactics to protect American servicemembers. Meigs oversees a growing IED organization and over $1 billion committed for counter-IED initiatives. If there is one thing the Pentagon knows how to do, it is throw money at a problem, particularly one that suggests a technology solution.

But it also knows how to play with blocs, organizational blocs that is. Consider this: In October 2003, the Army created the Improvised Explosive Device Task Force (IED-TF) in recognition of the threat. In February 2004, the Army further directed the IED-TF be made a standing capability with assigned field teams. In April 2004, the Army proposed activation of an Asymmetric Warfare Regiment (later designated the Asymmetric Warfare Group) to oversee IED response and counter-terrorism priorities. In July 2004, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz redesignates the Army Task Force the Joint IED Defeat Task Force (JIEDD-TF), again assigning it the mission of providing streamlined and timely support to soldiers in the field. In July 2004, DOD establishes a Joint Integrated Process Team for Defeating Improvised Explosive Devices (Joint IED Defeat IPT) to sharpen DoD focus on IEDs. In June 2005, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld signed a directive (DOD Directive 2000.19, Joint Improvised Explosive Device (IED) Defeat) designating DOD resources and direction to the problem. In January 2006, Meigs' JIEDD-TF is again redesignated as the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) and is made a permanent task force.

What has all this produced to stop IEDs? I guess a lot of old letterhead and not much action.

So it should be no surprise that in October 2004, when the Army published interim Field Manual 3-07.22, "Counterinsurgency Operations," the new doctrine only mentioned IEDs as a peripheral threat and made no mention whatsoever of potential IED campaigns employed by an adversary such as in Iraq. The new doctrine establish no doctrine for countering such campaigns.

No wonder that this week Republican and military stalwart Rep. Hunter now says "we need to focus more effort" on the IED problem and threat.

The President may declare that we are "winning" in Iraq, but on the ground, happy talk about progress masks an unchanging if not even growing threat.

Of course none of this would be the epidemic that it is if the Defense Secretary and his department had recognized from the beginning that Iraq not only was chock-a-block filled with munitions but also that more troops were needed to ensure security after vanquishing the Iraqi Army.

My point is not to go over old territory, but to lament the clear contradiction evident in wild reorganization and the writing of check for over $1 billion to solve the problem: We are winning? Not only aren't we, but I have little confidence that this Pentagon leadership can even do what is needed to minimally protect American and Iraqi lives.

Shrillblog Joke Contest!

Sometimes we sit around the halls of The Order trying to find a silver lining to the incompetence, malevolence, mendacity, and sheer disconnection of reality of the George W. Bush administration. At the very least, we'd like a good joke. Here's the latest batch, fresh from the lab:

Q: What's funnier than President Bush proclaiming we need to reduce dependence on oil?
A: President Bush's own advisors admitting he was making it up.

Q: What's funnier tha President Bush's own advisors admitting he was making it up?
A: Nothing!

Thank you, thank you -- we're here all foureight years. Semper catum.

Presenting the Grand Heresiarch of the Ancient, Hermetic, and Occult Order of the Shrill

It's Andrew Sullivan! Shriller than five Krugmans!! More Mad than Michael Moore!!!

Andrew Sullivan | The Daily Dish : Fiscal blather: The man has added over $20 trillion in fiscal liabilities to the next generation. And he brags about alleged future savings of ... $40 billion. He makes the line-item veto the criterion for fiscal responsibility, knowing it will never pass. He says his proposal last year was designed to "save social security." But it had no long-term impact on the costs. To deal with the entitlement crunch, after five years in office, he proposes ... a commission! And urges Washington to avoid "partisan politics." I'm sorry but this is duplicitous when it isn't pathetic.

Unrepentant on illegal wire-tapping. But the "statute" to which he refers specifically sets up a court for the kind of warrants he says he doesn't need to ask for. Classic Bush: ignore the actual criticism; set up a straw man; and then whack it with a big baseball bat. And you know what? It worked extremely well. "We will not sit back and wait to be hit again." Great line. Best defense. Avoids the basic issue. Keep going ...

