Zalmay Khalilzad Leads the Order in Evensong Tonight

Evensong tonight at Order of the Shrill headquarters will be led by the newest of our Greater Shoggoths, Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, who reacts to George W. Bush's claims that:

I was impressed with [Malaki] the [new] Prime Minister [of Iraq], the team he has assembled, and the plan he has set for his government. I appreciate his determination, and the determination of his Cabinet, to make his agenda work. I told them that the future of Iraq is in their hands. And I told them that America is a nation that keeps its word, and America will stand with them as we work toward our shared goal: a free Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself. By seizing this moment of opportunity, we will defeat our common enemies and build a lasting democracy in the heart of the Middle East, and that will make Americans, Iraqis, and the world more secure.

by descending into shrill unholy madness:

R 121430Z 06
FM AMEMBASSY BAGHDAD
TO SECSTATE WASHDC 5042
INFO IRAQ COLLECTIVE

UNCLAS BAGHDAD 001992

E.O. 122956: N/A
TAGS: PHUM, PREL, ASEC, AMGT, IZ
SUBJECT: Snapshots from the Office: Public Affairs Staff Show Strains of Social Discord

SENSITIVE

1. (SBU) Beginning in March, and picking up in mid-May, Iraqi staff in the Public Affairs section have complained that Islamist and/or militia groups have been negativelyy affecting their daily routine. Harassment over proper dress and habits has been increasingly pervasive. They also report that power cuts and fuel prices have diminished their quality of life. Conditions vary by neighborhood, but even upscale neighborhoods such as Mansur have visibly deteriorated.

2. (SBU) The Public Affairs Office has 9 local Iraqi employees. Two of our female employees report stepped up harassment beginning in mid-May. One, a Shiite who favors Western clothing, was advised by an unknown woman in her upscale Shiite/Christian Baghdad neighborhood to wear a veil and not to drive her own car. Indeed, she said, some groups are pushing women to cover even their faces, a step not taken in Iran even at its most conservative.

3. (SBU) Another, a Sunni, said that people in her middle-class neighborhood are harassing women and telling them to cover up and stop using cell phones (suspected channel to licentious relationships with men). She said that the taxi driver who brings her every day to the green zone checkpoint has told her he cannot let her ride unless she wears a headcover. A female in the PAS cultural section is now wearing a full abaya after receiving direct threats in May. She says her neighborhood, Adhamiya, is no longer permissive if she is not clad so modestly.

4. (SBU) These women say they cannot identify the groups that are pressuring them; many times, the cautions come from other women, sometimes from men who they say could be Sunni or Shiite, but appear conservative.They also tell us that some ministries, notably the Sadrist controlled Ministry of Transportation, have been forcing females to wear the hijab at work.

5. (SBU) Staff members have reported that it is now dangerous for men to wear shorts in public; they no longer allow their children to play outside in shorts. People who wear jeans in public have coe under attack from what staff members describe as Wahabis and Sadrists.

6. (SBU) One colleague beseeched us to weigh in to help a neighbor who was uprooted in May from her home of 30 years, on the pretense of application of some long-disused law that allows owners to evict tenants after 14 years. The woman, who is a Fayli Kurd, says she has nowhere to go, no other home, but the courts give them no recourse to this assertion of power. Such uprootings may be a response ny mew Shiite government authorities to similar actions against Arabs by Kurds in other parts of Iraq. (NOTE: An Arab newspaper editor told us he is preparing an extensive survey of ethnic cleansing, which he said is taking place in almost every Iraqi province, as political parties and their militias are seemingly engaged in tit-for-tat reprisals all over Iraq. One editor told us that the KDP is now planning to set up tent cities in Irbil, to house Kurds being evicted from Baghdad.)

7. Temperatures in Baghdad have already reached 115 degrees. Employees all confirm that by the last week of May, they were getting one hour of power for every six hours without. That was only about four hours of power a day for the city. By early June, the situation had improved slightly. In Hai al Shaab, power has recently improved from one in six to one in three hours. Other staff report similar variances. Central Baghdad neighborhood Bab al Mu'atham has had no city power for over a month. Areas near hospitals, political party headquarters, and the green zone have the best supply, in some cases reaching 24 hours. One staff member reported that a friend lives in a building that houses a new minister; within 24 hours of his appointment, her building had city power 24 hours a day.

8. (SBU) All employees supplement city power with service contracted with neighborhood genarator hookups that they pay for monthly. One employee pays 6500 ID per ampere to get 10 amperes per month (75,000 ID = USD 50/month). For this, her family gets 6 hours power per day, with service ending at 2 am. Another employee pays 9000 ID per ampere to get 10 amperes per month (90,000 = USD 60). For this, his family gets 8 hours per day, with service running until 5 am.

9. (SBU) Fuel lines have also taxed our staff. One employee told us May 29 that he had spent 12 hours on his day off (Saturday) waiting to get gas. Another staff member confirmed that shortages were so dire, prices o the black market in much of Baghdad were now above 1,000 Iraqi dinars per liter (the official, subsidized price is 250 ID).

10. (SBU) One employee informed us in March that his brother in law had been kidnapped. The man was eventually released, but this caused enormous emotional distress to the entire family. One employee, a Sunni Kurd, received an indirect threat to her life in April. She took extended leave, and by May, relocated abroad with her family.

11. (SBU) In April, employees began reporting a change in demeanor of guards at the green zone checkpoints. They seemed to be more militia-like, in some cases seemingly taunting. One employee asked us to explore getting her press credentials because guards had held her embassy badge up and proclaimed loudly to nearby passers-by "Embassy" as she entered. Such information is a death sentence if overheard by the wrong people.

12. (SBU) Employees all share a common tale of their lives: of nine employees in March, only four had family members who knew they worked at the embassy. That makes it difficult for them and for us. Iraqi colleagues called after hours often speak Arabic as an indication they cannot speak openly in English.

13. (SBU) We cannot call employees in on weekends or holidays without blowing their "cover." Likewise, they have been unavailable during multiple security closures imposed by the government since February. A Sunni Arab female employee tells us that family pressures and the inability to share details of her employment is very tough; she told her family she was in Jordan when we sent her on training to the U.S. in February. Mounting criticisms of the U.S. at home among family members also makes her life difficult. She told us in mid-June that most of her family believes the U.S. -- which is widely perceived as fully controlling the country and tolerating the malaise -- is punishing populations as Saddam did (but with Sunnis and very poor Shiites now at the bottom of the list). Otherwise, she says, the allocation of power and security would not be so arbitrary.

14. (SBU) Some of our staff do not take home their American cell phones, as this makes them a target. Planning for their own possible abduction, they use code names for friends and colleagues and contacts entered into Iraq cell phones. For at least six months, we have not been able to use any local staff members for translation at on-camera press events.

15. (SBU) More recently, we have begun shredding documents printed out that show local staff surnames. In March, a few staff members approached us to ask what provisions would we make for them if we evacuate.

16. (SBU) Ethnic and sectarian faultlines are also becoming part of the daily media fare in the country. One Shiite employee told us in late May that she can no longer watch TV news with her mother, who is a Sunni, because her mother blamed all government failings on the fact that Shiites are in charge. Many of the employee's immediate family members, including her father, one sister, and a brother, left Iraq years ago. This month, another sister is departing for Egypt, as she images the future here is too bleak.

17. (SBU) Against this backdrop of frayed social networks, tension and moodiness have risen. One Shiite made disparaging comments about the Sunni caliph Othman which angered a Kurd. A Sunni Arab female apparently insulted a Shiite female colleague by criticizing he overly liberal dress. One colleague told us he feels "defeated" by circumstances, citing the example of being unable to help his two year old son who has asthma and cannot sleep in the stifling heat.

18. (SBU) Another employee tells us that life outside the Green Zone has become "emotionally draining." He lives in a mostly Shiite area and claims to attend a funeral "every evening." He, like other local employees, is financially responsible for his immediate and extended families. He revealed that "the burden of responsibility; new stress coming from social circles who increasingl disapprove of the coalition presence, and everyday threats weigh very heavily." This employee became extremely agitated in late May at website reports of an abduction of an Iraqi working with MNFI, whose expired Embassy and MNFI badges were posted on the website.

19. (SBU) Staff members say they daily assess how to move safely in public. Often, if they must travel outside their own neighborhoods, they adopt the clothing, language, and traits of the area. In Jadriya, for example, one needs to conform to the SCIRI/Badr ethic; in Yusufiya, a strict Sunni conservative dress code has taken hold. Adhamiya and Salihiya, controlled by the secular Ministry of Defense, and not conservative. Moving inconspicuously in Sadr City requires Shiite conservative dress and a particular lingo. Once-upscale Mansur district, near the Green Zone, according to one employee, by early June was an "unrecognizable ghost town."

20. (SBU) Since Samarra, Baghdadis have honed these survival skills. Vocabulary has shifted to reflect new behavior. Our staff -- and our contacts -- have become adept in modifying behavior to avoid "Alasas," informants who keep an eye out for "outsiders" in neighborhoods. The Alasa mentality is becoming entrenched as Iraqi security forces fail to gain public confidence.

21. (SBU) Our staff report that security and services are being rerouted through "local providers" whose affiliations are vague. As noted above, those who are admonishing citizens on their dress are not known to the residents. Neighborhood power providers are no well known either, nor is it clear how they avoid robbery or targeting. Personal safety depends on good relations with the "neighborhood" governments, who barricade streets and ward off outsiders. The central government, our staff says, is not relevant; even local mukhtars have been displaced or coopted by militias. People no longer trust most neighbors.

22. (SBU) A resident of upscale Shiite/Christian Karrada district told us that "outsiders" have moved in and now control the local mukhtars, one of whom now has cows and goats grazing in the streets. When she expressed her concern at the dereliction, he told her to butt out.