Ex-Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin Joins the Order

Yes, we can now reveal that ex-Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin has joined the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill, in a measured, polite, and sober way:

WSJ.com - 'We Must Change Policy Direction' : Some would argue that our reasonably healthy GDP growth in the last few years -- driven largely by the Federal Reserve Board's accommodative monetary policy and the disposition of consumers to spend based on high housing prices and lower interest rates -- indicates that we can stick with the economic policy status quo. I believe this would be a serious mistake. Median real wages and median family incomes have been roughly stagnant for the past five years.... Private sector job growth has been the lowest of any recovery since the '30s. Most importantly, the longer-term underpinnings of our economy are unsound.... Re-establishing seriousness of purpose regarding economic policy... will require our political system to do what it is not doing today: making choices that are very difficult politically... putting aside ideology in favor of facts and analysis....

[O]ur future economic well-being is threatened by large current and projected fiscal deficits, huge increases in entitlement costs... personal savings rates of approximately zero, public school system inadequacies, and high health care costs. But our political system is... failing to make the difficult decisions required. Political leaders... have taken on critically important economic issues, as President Clinton did on deficit reduction, trade liberalization and global economic crises... as Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill did on Social Security in 1983....

(1) We should re-establish sound fiscal conditions for the intermediate term (the 10-year federal budget window) and put in place a real plan to get entitlements on a sound footing for the long term. (2) We need a strong public investment program -- paid for... -- to promote productivity growth, to help those dislocated by technology and trade, and to equip all citizens to share in our economic well-being and growth. (3) We must pursue an international economic policy that continues global integration, especially multilaterally, and proactively addresses our other international economic interests, including combating global poverty. (4) We should work toward a regulatory regime that meets our needs and sensibly weigh risks and rewards. Our strategy should reaffirm market-based economics as the most effective organizing principle for economic activity, while recognizing the critical role of government in providing the many requisites for economic success that markets, by their very nature, will not provide.

Broad participation in economic well-being and growth is critical, both as a fundamental value and to realize our economic potential.... [I]n 1979 it took 44 people with average earnings in the bottom half of the population to equal each person in the top 0.1 of 1%, while in 2001, the last year in that study, that number was 160.... The proponents of supply-side theory who assert that tax cuts will wholly -- or even significantly -- pay for themselves (through increased growth and federal tax revenues), appear to be no more accurate now than they were in the '90s.... Virtually all mainstream economists take the view that sustained long-term deficits will crowd out private investment, increase interest rates, reduce productivity and reduce growth. And the far greater danger is that these various imbalances could at some point lead to fear of fiscal disarray and concern about our currency, causing sharply higher interest rates in our bond markets and the risk of a sharp exchange-rate decline. Also, very importantly, the evidence of the early '90s strongly suggests that sustained deficits can undermine business and consumer confidence. The adverse impact on interest and currency rates has not yet occurred, partly because business has had relatively low levels of demand for capital -- but most importantly because of vast capital inflows from abroad (until recently, predominantly from central banks supporting the dollar to subsidize their exports). This is not indefinitely sustainable....

I believe that the most realistic way forward is for the president to bring together the leaders of both parties and both houses to make these decisions with joint political responsibility. Everything should be on the table, including cost discipline, progress toward entitlement reform, and judgment as to the revenues needed to close current deficits and provide the functions the American people expect of government. These include public investment in education, basic research, infrastructure and other requisites for a successful economy as well as national security and the entitlement costs of an aging population. Finding the balance that best promotes economic growth in this context could well call for revenue increases as well as spending discipline, as evidenced by the '90s, when a mixture of spending cuts and targeted tax increases was followed by years of strong growth, powerful job creation and rising incomes. Moreover, any revenue-increasing measures should reduce, not exacerbate, our growing income gap....

None of this is easy, but our economy could well be at a critical juncture for the longer term. To realize our bright future and to minimize the risk of serious difficulty, we urgently need our own sense of mission to meet the challenges facing our economy.

Meyerson Fhtagn!! Meyerson Fhtagn!!