23. (SBU) Although our staff retain a professional demeanor, strains are apparent. We see that their personal fears are reinforcing divisive sectarian or ethnic channels, despite talk of reconciliation by officials. Employees are apprehensive enough that we fear they may exaggerate developments or steer us towards news that comports with their own worldview. Objectivity, civility, and logic that make for a functional workplace may falter if social pressures outside the Green Zone don't abate.

KHALILZAD

Labor Secretary Elaine Chao Is Shrill!!

Yes, she is a shrill unbalanced critic of George W. Bush. The Carpetbagger Report reports from its carpetbag:

Carpetbagger Report: From time to time, it's helpful to look back and see how the administration performs by its own standards. In February 2004, for example, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao was on CNN defending the Bush administration's economic policies. When Judy Woodruff noted the president's poor record on job creation, Chao suggested there's only one number that matters.

Woodruff: I want to cite the one economic analyst with Credit Suisse First Boston. He said, these are his words, quote, "very disappointing; we're not getting the jobs to replace the stimulus in the economy which will fade once the first quarter ends." Another economist said, "It's the weakest job-creation rate relative to economic growth on record."

Chao: Well, the stock market is, after all, the final arbiter.

In retrospect, Chao may have wanted to pick a different standard of measurement, because if the stock market is "the final arbiter," Bush has some explaining to do. Yesterday, the Dow Jones closed at 10,706.14. On the day Bush was sworn into office in January 2001, the Dow Jones stood at 10,732.46. In other words, after five-and-a-half years of Bush's presidency and a series of budget-busting tax cuts, the stock market has a cumulative gain of negative 26 points.

Under Reagan, the Dow went up 148%. Under Clinton, it grew 187%. After five-and-a-half years, Bush isn't quite breaking even. Sure, Republican administrations have consistently under-performed Democratic administrations on stock market growth, but who would have guessed that nearly five years after Bush took office, the Dow wouldn't have grown at all?

Rudolph Giuliani Is Shrill!!

Daniel Gross reports that Rudolph Giuliani is now a shrill unbalanced critic of George W. Bush:

Daniel Gross: June 11, 2006 - June 17, 2006 Archives: Look who is railing against the administration's failure to develop anything resembling a plan to deal with the nation's energy challenges. Why it's that well-known leftist Rudolph Giuliani. Patrick Healy reports in the New York Times

Challenging fellow Republicans in Washington, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said yesterday that the Bush administration lacked an energy policy and that greater reliance on nuclear power, ethanol-based fuels and hybrid vehicles was more realistic than President Bush's goal of independence from foreign energy sources.

Mr. Giuliani, who is considering a presidential bid in 2008, did not criticize Mr. Bush by name, and some of his ideas reflected Republican orthodoxy about increasing energy supply. Yet in a speech to conservative thinkers from the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Mr. Giuliani implicitly accused the White House of doing little to expand energy sources. Afterward, too, he expressed concern about global warming, saying that "everyone accepts the fact that it's happening and it has an impact."

"I can't imagine how you can achieve anything in government without a plan," he said in his remarks at the Princeton Club, referring to the nation's long-range energy needs. "This is an area where we haven't had a plan in a very, very long time."

It's actually a brilliant move: he burnishes his image as an independent while indirectly shilling for clients. Giuliani's lobbying firm, Healy notes, "advises energy companeis and a liquefied natural gas project on Long Island."

John Derbyshire Is Shrill!!!

Is there nobody not on the immediate White House payroll who is not shrill? For now John Derbyshire of National Review is a shrill unholy critic of George W. Bush. We have proof:

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Derbyshire R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Derbyshire R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Derbyshire R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! Derbyshire fhtagn!! DERBYSHIRE FHTAGN!!!!

John Derbyshire on Iraq on National Review Online: Did I support the 2003 invasion of Iraq? Yes I did. Do I support the continuing effort to get civil society going in Iraq? No I don’t, and haven’t for over two years.... Let’s start from the fact that the whole thing, taken in one piece—-attack plus follow-up nation--building effort—has been a huge negative for the USA. Is there anyone, really, who is glad we did it? Most of my NR colleagues are still talking up the administration’s Iraq policy. It’s hard not to think, though, that if wired up to a polygraph and asked the question: “Supposing you could wind the movie back to early 2003, would you still attack Iraq?” any affirmative answers would have those old needles a-jumping and a-skipping all over the graph paper.

We are stuck there in that wretched place with no way out that would not involve massive loss of geostrategic face. Getting on for 3,000 of our troops have been killed, and close to 20,000 maimed. We’ve spent untold billions of dollars. For what? One reason I supported the initial attack, and the destruction of the Saddam regime, was that I hoped it would serve as an example, deliver a psychic shock to the whole region.... As it is, the shock value has all been frittered away.... [W]e are perceived as a soft and foolish nation, that squanders its victories and permits its mighty military power to be held to standoff by teenagers with homemade bombs—-that lets crooks and bandits tie it down, Gulliver-like, with a thousand little threads of blackmail, trickery, lies, and petty violence.

Just ask yourself: Given that Iran is the real looming threat in that region, are we better placed now to deal with that threat than we would have been absent an Iraq war? If we could ask President Ahmadinejad whether he thinks we are better placed, what would his honest answer be?

We are not controlling events in Iraq. Events in Iraq are controlling us. We are the puppet; the street gangs of Baghdad and Basra are the puppet-masters, aided and abetted by an unsavory assortment of confidence men, bazaar traders, scheming clerics, ethnic front men, and Iranian agents. With all our wealth and power and idealism, we have submitted to become the plaything of a rabble, and a Middle Eastern rabble at that. Instead of rubbling, we have ourselves been rabbled. The lazy-minded evangelico-romanticism of George W. Bush, the bureaucratic will to power of Donald Rumsfeld, the avuncular condescension of Dick Cheney, and the reflexive military deference of Colin Powell combined to get us into a situation we never wanted to be in, a situation no self-respecting nation ought to be in, a situation we don’t know how to get out of. It’s not inconceivable that, with a run of sheer good luck, we might yet escape without too much egg on our faces, but it’s not likely. The place we are at is surely not a place anyone in 2003 wanted us to be at—-not even Vic Davis Hanson.

Since the Iraq war was obviously a gross blunder, is it time for those of us who cheered on the war to offer some kind of apology?... For those of us down at the bottom of the pundit pecking order, the stakes aren’t so high. I, at any rate, am willing to eat some crow and say: I wish I had never given any support to this fool war. I am spared major embarrassment not only by the slightness of my own reputation, as by the fact that while I supported the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of the regime, I never thought much of the nation-building exercise that followed. It took me a while to figure out that the administration actually believed all the guff about “establishing democracy in the Middle East,” but once it had sunk in, and the party enthusiasms of the 2004 election season had subsided, I was calling for withdrawal....

My fault was in not grasping the scale of the administration’s multiculturalist ambitions. (Of which, to be fair to them, they had given plenty of hints, and even one or two frank declarations of intent.) George W. Bush believes that, to borrow and adjust a line from the colonel in Full Metal Jacket: “Inside every Middle East Muslim there is an American trying to get out”...

Paul Bass of The Hartford Courant Is Shrill!

Bass Fhtagn!!

Connecticut News from The Hartford Courant ::: State, Regions, & Towns On courant.com: Meanwhile, in ads and public statements, Lieberman portrays himself as Regular Joe, a fighter for the little guy, in touch with blue-state Connecticut and mainstream Democrats on all issues except Iraq. And somehow we - not just Lieberman - keep a straight face, as if he hadn't just spent 18 years helping Republicans hijack the Constitution and pick on little guy after little guy.

The Bush administration values Joe Lieberman because he has been a crucial ally in efforts to free Enron-style corporate crooks from regulation, transfer wealth to the wealthy, hound gays, trample on the rights of government critics and sacrifice the lives of thousands of Americans and Iraqis to dishonest, dangerous military adventurism....

Watching Lieberman and Lamont these past few weeks, I had to wonder: Am I the one with amnesia? So I went up to the attic and pulled out my Lieberman file, with clippings and documents collected from covering him during his three terms in Washington. It was true. My memory was faulty. I had remembered that, out of the eye of voters back home, Lieberman developed working alliances with the most hypocritical and dangerous right-wingnuts like Ralph Reed and Charles Murray and Bill Bennett. But I had forgotten just how extensive a record he had accumulated.

I had forgotten how he played the leading role in 1993 to thwart Democrats who tried to close loopholes allowing companies to cook the books on millions of dollars of stock options. Thus began the regulatory abandonment that spawned Enron and its sibling rip-offs. I had forgotten how that same year, Lieberman joined with Republican Sen. Alphonse M. D'Amato of New York and against Democrats to "work the cloakrooms" of the Senate, in the words of a news account, to "line up unanimous support so that a tax break eagerly sought by the real estate industry could be passed without senators having to vote on the record."

How many Connecticut Democrats remember that their senator was one of only two Democrats who voted with Republicans in 1995 to kill a lobbyist-gift ban? Or that he called affirmative action "un-American?" Or that in August 1994 he voted in favor of a proposal by Republican Jesse Helms to cut off all federal money from schools that offer counseling to suicidal gay teens by referring them to gay support groups or in any way suggesting it's OK to be gay? Or that Gov. John Rowland and Lieberman had the same fundraiser, Michael Lewan, raising the same campaign cash from the same fat cats, because, as Lewan told the Courant, "they're two like-minded guys?"

Did most Connecticut Democrats even know that Lieberman helped Lynne Cheney found a McCarthy-style group called the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which hounded liberal university professors for criticizing American foreign policy, including the president of Wesleyan University? No wonder Lieberman could vote to confirm an attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, who wrote the legal opinion excusing torture. Most recently, Gonzalez threatened to start prosecuting journalists for publishing classified information in order to silence government critics. But that was weeks ago. The new Fightin' Joe is on our side. A real Democrat.

Now it's true that Lieberman earns high marks on Democratic interest group "report cards." That's because he plays a shell game in which liberal interest groups are complicit. He gets the "right" mark for voting against Samuel Alito's Supreme Court nomination, for instance. But he gives the Bush administration the vote it needs to make Alito a judge, by voting to stop a filibuster. Similarly, he held back on voting for Clarence Thomas's nomination until the first Bush administration saw it had the votes. Then Lieberman could safely vote against Thomas and earn the "right" grade.

It's fine for Lieberman to join Republicans in ideological arguments. He does that a lot for someone still calling himself a Democrat. And when he can publicly excoriate President Clinton for having sex with an intern - then hold back on President Bush's immoral lying about Iraq and illegal spying on Americans - he steps over not just a party line, but an ethical line as well.

It's also true that Lieberman has acknowledged some errors. He told me in past interviews that he was wrong to vote with Helms on the gay-bashing proposal. He said he erred in joining the Cheney group. But such after-the-fact admissions ring hollow when he continues to oppose gay marriage, or when he accuses critics of the Bush administration's Iraq war of endangering national security.

Finally, it's true that Joe Lieberman is a genuinely nice person, a decent man. That has nothing to do with his record, with masquerading as a Connecticut Democrat while enlisting in a Republican assault on Americans' bedrock freedoms and norms of social justice. Good people do awful things when power tempts. In watching this senate race unfold, remembering that adage might help ward off the most dangerous effects of Connecticut's political amnesia.

Matthew Yglesias Is Shrill...

Matthew Yglesias is shrill, and has the courage of his convictions, or the convictions of his courage, or something:

Cause and Effect | TPMCafe: My thinking... has... become totally unmixed. I worry about the fates of the populations of, say, Iran and Venezuela. But realistically the most helpful thing I can do for Iranians and Venezuelans is use my platform as a pundit to discourage the United States from launching a war with the former country or mounting a coup in the latter country. Extravagant denunciations of the Iranian regime do much more to increase the odds of a war with Iran (bad for Iranians) than to boost the fortunes of Iranian democracy. Enhancing my own sense of self-righteousness is not a real value.

In Beinart's defense, he's not just advocating self-righteousness. His read of the situation is that in the wake of Iraq the balance of risks is such that it's more likely the United States will become unduly isolationist and unconcerned with the fate of the world than that it will act in an unduly aggressive manner around the world. Insofar as you think that's true, it likewise follows that more pundit-time spent denouncing would be a good thing.

But that strikes me as a bizarre assessment of the situation. Beinart and I are in more-or-less the same place substantively -- we were both for the Iraq War and have both concluded that we were badly mistaken about this -- but when I look around I see a world in which basically the entire GOP and a surprisingly large segment of the leading Democrats are too my right. Plenty of people inhabit a conceptual space to my left on national security issues, but I don't see any circumstances under which they're going to achieve political power in the foreseeable future. I worry about the people running the country, and about those Democrats who don't seem to offer a seriously different view of how the country's foreign policy should be conducted. I worry that we're going to invade Iran, and I want to stop that from happening.

It may come to pass that we don't invade Iran and after a decade or two -- or maybe even less -- of peace, Iran emerges as a democracy. If that happens, Iranian dissidents may well look back at early 21st century America and decide that those pundits who spent a lot of time denouncing the Ayatollahs were the good guys and that I was one of the bad guys. I would be disappointed by that result, but would consider this a very good outcome all things considered. Right now the issue really is whether or not there's going to be a war, and it's worth focusing one's energies on that fact and not incidental matters.

David Frum Is Shrill in a New Way!

David Frum is really shrill. His contempt for the U.S. military is such that he thinks U.S. arsenals and headquarters need to be protected by the Department of Homeland Security:

David Frum's Diary on National Review Online: A knowledgeable reader points out: 40% of the US chemical warfare arsenal is stored on a military base near Little Rock, Arkansas. Think that might be interesting to al Qaeda?... The DHS decision to shift anti-terror funds to places like Omaha, Nebraska, has excited a lot of controversy from northeastern bloggers who find it hard to imagine that the terrorists could find anything of interest to attack in the boring old Midwest. In response, a reader (affiliated with, shudder, a Midwestern university) writes:

You guys DO realize (I ask since most of you live in New York and DC and hence may be unfamilar with flyover land) that Omaha is the headquarters to the military's USSTRATCOM, which controls our strategic (i.e. nuclear) weapons? Not to mention be a major rail center--if someone wanted to cripple a military response to, say, an Iranian nuclear threat, it's a better target than NYC.

David Frum Is Shrill, But Not Shrill Enough...

Frum writes:

David Frum's Diary on National Review Online: May. 30, 2006: Paulson: He'll be a good man to have at the Treasury if there's a crisis. But his appointment raises the question: Why was he - or someone like him - not appointed in January 2005, when the president still possessed ample political capital and real opportunities to achieve results?

Why was Paulson - or someone like him - not appointed in January 2001?

Kevin Drum and Andrew Sullivan Are Shrill!

Kevin Drum and Andrew Sullivan are the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis... the William Cecil and Francis Walsingham... the Wilson and Lloyd George... the Roosevelt and Churchill... the Sacco and Venzetti... the Hiss and Chambers... of the Order of the Shrill:

The Washington Monthly: WORDS AND DEEDS....Andrew Sullivan is perplexed by President Bush's admittedly incomprehensible approach to the Iraq war:

We were told by the president that the Iraq war was the critical battle in the war on terror, an effort of enormous stakes that we couldn't possibly lose. And then he went to war with half the troops necessary to win, with no plan for the aftermath, and refused to budge even when this became obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain.

This is followed by a long string of "He says [blank]" accompanied by evidence that Bush rather obviously doesn't believe [blank].

But it's not just the Iraq war and it's not just Bush. It's the entire Republican leadership. For example, they claim to be worried about nuclear terrorism, but they pay virtually no serious attention to counterproliferation issues and have routinely opposed proposals for tighter port security.

They claim to be concerned about the future financial impact of Social Security deficits, but for short-term electoral reasons they have blithely passed tax cuts and a Medicare prescription bill that do far more damage to our future finances than Social Security ever will.

They claim that democracy promotion is the cornerstone of their foreign policy, but they've budgeted only a pittance for programs that might genuinely encourage democracy, and have applied serious public pressure only to regimes that are already administration bête-noirs for other reasons.

I could go on, but I'll spare you. The obvious conclusion is that they didn't think Iraq was the central front on the war on terror back in 2002. They don't think nuclear terrorism is really that big a deal. They aren't worried about long term finances. And they don't really care very much about democracy promotion. They just say these things because they're convenient.

It's this simple: these guys say a lot of stuff they don't believe. Their words are largely meaningless. There's no paradox, and there's really not much point in trying to make it more complicated.

Ia! Ia! Drum Fhtagn! Sullivan Fhtagn! Ia!

Greg Mankiw Is a Shrill Unbalanced Critic of Ben Bernanke

Greg Mankiw is a shrill unbalanced critic of Ben Bernanke:

Greg Mankiw's Blog: Big Blunder from Bernanke?: I think I may have identified Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's most troubling misstep to date. Buried inside today's Wall Street Journal is this piece of news:

Greenspan's retirement disappoints A-list journalists and politicians in a way unrelated to economic performance. It ends the Fourth of July fireworks party that the erstwhile Federal Reserve chairman and wife Andrea Mitchell threw annually atop Fed building, overlooking Washington Monument.

I have a fond recollection of these events, which I shared with my family during my time in DC. I am shocked and dismayed by the suggestion that Ben is not continuing the tradition. The Fed terrace is too great a venue to see the fireworks to have this scarce resource go to waste.

Impeach Ben Bernanke! Impeach him now!

Glenn Hubbard Is Not Shrill

Glenn Hubbard is not shrill--just calmly critical, in a measured and sober way:

WSJ.com - Former Bush Adviser Criticizes Drug Plan: R. Glenn Hubbard, former chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, says the Bush-backed expansion of Medicare to include prescription drugs was "unwise."

"The Medicare expansion without substantial reform of the system was unwise fiscal policy," Mr. Hubbard, now dean of Columbia University's business school, said in an online exchange sponsored by The Wall Street Journal. "The current Social Security and Medicare systems are on an unsustainable path," Mr. Hubbard said in the exchange with Robert Reich, a Brandeis University professor who served as secretary of labor in the Clinton administration. "In both cases, sound fiscal reform should involve slower benefit growth for high-income households. In addition, fiscal reform for Medicare must be accompanied by reform of health-care markets."...

Mr. Hubbard was chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers from February 2001 until March 2003, where he advised President Bush on economic, tax and budget policy, international finance and health care, among other issues.

He's not shrill. That's OK. We'll still save him a lobster at the 4th of July ShillBQ.

Bill O'Reilly Has Driven Keith Olbermann Mad!

Olbermann Fhtagn!! Olberman Fhtagn!!

Olbermann on O'Reilly and Wesley Clark transcript: Abraham Lincoln did not shoot John Wilkes Booth...

"Titanic" did not sink a North Atlantic iceberg...

And Fox News is neither fair nor balanced.

These are simple historical facts -- intelligible to all adults, most children, and some of your more discerning domesticated animals.

But not, as the third story on the Countdown proves yet again... not to Billo.

The guilty pleasure offered by the existence of Bill O'Reilly is simple, and understandable.

99 times out of a hundred when we belly up to the Billo bar of bluster... nearly every time we partake of the movable Falafel Feast, he serves us nothing but comedy.

Farce, slapstick, unconscious self-mutilation -- the Sideshow Bob of commentators, forever stepping on the same rake, forever muttering the same grunt of inarticulate surrender, forever resuming the circle that will take him back to the same rake. The Sisyphus of morons, if you will.

But this is the 100th time out of 100.

It is not funny at all.

Bill O'Reilly has -- for the second time in just under eight months -- slandered at least 84 dead American servicemen. He has turned them, again, from victims of the kind of atrocity our country has always fought, into perpetrators of that kind of atrocity. He has made these Americans... into War Criminals.

They are dead - and have been, for 61 years. They cannot defend themselves against O'Reilly. We will have to do it for them.