Howard Meyerson of the Washington Post is shrill!

Bush the Incompetent : Incompetence is... hardly the worst attribute that can be ascribed to George W. Bush. But it is this president's defining attribute. Historians... the hash... of his war in Iraq... Hurricane Katrina... Medicare drug plan, will have to grapple with how one president could so cosmically botch so many big things... the president's own initiatives.... [L]itanies of screw-ups. Yesterday's New York Times... the first official assessment... reconstruction... in Iraq... "gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting [and] secrecy."... [T]he president's prescription drug plan... is his most mind-boggling failure.... Pharmacists are not resisting the program; seniors are not planting car bombs to impede it.... [P]eople are trying to get their medications covered under the program.... [T]his is a contingency for which the administration was not prepared....

Initially, Part D's biggest glitch seemed to be the difficulty that seniors encountered in selecting a plan. But since Part D took effect... the most acute problem has been the plan's failure to cover the 6.2 million low-income seniors whose medications had been covered by Medicaid. On New Year's Day, the new law shifted these people's coverage to private insurers. And all hell broke loose. Pharmacists found that the insurers didn't have the seniors' names in their systems, or charged them far in excess of what the new law stipulated -- and what the seniors could afford. In California fully 20 percent of the state's 1.1 million elderly Medicaid recipients had their coverage denied. The state had to step in to pick up the tab for their medications. California has appropriated $150 million for the medications, and estimates that it will be out of pocket more than $900 million by 2008-09. Before Jan. 1 the Bush administration had told California that it would save roughly $120 million a year once Part D was in effect.

California's experience is hardly unique. To date at least 25 states and the District have had to defray the costs to seniors that Part D was supposed to cover. What's truly stunning about this tale is that... they always knew that these 6.2 million seniors would be shifted into the plan on the first day of the year. There were absolutely no surprises, and yet administration officials weren't even remotely prepared. No such problems attended the creation of Medicare itself in the mid-1960s....

[F]inancially beholden to both the drug and insurance industries, the Bush administration and the Repsublican Congress mandated that millions of Americans have their coverage shifted to these most byzantine of bureaucracies. This is, remember, the president's signature domestic initiative, just as the Iraq war is his signature foreign initiative. How could a president get these things so wrong? Incompetence may describe this presidency, but it doesn't explain it. For that, historians may need to turn to the seven deadly sins: to greed... sloth... Incurious George.... [T]he key question for this administration is that of the great American sage, Casey Stengel: Can't anybody here play this game?

Five Octaves Above Middle C...

So shrill that only dogs can hear him, is Eric Alterman:

Eric Alterman : So we’ve gutted the budget for reconstruction in Iraq, something that may make sense, given that we’re not really conducting any, and are incapable of providing the necessary security to do so, but at the same time, we’ve destroyed what was a functioning country. True it was a totalitarian dictatorship run by mass murderer, but it functioned for most people. It no longer does. As unbelievable as it appears, we seem to have made Iraq a worse place than it was before. Look here and here if you think I exaggerate. (And keep in mind, as my young friend Paul McLeary demonstrates here, that it is damn hard and dangerous to do any solid reporting in that chaotic environment.)

Remember, I opposed the war even though I calculated at the time that it would include what I called the “liberation” of the people of Iraq. (Leftists attacked me for using that term unironically.) As a realist, I didn’t think what I then believed was that their liberation would justify its cost. Well, amazingly, the Bush administration was too incompetent to accomplish even that—and this is outside of the fact that they had to lie to the country to get us in there.

Really, there is nothing, nothing that justifies this war any more and nothing that justifies the faith anyone has that the Bush administration can make it any better. (Take a look here at what Eliot Weinberger heard about Iraq in 2005 if you doubt that.) Perhaps it will happen. But that would sure be a break from the past. I seem to recall from freshman philosophy that somebody big, David Hume, argued that just because the sun has risen in the East and set in the West every day since time immemorial is no argument for the fact that it will necessarily do so tomorrow. Still, I think it’s a good bet. And I think it’s a good bet that the Bush administration will continue to screw up Iraq even worse than before.