Last October, O'Reilly railed against a ruling that more photos from the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq might be released.

His guest was Wesley Clark.

Clark is a retired four-star General; was, for four years, the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in Europe, first in his class at West Point, wounded in Vietnam, earned the Bronze Star and the Silver Star, and has streets named for him in Alabama, and Kosovo.

Therefore, naturally, O'Reilly knows much more about the military than General Clark does.

Clark defended the release of the additional Abu Ghraib photos, saying we needed to know what happened, and to correct it.

O'Reilly lectured him, and concluded that there had always been atrocities, even by Americans, in war.

It was a remarkable mistake.

The Belgian town of Malmedy did lend its name to one of the most appalling battlefield War Crimes of the 20th Century, but O'Reilly's implication that the Americans committed it, was entirely backwards.

Americans - most of them, members of Battery B of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion - surrendered to German Panzer troops - and were then shot by their captors from the S.S.

Yet O'Reilly had implied that the Americans had massacred this Germans in this one stark moment of the Battle of the Bulge. And he used this Alice-Through-The-Looking-Glass view of history to somehow rationalize Abu Ghraib -- while trying to dress down a four-star American general.

Still. It could've been a mistake.

We make them -- even historians do.

O'Reilly had not explicitly called the Americans the war criminals at Malmedy.

Our troops too were accused of crimes against prisoners in the second World War.

It was assumed he had simply made a foolish error. And, though he got beaten up appropriately in some places, it was largely dismissed as merely that -- a mistake.

Then came this Tuesday night.

Again O'Reilly's guest was General Wes Clark.

This time the topic was the apparent murder of Iraqi civilians at Hadeetha.

That O'Reilly was dismissive of the event, should be no surprise.

That he should have described as the real crime of Iraq, the events of Abu Ghraib, should be no surprise to those who know of his willingness to jettison his most important beliefs of yesterday, for the expediencies of today.

But that he should have brought up Malmedy -- again -- that was a surprise.

Thus was the full depth of Bill O'Reilly's insult to the American dead of World War Two made clear.

The mistake of last October was not some innocent slip, nor misremembered history.

This was the way O'Reilly understood it, and thus, this way -- it had to be.

No errors corrected, no apologies offered, no stopping the relentless tide of bull even briefly enough to check one fact.

The facts of Malmedy are terrifying.

As described by Michael Reynolds in his painstakingly detailed article from a 2003 issue of "World War 2 Magazine," one week before Christmas, 1944, 139 U.S. soldiers, most of them from the 285th Field Artillery, encountered the "Kampf-gruppe Peiper," the leading formation of the German 1st S.S. Panzer Division, one of only two German units which actually carried Adolf Hitler's name.

The Americans were over-run. Eleven of the 139 Americans were killed in the very short battle of Malmedy.

Two more were killed as they tried to flee.

Seven escaped.

Six became Prisoners of War.

The other 113 Americans - nearly all of whom had surrendered outright -- were ordered to assemble in an open field next to a restaurant, the Café Bodarwe'.

What happened next has been attributed to many things: a cold-blooded decision by the Panzer unit Commander -- Colonel Joachim Peiper -- that he could not handle prisoners, or an unjustifiable over-reaction to some kind of escape attempt, or simply... horrible mass murder.

Within fifteen minutes, the S.S. Colonel or someone directly under him, had ordered his men to shoot the unarmed American POW's.

The bodies at Malmedy were not found until a month later. There were 84 of them, all, American soldiers.

More than half showed gunshot wounds to their heads. Six had received fatal blows to the head.

Nine were found with their arms still raised above their heads.

The fact that O'Reilly got these horrible facts completely backwards -- twice -- offended even his own usually compliant viewers.

From his program Wednesday night...

Wrong answer.

When you're that wrong -- when you're defending Nazi War Criminals and pinning their crimes on Americans, and you get caught doing so -- twice -- you're supposed to say 'I'm sorry, I was wrong'... and then you should shut up for a long time.

Instead, Fox washed its transcript of O'Reilly's remarks Tuesday -- its website claims O'Reilly said "In Normandy..." when in fact he said "In Malmedy..."

The rewriting of past reporting -- worthy of Orwell -- has now carried over into such on-line transcription services as Burrell's and Factiva.

Whatever did or did not happen later, in supposed or actual retribution... the victims at Malmedy, were Americans, gunned down while surrendering -- by Nazis in 1944 -- and again, Tuesday Night and Wednesday Night -- by a false patriot who would rather be loud than right.

"In Malmedy, as you know" Bill O'Reilly said Tuesday night, in some indecipherable attempt to defend the events of Hadeetha, "U.S. forces captured S.S. forces who had their hands in the air and were unarmed and they shot them dead, you know that. That's on the record. And documented."

The victims at Malmedy in December, 1944... were Americans. Americans with their hands in the air. Americans who were unarmed. That's on the record. And documented.

And their memory deserves better than Bill O'Reilly.

We all do.

Glenn Reynolds Drives Jonathan Schwarz into Level 764 Shrillness!

The imbecilic Glenn Reynolds has pushed him over the edge:

Only so many ways to be crazy: On the day when Ann Coulter and Pat Robertson finally send the death squads to kill you and me and our families and everyone we know, whose fault will it be? Well, that's obvious: it will be our fault. Glenn Reynolds learnedly explains this for us here:

Peter Ingemi writes that the antiwar left has made Haditha morally irrelevant:

There is one aspect about Haditha that seems to be ignored by everybody. Our press and the anti-American left both in this country and outside of it has been reporting "Hadithas" over and over again over the last three years. Time and time again our friends have accused us of every possible atrocity that there is to the point that internationally people are already able to believe this or the 9/11 stuff or all the rest.

Because of this, internationally it is totally irrelevant if the Marines actually violated the rules of war. Our foes are going to say that we've done things if we do them or not, so the only people that it really matters to will be the people killed (and family) and the people in our own country who support the military.

The real danger is that we who support the war will reach the point that we say "we might as well be taken as wolves then as sheep". At that point the left can celebrate that they have made our military and those who support it the people they claim we are. Once that happens however any compunction about respecting them will be gone, and remember one side is armed and one is not.

That is a fate that I don't wish on any of us.

Neither do I.

It would be easy to say this is straight out of Nazi propaganda. So let me say it: this is straight out of Nazi propaganda. If anyone with time on their hands wants to look through this archive, I guarantee you'll find a dozen statements just like it--the same weepy self-pity and righteous sense of victimization from people with all the power, the same warnings that the powerless are soon going to get what they've been asking for FOR SO LONG, etc.

However, in fairness to Professor Reynolds and Mr. Ingemi, I'm sure you could also find this in the propaganda of the Soviet Union, the Iraqi Baathists, the Ottomans during World War I, etc. There are only so many ways to be dangerous authoritarian psychopaths. It's really not right to expect Reynolds and Ingemi to come up with anything new.

(Via Matt Barganier at Antiwar.com.)

HOLY CRIPES ALMIGHTY: Reynolds has updated the post with this:

Some people, judging from my email, are misjudging -- or deliberately misconstruing -- Ingemi's point. Ingemi's point, as I took it, is that crying wolf leads in the end to moral callousness, as people assume that there's no point in behaving morally when they're going to be called monsters anyway. This seems rather uncontroversially obvious to me.

I almost never look at Instapundit, so I actually had been concerned I might have been a little unfair to Reynolds. But, uh, not anymore.

It would take five years to untangle every strand of his Crazy Yarn, so let me just concentrate on this: what kind of person believes it's "uncontroversially obvious" that human beings work like this? Read that again: "people assume that there's no point in behaving morally when they're going to be called monsters anyway."

You know, Professor Reynolds is welcome to call me a babykiller every day until the sun explodes. Yet somehow I still won't come to his house and shoot his children.

That's just the way my species is, here on the planet we call "Earth."

Matthew McIrvin Is Shrill!

Matthew McIrvin is shrill:

mmcirvin: More fun and games: Does Joel Achenbach's article on global warming skeptics win the bingo? It's written as a more or less unjudgmental personality piece, of the "I can't evaluate what these brainiacs are saying but it sure is interesting" variety.... [T]his kind of coverage of science drives me nuts.

Joel Achenbach's true sin is his failure to lift a finger to evaluate any of the claims of global warming skeptics. Fortunately, we can teach Joel Achenbach to deal with Fred Smith. We can send him to Tim Lambert:

Deltoid: CEI exaggerates by a factor of one million: After everyone laughed at their first two ads, CEI have made another one. This purports to compare Gore's CO2 emissions from flying around to give his presentation on global warming with that of an average person. This screen capture shows that Gore's CO2 meter is about 683,000,000, while the one for the average person is 177, so apparently Gore's flying around produces 4,000,000 times as much CO2 as the average person does in their regular activities. The average person produces about 170 pounds of CO2 per day. According to the CEI video Gore only makes flights from one side of the USA to the other and never flies to somewhere in the middle of the country or on the same coast. This calculator says that a cross country flight produces 1600 pounds of CO2. It seems that the CEI believe that Gore must take 4,000,000*(170/1600)=400,000 cross-country flights every day of the year.

Taking a cross country flight even every second day would be a pretty brutal schedule, so CEI are out by at least a factor of a million.

So, if Gore doesn't fly around the country to warn people about global warming, no-one hears his message. If he does, CEI says "Don't listen to Gore, he's a hypocrite". Cute.

Joel Achenbach had better learn to deal with Fred Smith. If he doesn't he will be doomed, after his death, to forever walk the night through the Washington Post newsroom:

There was a clanking noise, deep down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine merchant's cellar. The door flew open with a booming sound, and then came the noise much louder. "How now!" said the night editor, caustic and cold as ever. "What do you want with me?"

"Much!" -- Achenbach's voice, no doubt about it.

"Who are you?"

"Ask me who I was."

"Who were you then?"

"In life I was your magazine writer, Joel Achenbach." "You don't believe in me," observed the Ghost.

"I don't."

"What evidence would you have of my reality, beyond that of your senses?"

"I don't know."

"Why do you doubt your senses?"

"Because a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise. "Mercy!" said the night editor. "Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?"

"Man of the worldly mind!" replied the Ghost, "do you believe in me or not?"

"I do. I must. But why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?"

"It is required of every man," the Ghost returned, "that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world -- oh, woe is me! -- and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!" Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain and wrung its shadowy hands.

"You are fettered. Tell me why?"

"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?"

The editor trembled more and more.

"These links I forged when I let Fred Smith spin me about global warming..."

Greg Sargent Is Shrill!

He deals with Adam Nagourney:

The Horse's Mouth: it would be awfully nice if the political media saw fit to acknowledge its own role in shaping the public's perceptions of politicans and political events. From reporter Adam Nagourney's piece:

Mr. Gore had managed to shed much of his political baggage from 2000, when he was derided precisely for being a sound-bite candidate, captive of his consultants. (Emphasis added.)

The passive voice is always a giveaway. Who was it exactly who derided Gore in 2000? Why, The New York Times among others did, that's who! The paper's coverage of the campaign, especially that done by Katharine Seelye, relentlessly caricatured Gore as overly political and calculating, and while it's not easy to get the offending articles without Nexis, you can see piles and piles of evidence if you go to The Daily Howler's archive from 2000.

With that in mind, it was gratifying indeed to hear Gore unload on the political press and describe it as frivolous and cynical....

Is it churlish to note that, while [Nagourney's] piece was somewhat sympathetic to Gore, the paper was still straining to revive an old Gore chesnut -- Gore is a pompous ass -- by noting his "cluck-clucking" at a time when Gore was talking about what is quite literally the most important issue facing humankind, i.e., the fate of the earth? Maybe. It's also worth noting that the piece strained to imply that Gore had other motives -- worry over his image and legacy; fear of losing -- for devoting himself to issues instead of returning to politics...

The Poor Man Is Hypershrill!!

Ia Fhtagn!! Ia Fhtagn!!

The Poor Man: I was going to do a whole thing about how disingenuous Gregg Easterbrook has been about global warming, but I see that Media Matters has already done a very thorough job. I would like to highlight one rather egregious item they missed, which comes from his dramatic announcement that, at long last, the science behind global warming has earned the coveted Gregg Easterbrook Seal of Sound Science:

When global-warming concerns became widespread, many argued that more scientific research was needed before any policy decisions. [sic] This was hardly just the contention of oil-company executives. “There is no evidence yet” of dangerous climate change, the National Academy of Sciences declared in 1991.

The thing is, Easterbrook was wrong about global warming, wrong and foolish, as he has been wrong and foolish about countless scientific questions over the years.... However, as he has (somehow) fashioned a professional career based on his “expertise” in “Environmental policy; Global warming; [...] Science; Space policy”, it doesn’t look good if he is found out to be just another dilettante crackpot. So history... will have to be re-written, in order that he can claim that his anti-science position was informed.... It was not. Here is the relevent passage from that 15-year-old NAS report:

During the last 100 years the average global temperature has increased between 0.3° and 0.6°C (0.5° and 1.1°F). This temperature rise could be attributable to greenhouse warming or to natural climate variability; with today’s limited understanding of the underlying phenomena, neither can be ruled out.

Increases in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations probably will be followed by increases in average atmospheric temperature. We cannot predict how rapidly these changes will occur, how intense they will be for any given atmospheric concentration, or, in particular, what regional changes in temperature, precipitation, wind speed, and frost occurrence can be expected. So far, no large or rapid increases in the global average temperature have occurred, and there is no evidence yet of imminent rapid change. But if the higher GCM [General Circulation Models] projections prove to be accurate, substantial responses would be needed, and the stresses on this planet and its inhabitants would be serious.

Easterbrook cilps 5 words from page 2 of this report as evidence that the NAS was cautioning against making any policy decisions. Seventy pages later, in a chapter titled “Recommendations”, you find this:

Despite the great uncertainties, greenhouse warming is a potential threat sufficient to justify action now.

Ten pages of immediate policy recommendations follow. Again, this report came out 15 years ago.

The fundamental point is not that Gregg Easterbrook is not an authority on climate science.... Nor is it that, due to personal dishonesty or lack of interest, he doesn’t seem capable of absorbing not-at-all subtle points from minimally-technical overview documents put together - at great effort - by committees of actual world-class authorities, aimed directly at people who - like Easterbrook - who are interested in environmental policy. Nor is it that Easterbrook has a lot of poorly-concealed resentment directed at scientists and science.... Most people aren’t authorities on climate science, or on much of anything, but that’s not some horrible moral failing. Most people don’t want to read all the way to chapter 9 of some assiduously dry science policy document; and, let’s face it, most people are full of weird ideas about shit they don’t know anything about. I know I am.

The problem is that - for reasons I can’t begin to understand - Easterbrook is sitting in the chair that should be occupied by someone who knows what the hell they are talking about...

David Frum Is Shriller than Ever!

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Shrum R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!!

David Frum's Diary on National Review Online: When the Bush administration fitfully attempts to enforce the immigration laws, it looks for measures that meet four criteria: They must be 1) spectacular; 2) expensive; 3) unsustainable; and 4) ineffective. The proposal to deploy the National Guard to the border meets all four!

This plan won't work, and it is not seriously meant to work. It's supposed to look dramatic and buy the president some respite from negative polls.... Putting the Guard on the border is a symbolic act. If that action symbolized a genuine new commitment to enforce the law, then it would be a good and valuable thing to do. But I am afraid that in this case, the symbolism is manipulative and deceptive...

Yog-Sothoth knows the gate! Yog-Sothoth is the gate!

Not Bush, But the Press Corps Has Driven Michael Berube Shrill

Welcome to the Order of the Shrill's new Yog-Sothoth Professor of Cthonic Cthulthan Studies!

Michael Berube: Margaret Carlson, giving Al Gore his due at last, and doing it the only way a paid-up member of the Media Elite can give a Democrat his due, with a backhanded compliment, observes that possibly, just possibly, likeability isn't the only qualification for a President of the United States.

Sure, she admits, George Bush might have been the more likeable guy back in 2000, but:

Maybe Americans prefer to have a beer and burger with the charming frat boy to the student who always does his homework. But is that a wise basis for choosing a president?

As Shakespeare's Sister's father would say, No foolin', Red Ryder?

Carlson goes on to note that George Bush, charming a frat boy as he is, hasn't done a bang-up job:

With all the needless death from a ill-conceived war, the wasteful corruption of sweetheart contracts in Iraq and New Orleans, debt and deficits as far as the eye can see, gas prices through the roof with no energy policy in sight, and with a president who delegates to incompetents and cronies, I%u2019m ready to give the class nerd his due and raise a glass to a serious man.

You'll note that giving Al Gore his due doesn't require her to admit he'd have been a better President or that he should run again in 2008 or for her to give up referring to him and Bush as if running for President of the United States was the same as running for high school class President.

Al's still the class nerd. And as Bob Somerby keeps pointing out, this caricature of Gore is not going to go away. And if Gore does run and faces off against John McCain, the Media Elite will follow a very similar script in 2008 as they did in 2000, portraying the election as a contest between the robotic class nerd and the authentic, straight-talking, independent (but intellectually average and on the issues wronger than wrong, as wrong as George Bush) man of the people.

The Green Knight dug up something Carlson had to say about Gore and Bush back in 2000:

You can actually disprove some of what Bush is saying if you really get in the weeds and get out your calculator or you look at his record in Texas. But it's really easy, and it's fun, to disprove Gore.

If you can find the difference in tone between what she said then and what she's saying now you have a better ear than I have. The problem, back then, apparently, was that telling the truth about Bush would have required work, while picking on Al Gore just came naturally. Of course, in order to have done that, they needed to make things up about Gore, but that was ok because he was the class nerd, and nerds have no excuse to live if they aren't there to be picked on.

But I want to deal with the likeability thing a little bit, the idea that Americans want of vote for the candidate they'd enjoying sharing a beer and a burger with. I don't know when this notion took root. Maybe back in 1800 pundits were pointing out that regular Americans would prefer to quaff an ale with the charming, straight-talking war hero Aaron Burr to the cold, intellectual, elitist Thomas Jefferson.

But the first I became aware of it was back when it was Morning in America, and analysts and journalists were trying to explain how it could be that while it was obvious to them that Reagan lied, flip-flopped ever which way on issues, blew off his conservative base when it suited him, ignored the will of Congress when that suited him, broke the law (Iran? Contras? Death Squads? Ah, memories!), praised dead Nazis (Bitburg. Good times, good times.), just plain made stuff up, and basically was wrong about almost everything, he was remained wildly popular.

Throwing up their hands collectively, they decided, Heck, it's just that he's so gosh darned likeable.... I don't recall anyone suggesting at the time that Reagan's likeability and apparent sociability excused everything else.

By 2000, their tune had changed. George Bush was likeable, the charming frat boy you'd share a beer and a burger with. Al Gore was the class nerd, the kind of annoying twerp who always did his homework and made sure you knew it. (Sigh.) And not only did this explain why Bush was the people's choice, even though he was only half the people's choice, it made Bush the pundits' darling and the Right Man at the Right Time...

Daniel Drezner Is Shrill!

He writes:

danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner :: The White House goes Vizzini on Treasury: The White House seems to view the Treasury Secretary as a salesman's job, as opposed to a position where that requires any requisite policy knowledge, expertise, or anything of that nature. At least, that's what I divined from this Financial Times story by Demetri Sevastopulo, Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Caroline Daniel:

The White House has been seeking to replace Mr Snow with someone who would command more respect on Wall Street, in international financial markets, on Capitol Hill and among the public. One influential Republican with close ties to the White House said Mr Zoellick was leaving “soon” because he was not getting the Treasury job. The Republican added that the White House wanted someone who would be a better salesman. Mr Zoellick is more widely admired for his policy knowledge.