William M. Arkin of washingtonpost.com Joins Our Ranks!

Welcome, William M. Arkin! It's good to see yet another employee of washingtonpost.com succumb to shrill unholy madness, and howl his shrill screeds of Bush hatred though the night!

Early Warning by William M. Arkin - washingtonpost.com : Col. Thomas M. Pappas, once commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, and the senior intelligence officer responsible for military interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison, has now been given immunity.... [T]here will never be a connection made between the goings on at Abu Ghraib and the top ranks of either the Pentagon or the Bush administration.... Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the one time commander of the Guantanamo Bay prison and the supposed inspiration for Abu Ghraib's operations has invoked his right not to incriminate himself.... Pappas' nonjudicial proceedings resulted in a written reprimand and forfeiture of $4,000 pay per month for two months. Seven enlisted military policemen have so far been prosecuted for treatment of detainees. Private Charles A. Graner received a 10-year prison sentence.

The military calls it different spanks for different ranks....

Here's how it works: An Army Colonel in Iraq talks to his direct commander and liaises with adjacent commanders. He occasionally talks to the one-star staff officers, special assistants and executive aides to the two and three stars. The staff jockeys are themselves strap hangers and note takers in video teleconferences.... But... when sensitive matters -- including issues of personality and high level assignments -- are being discussed, the general officers "meet" privately on the VTC without back seaters in the room. Or they talk on the phone.... I wrote almost two years ago, when the Abu Ghraib scandal was first breaking... that I didn't believe that an "order" would ever be uncovered, that a direct connection would ever be made between the soldiers in those cell blocks and officers at a higher level.

Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, one of the few heroes... testified before Congress that a "failure in leadership, lack of discipline; no training whatsoever; and no supervision" led to the mistreatment. I wrote then that "In the context of what was going on in Iraq [in 2003], a muddled, leaderless, unsupervised, high-pressure environment at Abu Ghraib led military policemen and their intelligence brethren to turn into a mob."

Heads should certainly roll, I said, but more important, I thought we should learn the lesson: "that we, represented by the American fighting men and women stuck in the muddled and hopeless endeavor of Iraq, are in way over our heads."

We still haven't learned that lesson.

The real crime of the wars since 9/11 is that when it comes to any kind of "sensitive" -- read controversial -- actions and policies, there are no explicit written orders. Without rules, without oversight, without accountability, with such a high octane and high pressured overblown -- almost manic -- enterprise, it is no wonder that many of the participants think that they are saving the world and thereby take liberties in their day-to-day efforts.

We welcome Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz to the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill:

Howard Kurtz : The larger issue is that much of the press has abandoned reporting on health and safety regulation until disaster strikes. How many reporters have dug into the Labor Department's Mine Safety and Health Administration, which under the Bush administration was run by a former Utah mine manager until last year? About as many as did pieces, before Hurricane Katrina, on why a former Arabian horse official was running the dysfunctional bureaucracy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Heck of a job. "I have tried to get the general press interested," says Ellen Smith, owner of the trade publication Mine Safety and Health News. "I just kind of gave up." The mine agency has received scant coverage, even as it has changed -- critics say softened -- the Clinton administration%u2019s enforcement approach. Since 2001... The Post has published three staff-written stories on mine safety not related to a specific accident; the New York Times, two; Wall Street Journal, one; Chicago Tribune, one; and Los Angeles Times and USA Today, none. 60 Minutes did one segment on a mine safety whistle-blower.

Perhaps the most persistent reporter has been Ken Ward of West Virginia's Charleston Gazette, who says that under the Bush administration, the mine safety agency "started clamping down on folks like me" and "people we dealt with all the time were all of a sudden instructed not to talk." Ward says the agency didn't tell the Gazette of a media conference call last week: "It's pretty amazing that a federal agency would hold a briefing on the biggest mining disaster in West Virginia in 40 years and exclude the biggest paper in the state."Labor Department spokesman David James says the call was put together on the fly and there was no attempt to exclude the Gazette.