The truly scary thing... is the White House's belief that one can find a Treasury Secretary who would be a salesman while still commanding respect in the markets. To my knowledge, the only value-added John Snow has brought to the Treasury position has been his willingness to be the Bush administration's salesman -- and I'm pretty sure the markets don't respect him all that much.

Yes. That is one of the truly scary things.

The other truly scary things are drawn from darker and more furtively whispered cycles of subterranean legend--black, formless Tsathoggua, many-tentacled Cthulhu, proboscidian Chaugnar Faugn, and other rumored blasphemies from beyond the stars and beneath the sea described in forbidden books like the Krugmanomicon, the Book of Crawford, or the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of OSP.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Drezner R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aiiiiiii!!!

The Washington Times Is Shrill

Bruce Bartlett points us to this shrill and unbalanced editorial by the Washington Times. Yes, John Snow has finally pushed them over the edge:

TODAY'S EDITORIAL May 22, 2006: Treasury Secretary John Snow might find his credibility rising if he would recognize that his listeners are intelligent. Testifying May 17 before the House Financial Services Committee, he noted that "real [i.e., inflation-adjusted] GDP rose an impressive 4.8 percent at an annual rate in the first quarter of this year." Moments later Mr. Snow, trying to "stress how broadly the benefits of this strong growth impact Americans," cited as example that "average hourly earnings are picking up. We learned from this month's jobs report that average hourly earnings have risen 3.8 percent over the past 12 months -- their largest increase in nearly five years."

Rep. Barney Frank asked Mr. Snow: "What's the [consumer price index] increase over the past 12 months?" Presumably referring to the Labor Department's consumer price index number for April, issued just an hour and a half before Mr. Snow began testifying, the Treasury secretary replied, "It came out recently, as you know. The headline [CPI rate] . . . " He was interrupted by Mr. Frank, who repeated his request for the consumer price index number "over 12 months," the precise period for which Mr. Snow had earlier boasted that "average hourly earnings have risen 3.8 percent." The Treasury secretary replied, lamely, "Well, about 5 [percent], I think, 5.1 [percent]."

Mr. Frank then asked Mr. Snow to "acknowledge that [the] 3.8 percent increase in wages you're talking about is nominal, not adjusted for inflation." Mr. Snow, who holds a Ph.D. in economics, nevertheless hadn't figured it out: "I'll have to go back, congressman, and check these numbers." Mr. Frank persisted. Perhaps helped by an assistant (perhaps without a Ph.D.), Mr. Snow conceded, "For the 12 months, it's nominal."... [T]he actual not-so-good news, beyond the microscopic increase in average real wages, is that America's secretary of the Treasury has no clue about the 12-month "headline" rate of inflation...

Tom Friedman Howls Beneath the Dead Uncaring Stars

Yes. Tom Friedman is now a greater shoggoth:

War and Piece:: What's happened to Tom Friedman?

President Bush has slipped in one recent poll to a 29 percent approval rating. Frankly, I can't believe that. Those polls can't possibly be accurate. I mean, really, ask yourself: How could there still be 29 percent of the people who approve of this presidency? Personally, I think the president can reshuffle his cabinet all he wants, but his poll ratings are not going to substantially recover -- ever.... Americans in recent months have simply lost confidence in this administration's competence and honesty... time and time again, it has put politics and ideology ahead of the interests of the United States, and I think a lot of people are just sick of it. I know I sure am....

Is there no job in this administration that is too important to be handed over to a political hack? No. In his excellent book on the Iraq war, "The Assassins' Gate," George Packer tells the story of how some of the State Department's best Iraq experts were barred from going to Iraq immediately after the invasion -- when they were needed most -- because that didn't pass Dick Cheney's or Don Rumsfeld's ideology tests. And that is the core of the matter: the Bush team believes in loyalty over expertise. When ideology always trumps reality, loyalty always trumps expertise.

Yes, Mr. Bush has seen the error of his ways and has sacked the Goss crew, but we just wasted a year and saw a number of experienced C.I.A. people quit the agency in disgust...

War Correspondent Joe Galloway Is Shrill

Via Noah Schachtman's defensetech. War correspondent Joe Galloway is really shrill:

Defense Tech: Galloway Goes for the Throat: One of the nice things about being one of the most repected war correspondents ever is that you get to tell Pentagon bigwigs to shove it where the sun don't shine. Check out this e-mail slugfest between We Were Soldiers Once... And Young author Joe Galloway, and departing Defense Department flack-in-chief Larry DiRita.

The whole thing started over Galloway's recent profile of Paul Van Riper, the iconoclastic Marine retired general. But it wound up hitting on just about every major issue facing the Pentagon today, from where to station forces to what kind of gear to buy. Along the way, DiRita and Galloway call each other lots of nasty things. Here's an excerpt, from Galloway's third response to DiRita. Check out the whole thing after the jump.

...this is not an army on the way up but one on the way to a disaster... so far it is the willingness of these young men and women to serve, and to deploy multiple times, and to work grueling and dangerous 18 hour days 7 days a week that is the glue holding things together.

all the cheap fixes have been used; all the one-time-only gains so beloved of legislators trying to balance a budget and get out of town.

the question is what sort of an army are your bosses going to leave behind as their legacy in 2009? one that is trained, ready and well equipped to fight the hundred-year war with islam that seems to have begun with a vengeance on your watch? or will they leave town and head into a golden retirement as that army collapses for lack of manpower, lack of money to repair and replace all the equipment chewed up by iraq and afghanistan, lack of money to apply to fixing those problems because billions were squandered on weapons systems that are a ridiculous legacy of a Cold War era long gone (viz. the f/22, the osprey, the navy's gold plated destroyers and aircraft carriers and, yes, nuclear submarines whose seeming future purpose is to replace rubber zodiac boats as the favorite landing craft of Spec Ops teams, at a cost of billions). meanwhile, the pentagon, at the direction of your boss, marches rapidly ahead with deployment of an anti-missile system whose rockets have yet to actually get out of the launch tubes. at a cost of yet more multiple billions.

you say i blame your boss for things 3 or 4 levels below him that he can't possibly be controlling and quote accusations from present and former flag officers who he has never eyeballed personally. well the above items are things that he directly controls, or should; things he came into office vowing he was going to fix or change drastically. and in the latest QDR, his last, he made none of the hard choices about wasted money on high dollar weapons systems that make no sense in the real world today. the same QDR quite correctly identifies an urgent need for MORE psyops and civil affairs and military police and far more troops who have foreign language training appropriate to where we fight. and we budget a paltry 191 million, i say MILLION, bucks to do all that. not even the cost of the periscopes on those oh-so-necessary submarines, or the instruments on one of those f22s.

this is what has my attention; this is what has me in a mood to question over and over and over, waiting for answers that never come, change that never comes, course corrections that never come. you wanted some specifics. there are some specifics.

joe galloway

PS: those [tens of thousands of soldiers in fixed garrisons in germany who could not deploy] were called VII Corps in the Persian Gulf War. they deployed. they formed the armored spear that penetrated kuwait and broke the republican guard. the garrisons were guarded, while they were gone, by the german army and police. they would have been so guarded in OIF too had we tried a bit of diplomacy instead of bitch-slapping Old Europe as your boss did at a crucial moment.

Rush Limbaugh Is Shrill

Dick Cheney goes on Rush Limbaugh, expecting some softballs he can hit into the outfield. But he gets a surprise. Rush screams and leaps, tearing at Cheney's flesh with the suckers on his tentacles while trying to get purchase to rend Cheney's entrails with his horny beak... I can't watch:

Carpetbagger Report: Yesterday, Dick Cheney made his third appearance on Rush Limbaugh's radio show.... Cheney was on for 13 minutes -- and there wasn't a single softball question during the entire interview. Consider some of Limbaugh's queries:

• Is the President -- are you and the President, the administration aware of the dissatisfaction on the whole issue of illegal immigration that exists not just within the Republican base, but within the country at large?
• Why is it that so many people don't think that the steps the President is outlining and has outlined over the years will address the seriousness of the problem?
• Let me ask you this on behalf of my audience, simply because of the number of emails. People don't think that this number of 6,000 [National Guard troops] -- which probably will add up to 2,000 or 3,000 on duty at any given time -- is actually going to make much of an impact.
• The Dubai Ports deal, American people spoke out loudly against it, "we don't want any part of it," it got killed. The illegal immigration deal is generating just as much negative response, but the American people are not getting the reaction -- the same reaction from government to that, that they got on the Dubai Ports deal -- a little confused, asking questions, "what's different here, we're still talking security."

John Tierney Is Shrill!!

I hereby proclaim his new rank as a Greater Shoggoth in the Order of the Shrill. He writes:

Throwing Hawks a Bone - New York Times: President Bush['s] job last night was not to secure the border but to pretend he could.... His plan to send a few thousand National Guard troops to the border is a symbolic gesture, but symbolism is what's needed. Immigrants will find ways to evade the proposed new ID card requirements, as well as the new high-tech sensors at the border, but the ideas sounded good enough on television.... The fixation on defending the border is a political -- and psychological -- problem, not a rational response to a genuine national threat.... The border hawks have two chief arguments, starting with that great debate stopper: Sept. 11. A porous southern border is supposedly no longer tolerable now that terrorists have declared war on America and are threatening even more catastrophic attacks. But... Mohamed Atta did not have to hire a coyote or swim across the Rio Grande. He and the other hijackers entered the country legally....

The border hawks' other argument is that America must enforce its immigration law or succumb to "mob rule."... But for most of the country's history, America allowed essentially unlimited immigration without descending into Hobbesian chaos....

Bush tried a brief dose of economic reality... the lure of America for poor Mexican workers "creates enormous pressure on our border that walls and patrols alone will not stop." As he explained, the way to reduce illegal immigration is to change the law so more people can enter legally. But that was the rational part of the speech, which Bush knew wasn't enough.

He had to throw in the tough border talk and the ID cards. He had to deal with the new outbreak of xenophobia.... Distrusting foreigners made evolutionary sense when outside clans threatened to bring in disease and encroach on hunting grounds. It made sense during the thousands of years when towns built walls to stop invaders from plundering their wealth and enslaving their inhabitants. But the immigrants now coming across the Mexican border do not want to sack our cities. They're not about to pillage our granaries or march home with Americans in chains. They just want to mow our lawns and clean our offices.

They're coming to feed us, not take our food, yet we're demanding that our leaders keep them out. No Mexican busboys! No Guatemalan cooks! Stop them before they grill again!

Kathryn Jean Lopez of *National Review* Is Shrill!!

Over at National Review, Kathryn Lopez writes:

The Corner on National Review Online: The Speech [Kathryn Jean Lopez]: I think I wouldn't hate it as much (going into it knowing el Presidente Jorge Arbusto and being realistic)...

"Arbusto" is both Spanish for "Bush" and a reference to Arbusto Energy:

Arbusto Energy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Arbusto Energy (Arbusto Oil) was a petroleum and energy corporation formed in Midland, Texas, in 1977, by George W. Bush. The word arbusto is Spanish for "bush".

Investors in the company included Dorothy Bush, Lewis Lehrman, William Henry Draper III, Bill Gammell, and James R. Bath. At the time that Bath made an investment of $50,000 he was representing Salem bin Laden's interests in Texas. When Salem bin Laden died in 1988, his interest in Arbusto (along with other bin Laden Group assets) passed to Khalid bin Mahfouz.

In 1982, Arbusto became known as Bush Exploration, a year after George H. W. Bush became Vice President. A friend of the Bush family, Philip Uzielli, invested $1 million in 1982 in exchange for a 10% stake in the company, at a time when the whole company was valued at less than $400,000. As it neared financial collapse again in September 1984, Bush Exploration merged with Spectrum 7 Energy Corp., a company owned by William DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds. Bush became Chairman and CEO of Spectrum 7.

In 1985 Spectrum 7 reported a net loss of $1.5 million and was bought in 1986 for $2.2 million by Harken Oil and Gas, with Bush joining the Harken board of directors and finance audit committee.

In 1987 the Saudi investor Abdullah Taha Bakhsh bought most of Union Bank of Switzerland's shares in Harken becoming its third largest investor owning 17% of the company. He was represented on the board by Talat M. Othman. Another investor was Ghaith R. Pharaon who would later be involved in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International scandal.

In January 1990 with the company in the same state as its previous incarnations, it was awarded a contract to drill for crude oil off the coast of Bahrain, a move that shocked industry insiders as Harken had no previous experience outside of the US or of drilling offshore.

In June 1990 Bush sold most shares in Harken to a Los Angeles broker named Ralph D. Smith. One week later Harken announced an overall loss of $23.2 million triggering an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission into the sale...

A Tiny Revolution Makes an Awful Suggestion

Could this be? No... No... It's inconeivable!

A Tiny Revolution: Dog Whistle Politics FROM BEYOND THE STARS: George Bush is notorious for his use of dog whistle politics%u2014that is, references in speeches that strike most people as innocuous if peculiar, but are freighted with great meaning for certain constituencies. For instance, in one of the 2004 debates, Bush said he wouldn't appoint anyone to the Supreme Court who would condone the Dred Scott decision. This was confusing, given that this question seemed to have been definitively settled by the Civil War. But it turns out "Dred Scott" is actually religious right-speak for Roe v. Wade. It was inaudible to almost everyone else, but they heard what he was saying.

Yet few have noticed Bush's secret messages to an even more terrifying group of supporters. Take his speech from the 2004 convention:

Like generations before us, we have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom.

This was such an important point he repeated it on Inauguration Day:

We have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom.

This seems weird but essentially meaningless...unless, that is, you are familiar with the Necronomicon of the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred:

I hear the Crawling Chaos that calls from beyond the stars...

Or as it was put by H.P. Lovecraft himself:

...men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars...

That's right! Bush was directing these references not to us, but to the specialest special interest of all:

THE OLD ONES

Moreover, as the End Times approach and R'lyeh prepares to rise from the sea, Bush is getting more and more overt about this. Indeed, according to advance copies, his prime time speech tomorrow will conclude with these words:

My fellow Americans: the Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be! Yog-Sothoth knows the gate! Yog-Sothoth is the gate!

AAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So, here's some advice from an old political hand: when Cthulhu awakes, try if at all possible to be among the first to be eaten.

Posted by Jonathan Schwarz at May 14, 2006 02:42 PM | TrackBack

Newt Gingrich Is Shrill!

On TV last night, Newton Leroy Gingrich now joined the Order of the Shrill--those driven into shrill unholy madness by the malevolence, incompetence, disconnection from reality, and sheer mendacity of George W. Bush and his administration:

Gingrich on NSA:

COLMES: Then he said when it came out a little while ago that there was some wiretapping he said it only applies to international communications. And now we're finding something else. So it just seems we're not getting a consistent story here, are we?

GINGRICH: No. You're not.

COLMES: Why not?

GINGRICH: Look, I'm not -- Alan, I'm not going to defend the indefensible. The Bush administration has an obligation to level with the American people.

And I'm prepared to defend a very aggressive anti-terrorist campaign, and I'm prepared to defend the idea that the government ought to know who's making the calls, as long as that information is only used against terrorists, and as long as the Congress knows that it's underway.

But I don't think the way they've handled this can be defended by reasonable people. It is sloppy. It is contradictory, and frankly for normal Americans, it makes no sense to listen to these three totally different explanations.

Gingrich Fhtagn!! Gingrich Fhtagn!!! GINGRICH FHTAGN!!!

Thomas P.M. Barnett Is Shrill!

Global strategic analyst Thomas P.M. Barnett has joined the ranks of the shrill, unbalanced critics of the Bush administration:

Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog: Putin's backtalking is just another sign that the Bush administration is a spent force: ARTICLE: "Putin Hits Back, Criticizing U.S. In Yearly Address: Russian Leader Call for Stronger Military," by Judith Ingram, Washington Post, 11 May 2006, p. A1.

Nice line: "We are aware of what is going on in the world. Comrade wolf knows whom to eat, he eats without listening, and he's clearly not going to listen to anyone."

Translation: "The Bush Administration does what it wants with its military and energy policies. It decides to invade and conquer one of the world's largest oil reserves, and does so with little care for allies' opinions. Even know, though, this regime lectures the world on democracy while consorting with whatever dictators it cares to, so long as their access to energy is assured."

Cheney warns that Putin is threatening to reverse the gains of the last decade in Russia. Guess what? Plenty of our allies belief Bush and Cheney have already reversed the gains made by globalization over the past decade!

Yes, yes, the Clinton years are looking better by the minute....

[T]his administration seems intent of making sure we reduce our partnership with Russia as much as possible. Why? Apparently right now we need allies less than ever. Putin's backtalking... signals the growing awareness internationally that the Bush Administration is a spent force. This crew is not inclined to change their spots now, and the world knows it. So, quite frankly, our debates should focus most on who and what comes next for America. The conversation is basically over with the Bush Administration. So it's time to focus on the new ideas, the new leaders, and the lifers within the bureaucracy who will both rule--for all practical purposes--in the meantime and be there when the new crew arrives.

Reality Is Shrill!

Jim Henley says that the structure of reality itself compels all to join the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill:

Unqualified Offerings: Look, I have become a "Bush hater." There's nothing wrong with that. The man's record on civil liberties, spending, executive aggrandizement and international hubris compel animus.

Order of the Shrill News

Andrew Sullivan welcomes Peggy Noonan to the evening wiener roast:

Andrew Sullivan | The Daily Dish: Peggy Come Lately: Well, better late than never:

The Republicans talk about cutting spending, but they increase it - a lot. They stand for making government smaller, but they keep making it bigger. They say they're concerned about our borders, but they're not securing them. And they seem to think we're slobs for worrying. Republicans used to be sober and tough about foreign policy, but now they're sort of romantic and full of emotionalism. They talk about cutting taxes, and they have, but the cuts are provisional, temporary. Beyond that, there's something creepy about increasing spending so much and not paying the price right away but instead rolling it over and on to our kids, and their kids.

All of this was apparent before the last election, but Noonan was more interested in John Kerry's war record. Still she's right about one thing. Only by winning the last election has Bush been held fully accountable for what he has done. The chalice was poisoned; and the polity, if not the president, can recover.

Another Right-Wing Conservative Joins the Order of the Shrill

Welcome, right-wing judicial hero Judge J. Michael Luttig. We might carp a little on how long it took you to be driven into shrill unholy madness. But at least you know when you have been lied to and double-crossed. Now you clearly see the incompetence, mendacity, disconnection from reality, and malevolence of the George W. Bush administration.

We understand you already have your robe:

For Luttig, a Breakdown in Trust: On Nov. 22, U.S. Circuit Judge J. Michael Luttig was at work in his chambers here when he received a telephone call telling him to switch on the television. There, he saw Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announce that the government would file charges against Jose Padilla in a federal court -- treating the accused terrorist like a normal criminal suspect.

The judge was stunned. Two months earlier, he had written a landmark opinion saying the government could hold Padilla without charge in a military brig. The decision validated President Bush's claim that he could set aside Padilla's constitutional rights in the name of national security. The judge assumed the government had a compelling reason to consider the suspect an extraordinary threat. Now Gonzales wanted the courts to forget the whole case.

It didn't take long for the judge's anger to burst out into the open. The clash, which underscores the increasing skepticism among even some conservative jurists toward the Bush administration's sweeping theories of executive power, culminated yesterday in Judge Luttig's resignation. Read more in today's Page One article. -- Jess Bravin and J. Lynn Lunsford.

USA Today Founder Al Neuharth Is Shrill

Via the Carpetbagger Report:

Carpetbagger Report: USA Today founder Al Neuharth, generally known for his Republican views, seems to have officially given up on the president.