Former Iraq Viceroy Paul Bremer has joined the shrill unbalanced Critics of George W. Bush. Welcome, Paul! Pick up your black hooded robe covered with eldritch symbols at the laundry, and report to the North Pond for lessons in transforming yourself into your tentacled cephalopod form. The Scaife Foundation has paid your room, board, and fees through June.

Kevin Drum writes:

The Washington Monthly: BREMER ON IRAQ....On Dateline last night, Paul Bremer confirmed something that he briefly alluded to last year: we never had enough troops on the ground to keep order in Iraq, and both George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld knew it.

Bremer said he sent a memo to Rumsfeld suggesting that half a million soldiers would be needed, three times the number deployed by the Bush administration.

"I never had any reaction from him," the former diplomat told NBC's Brian Williams on "Dateline."

Although he never heard back from his direct boss, Bremer said he discussed his concerns with Bush, who told him he would seek troops from other countries, but did not mention increasing U.S. forces.

...[T]hat half million number is pretty stunning. It's one thing to tell your boss you need more troops, but it's quite another to tell him you need three times as many as you have. That's the kind of warning that really ought to make someone sit up and listen, and if Bremer is on the level here it means that Rumsfeld and Bush screwed the pooch even worse than we thought -- something I'm not sure I would have thought possible until now.

Silly Kevin. He is a valued member of the Order of the Shrill, but apparently not too bright. How long will he take to learn that the Bush administration is worse than he imagined, even after taking account of the fact that the Bush administration is worse than he imagined?

Republican Senators are Shrill and Unbalanced

Apparently emboldened by the chattering masses' debate over whether the President's oath to preserve, protect and devend the Constitution of the United States, President Bush has signed the anti-torture bill with two fingers crossed behind his back, reserving for himself the right to do whatever he pleases should he feel likes it tell you it's necessary for your safety.

We, however, are shocked, SHOCKED to hear that Republican Senators McCain, Warner, and Graham have been driven to shrill unholy madness by the mendacity, malevolence, sheer disconnection from reality, and desire to be appointed dictator of the George W. Bush administration.

''We believe the president understands Congress's intent in passing, by very large majorities, legislation governing the treatment of detainees," the senators said. ''The Congress declined when asked by administration officials to include a presidential waiver of the restrictions included in our legislation. Our committee intends through strict oversight to monitor the administration's implementation of the new law."

...

Separately, the third primary sponsor of the detainee treatment law, Senator Lindsey O. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, told the Globe in a phone interview that he agreed with everything McCain and Warner said ''and would go a little bit further."

''I do not believe that any political figure in the country has the ability to set aside any . . . law of armed conflict that we have adopted or treaties that we have ratified," Graham said. ''If we go down that road, it will cause great problems for our troops in future conflicts because [nothing] is to prevent other nations' leaders from doing the same."

And here, we thought that no political figure in this country has the ability to set aside any law because we didn't want a king in the first place or we'd still all be British.

William Arkin is shrill and opinionated. Somebody call Washington Post national political editor John Harris:

Early Warning by William M. Arkin - washingtonpost.com : By the end of 2006, the United States will have fewer than 100,000 troops in Iraq and will be well on its way to withdrawing its forces, Osama bin Laden will still be at large, Iran and Syria and North Korea will be safe from U.S. military attack.

I'm not going to hedge on my predictions for the New Year. Basically, nothing will really be different. Dick Cheney will still be there, and though there won't be a major terrorist attack in the United States -- strike major, there won't be any -- the administration will still manage, despite approval ratings in the toilet, to jerk the American public around "fighting" a war on terror that should hardly be labeled a war anymore.... Congress for its part will hold anemic hearings on NSA spying and will continue to make believe the super-bureaucracy of the Director of National Intelligence solves our "intelligence" problems. It will throw money at the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon and the intelligence community who will all argue that they are turning the corner getting it right in their post 9/11 revamping.

Despite Abramoff and signs of multi-billion dollar scandals in Iraq reconstruction, the Beltway ruling classes will prosper in 2006. There is nothing they love more than indeterminate national security debate, hearings, and bureaucracies reorganizing and turning corners: There are lunches and seminars and study trips and consulting contracts to aid in government deliberations.

Here are my ten five predictions for the coming year: 1. Iraq... the priority for the administration and the military will be turning over the problem not winning the counter-insurgency. Conventional wisdom says that there will be a modest reduction of U.S. forces to some 130,000. I say 100,000, with substantial forces, particularly support personnel, moving to Kuwait and the Gulf states. 2. War on Terrorism: A half dozen or more al Qaeda lieutenants will be captured in 2006 -- how many number three's can there be? -- with the core of the old organization remaining shielded in western Pakistan. Meanwhile the new organization of anti-American independent terrorist cells only loosely affiliated with al Qaeda will continue to grow outside Iraq and Pakistan as experienced fighters and wannabes organize to attack.... 3. NSA Spying: Congress will have passed no new laws regarding NSA spying in 2006, and its hearings on the subject will "reveal" that the actual program of spying on targeted individuals was less extensive than previously thought. None of it will explain why the Bush administration felt it needed to circumvent a law.... I say that the NSA story is about something else: A far more massive intrusion into the private lives of all Americans being conducted in the name of data-mining and link analysis. 4. Iraq, Syria, North Korea: Despite two developing WMD and a third other mischievously meddling in Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, these countries couldn't be safer in 2006. With U.S. coalitions weak and U.S. forces still overwhelmed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush administration won't even be contemplating real military action a la 2002-2003.... 5. China: It is the one to watch in 2006. The U.S. military in 2006 will continue to retool post-Iraq for the next "peer competitor" (read enemy), one finally worthy of all those lunches and seminars and study trips and consulting contracts to aid in government deliberations.... Conventional wisdom will conclude that it is only "prudent" for the United States to start planning for the potential of conflict with the second superpower, so grateful will it be for an opportunity to leave the Middle East. I say invest in China and Southeast Asia. I may not make you money in 2006 but the best way to avoid the U.S. military addiction of creating enemies, especially big one, is to rejoice in the prosperity and growth of others.

Contributions from Those Who Do Not Know Their Shrillness

Glenn Greenwald, who'd probably be Shoggoth at Large of the Order if he had any idea who we are, reports on wingnuts who have finally snapped back to the other side.

It’s true that Paul is not saying that Bush broke the law, only that it’s an "open question" - but that really is like a defense attorney suddenly ceasing to defend his client in open court and declaring his client’s guilt to be "an open question." When one's own attorney admits the real possibility of guilt, that is a rather strong indictment. To even read on Powerline that it is an "open" and "difficult" question whether George Bush broke the law is amazing, and quite revealing.

Conservative condemnation of Bush’s illegality is growing. Hardcore conservatives with unimpeachable conservative credentials, from Bob Barr to Reagan Justice Department official Bruce Fein have aggressively argued that Bush’s conduct is intolerably illegal and dangerous.

Wow! Grover Norquist is shrill!!

TIME.com: Bush Says, Bring It On; the Critics Will -- Jan. 09, 2006 -- Page 1 : But the NSA operation--and particularly Bush's decision to bypass the generally amenable Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for authorization--has drawn fire not only from liberal Democrats but also from some of the most conservative in Bush's party, in which government restraint is a fundamental precept. "There is a test of Republicans on this," says activist Grover Norquist, normally a White House ally. "The country will let you get away with this in the wake of 9/11, but that doesn't make it right." And even if Republicans are prepared to bless Bush's program, they know it theoretically would have to mean extending such sweeping Executive power to, say, a President Hillary Clinton...

Bruce Schneier is one of us now:

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

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

Barron's is shrill:

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

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

Norm Ornstein is shrill:

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

The Los Angeles Times is shrill:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome, Jonathan! Alter Ftagn!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unholy Keening Heard From the Newsweek Offices

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

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

The Bulldog Manifesto is really shrill:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martin van Creveld is really shrill!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stratfor: Shrill

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

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let's go to the transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The "Nelson Report" Is Now the "Black Goat with a Thousand Young Report"

Josh Micah Marshall reports that the Nelson Report is really shrill. It is calling for the impeachment of George W. Bush:

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: November 06, 2005 - November 12, 2005 Archives: A snippet out of this evening's Nelson Report ...

Scandals.... on the torture scandal part of the ongoing psychodrama called America, the political theme is that the Republican Leadership continues to trip all over itself, contradicting each other, insulting each other, and generally looking like incompetent fools. This is almost too much for the Democrats, who can hardly believe what they see unfolding, and who thus, so far, remain in something of a comic stupor, pending an organized, coherent attack.

But things are happening, and Senate Dems are coalescing around efforts to force real hearings on the misuse of Iraq war intel, and the torture scandal...even as the Republicans flounder between trying to deny everything, while simultaneously excusing or explaining it away. Latest example...former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, whom, you will recall, was forced to resign for insensitive racial remarks, is clearly revenging himself with comments that it was a fellow Republican who leaked the "CIA torture" story to the Washington Post last week.

On the larger topic, law and morality...the ethic of being an American leader, and its betrayal by the Bush Administration...the NY Times today details last year's CIA Inspector General's classified report that Bush Administration torture directives carried out by the Agency "might violate some provisions of the International Convention Against Torture..." and remember we warned last night that the CIA pros have it out for the White House....

We checked with a highly informed/involved former State Department source. His comments: "...in 1988 when John Whitehead signed the Convention in New York, and then later, when we ratified it, we enacted domestic laws where necessary to make it 'the law of the land'... we had this to say to the UN, copy to the Senate:

Torture is prohibited by law throughout the United States. It is categorically denounced as a matter of policy and as a tool of state authority. Every act constituting torture under the Convention constitutes a criminal offense under the law of the United States. No official of the government, federal, state or local, civilian or military, is authorized to commit or to instruct anyone else to commit torture. Nor may any official condone or tolerate torture in any form. No exceptional circumstances may be invoked as a justification of torture. US law contains no provision permitting otherwise prohibited acts of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment to be employed on grounds of exigent circumstances....

Hummm....sounds like a pretty solid case for an impeachment proceeding, were there anything resembling either a sense or shame, or national ethics, in the Leadership of the House of Representatives and Senate. Something to be argued out in the 2006 Congressional campaigns?

They've brought us very, very low.

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

The New York Times Editorial Board Is Shrill

We welcome the New York Times editorial board. The typeface used on their personalized straitjackets is, of course, Times Roman.

The New York Times editorial board is finally shrill--albeit five years too late. But they shy at the jump. If they believe what the body of their editorial says, the last line should call for Bush's resignation or impeachment:

President Bush's Walkabout - New York Times: After President Bush's disastrous visit to Latin America, it's unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three years to run. An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the world simply can't afford an American government this bad for that long.

Bush... could barely summon the energy to chat with the 33 other leaders there, almost all of whom would be considered friendly... under normal circumstances. He and his delegation failed to get even a minimally face-saving outcome at the collapsed trade talks.... [W]hen... Bush first ran for president, he bragged about his understanding of Latin America, his ability to speak Spanish and his friendship with Mexico. But he also made fun of Al Gore for believing that nation-building was a job for the United States military....

Bush could certainly afford to replace some of his top advisers. But the central problem is not Karl Rove or Treasury Secretary John Snow or even Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary. It is President Bush himself....

Bush has never demonstrated the capacity for... a comeback. Nevertheless, every American has a stake in hoping that he can surprise us.

The place to begin is with Dick Cheney.... This is truly a remarkable set of priorities: his former chief aide was indicted, Mr. Cheney's back is against the wall, and he's declared war on the Geneva Conventions....

Bush... could do what other presidents have done to vice presidents: keep him too busy attending funerals and acting as the chairman of studies to do more harm. Mr. Bush would still have to turn his administration around, but it would at least send a signal to the nation and the world that he was in charge, and the next three years might not be as dreadful as they threaten to be right now.

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