How low can Bush's approval rating go? My hunch is it's at or near the bottom. That 34% represents mostly unshakeable far-right wingers. Like Bush, Vice President Cheney and company, they are in denial. As were the 24% in the polls who still approved of President Richard Nixon before he resigned in disgrace.

What happened to the 37% who have switched from pro-Bush to anti-Bush? They finally realized they were suckered by Bush and his buddies back then about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction, his tie to terrorists and his threat to the USA.

President Abraham Lincoln was right when he said: "You may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."

Shrillness in the White House!

The new White House press secretary, Tony Snow, is shrill!

Think Progress: [Snow says Bush is an] "embarrassment... doesn't seem to mean what he says... bolstered his detractors' claims that he didn't have the drive and work ethic...

Wow.

Wingnut Representative Dana Rohrbacher Is Shrill!

Wow:

Another Republican Ditches Bush: [W]hen President Bush visited Rohrabacher's Orange County locale yesterday... the OC Congressman wanted nothing to do with W. "I don't want to be behind him looking glum and not applauding," Rohrabacher told the LA Times. "So as not to be rude to the president---which I think is inexcusable---I think I'll just be staying away."...

Colonel Wilkerson Is Really Shrill!

Steve Clemons writes:

The Washington Note: Yesterday, former State Department Chief of Staff offered another installment in his own "straight talk express" in an article that appeared in the Baltimore Sun. He opens with a powerful blast that articulates what true nationalists in this country are feeling:

In January 2001, with the inauguration of George W. Bush as president, America set on a path to cease being good; America became a revolutionary nation, a radical republic. If our country continues on this path, it will cease to be great -- as happened to all great powers before it, without exception.

From the Kyoto accords to the International Criminal Court, from torture and cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners to rendition of innocent civilians, from illegal domestic surveillance to lies about leaking, from energy ineptitude to denial of global warming, from cherry-picking intelligence to appointing a martinet and a tyrant to run the Defense Department, the Bush administration, in the name of fighting terrorism, has put America on the radical path to ruin.

Unprecedented interpretations of the Constitution that holds the president as commander in chief to be all-powerful and without checks and balances marks the hubris and unparalleled radicalism of this administration.

Moreover, fiscal profligacy of an order never seen before has brought America trade deficits that boggle the mind and a federal deficit that, when stripped of the gimmickry used to make it appear more tolerable, will leave every child and grandchild in this nation a debt that will weigh upon their generations like a ball and chain around every neck. Imagine owing $150,000 from the cradle. That is radical irresponsibility.

This administration has expanded government -- creation of the Homeland Security Department alone puts it in the record books -- and government intrusiveness. It has brought a new level of sleaze and corruption to Washington (difficult to do, to be sure). And it has done the impossible in war-waging: put in motion a conflict in Iraq that in terms of colossal incompetence, civilian and military, and unbridled arrogance portends to top the Vietnam era, a truly radical feat....

Rich Lowry Is Shrill!!

No, not a shrill critic of Bush. He is a shrill critic of the Republican Congress:

The Corner on National Review Online: CAN WE FIRE CONGRESS? [Rich Lowry

]This oil thing is, needless to say, idiotic. But it points to a larger issue: the GOP problem at the moment is by no means limited to the White House, as folks on Capitol Hill would have it, but very much includes Congress. Bush can get himself a top-notch White House staff firing on all cylinders and consulting like crazy with Congress, but if Capitol Hill is still run by what often seems a bunch of bungling, spend-thrift, unreformable, tin-eared, unimaginative, hysterical pols, not much is going to change.

Take the opportunity the House had with the selection of John Boehner as majority leader. He was a relative fresh face to most of the public, even if, obviously, not a stranger to K Street. What came of this departure? Very little. Did the GOP take advantage of the moment to institute some serious ethics and earmarks reforms? Of course not. Now, in this moment of political crisis, over in the senate the GOP has come up with the $700 million "railway to nowhere," just in time to remind conservatives why they are so dispirited, if they had by any chance forgotten. Then there's the immigration charade, with the GOP unable press what should be--given public opinion--their advantage on the issue and unable to exploit Democratic divisions on it...

David Frum of National Review Is Shrill!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Last September David Frum tiptoed up to the borders of shrill unholy madness, and then stepped back:

David Frum Is Almost Shrill!: [A]s one who... still critically supports him, I find the sudden surge of public disenchantment with Mr Bush very difficult to understand. If you were looking for a diligent manager of the office of the presidency, a close student of public policy, a careful balancer of risks and benefits -- George W. Bush would never be your man. But is this news?... [He] is a good man who is not a weak man. He is impatient, quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic, often uncurious, and as a result ill-informed...

Today, however, Frum crosses the line. He says that Bush has no positive domestic legacy at all: no permanent accomplishments on economic policy. None. Zero. The only economic achievements of Bush are his "tax cuts of 2001 and 2003" and those will "be undone at some point in the near future" unless, by some miracle, pigs grow wings and "budget discipline is restored."

http://frum.nationalreview.com/: Rob Portman... his translation away from the Trade Representative job at this 11th hour of the Doha trade round may signify that the Bush administration has more or less given up on its hopes for a significant new trade agreement. President Bush's cherished Free Trade Area for the Americas seems likewise doomed to fizzle away into nothing.... George W. Bush ran for president in 2000 as a principled and outspoken free-trader.... But in 2001, he imposed steel tariffs.... Since then, the administration has deviated more and more from its free trade promises: delivering huge new subsidies to farmers, exploiting BSE to bar Canadian beef from US markets... defying WTO panel rulings, etc. etc. This record raises the stakes dramaticallly.... [T]he Bush administration can claim only two substantial free-market economic achievements: the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003... [but] overspending calls into question the sustainability of those tax cuts. Unless budget discipline is restored... those tax cuts will be undone at some point in the near future...

After a hidden, secret committee meeting and a contact of the Great Old Ones via seance, the Council of Ten has reached a conclusion: this is sufficient to induct David Frum into the Ancient, Hermetic, and Occult Order of the Shrill: those who have been driven into shrill unholy madness by the incompetence, mendacity, malevolence, and sheer disconnection from reality of George W. Bush and his administration.

No positive domestic legacy, says Frum. We in the Order of the Shrill never thought that this day would ever come: Nunc dimittis servum tuum domine, et cetera...

Welcome, David. Put on your robe of shrillness. Accept your copy of the Krugmanomicon. Come sit by the fire for the hot dog roast.

Your next scheduled event is by the banks of the fetid, bubbling pools of the Miskatonic, two hours before dawn. You, John Tierney, Colonel Wilkerson, Larry Kudlow, Paul Bremer, Tim Russert, Andrew Sullivan, Peggy Noonan, and two of her dolphins have been selected to make up the morning minyan and thus be the first of the day to chant Aaaiii! Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh David Frum R'lyeh Wagn'nagl Fhtagn! Aaaiii!!!

David Ignatius Is Shrill

He is now a lesser shoggoth. His shrill, unbalanced ululating screeds of Bush hatred fill the night air:

Fix the Intelligence Mess: For the U.S. intelligence community, the warning lights are blinking red. A reorganization that was supposed to bring greater coordination has instead produced a layering of responsibilities and bureaucratic confusion. A demoralized CIA that needed professional management is chafing under a Republican former congressman who has proved to be the most political and ineffective director in the agency's history. Look at the organizational chart of the new Office of the Director of National Intelligence and you wonder if America has become a Third World country with a rival intelligence agency for each patch of turf. At last count, there were 16 different spy units under the DNI's umbrella -- a number that puts even Syria to shame.... You would have thought it was impossible to make our intelligence problems even worse, but the Bush administration has accomplished that. This is a dangerous situation for the country, and it needs to be fixed, now.

Howard Fineman Is Shrill

Boy is he shrill:

Martini Republi: Howard Fineman chimes in, adding to the chorus:

Nor is [Bush] likely to make wholesale changes in his foreign policy and defense team. Bolten can rearrange the deck chairs all he wants to on domestic and economic policy. But the Axis of Believers -- Cheney-Rummy-Rove-Condi -- remains. The more the media and its band of Republican allies complain, the more dug in Bush will become. He's as stubborn as Slim Pickens in "Dr. Strangelove": He'd rather ride Rummy to Armageddon than seem to concede that Iraq was a botched project...

Now why couldn't Howard Fineman have been writing about the incompetence of the Bush administration when it would have done some good--four years ago, say?

Peggy Noonan: Message: Just Because They Call You a Jackass Doesn't Mean You're Lincoln

Bruce Bartlett recommends Peggy Noonan, who is shrill:

OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan: Don't Wait, Calibrate: Learn to bend, Mr. Bush. You won't break: Thursday, April 20, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT: There have been, and apparently will be, personnel changes in the administration. The charmless and much-abused Scott McClellan is out; the focus of Karl Rove's portfolio has shifted back to hardball politics; Rob Portman to the Office of Management and Budget, etc. These shifts are not precisely cosmetic, but they do not signal Big Change. Whoever takes Mr. McClellan's place will put a new face on the news but will not change the news. Other things are needed for that.

To an extraordinary degree this is George W. Bush's presidency. Its strengths are his strengths and its weaknesses his weakness. This White House is him. The decisions it makes are him.... Mr. Bush's feelings, assumptions and convictions set theme, direction and mood. All decisions as to declared destination go to him. He seeks a sense of control by making and sticking to the decision. When he won't budge, the White House won't budge. When it clings to an idea beyond evidence and history, it is Mr. Bush who is doing the clinging....

We all like a president who says "The buck stops here." Mr. Bush never ducks the buck. But he puts severe limits on the number and kind of people who can hand it to him. He picks them, receives their passionate and by definition limited recommendations, makes his decision, and sticks. All very Trumanesque, except Truman could tolerate argument and dissent. They didn't pass the buck to little Harry, they threw it at his head. Clark Clifford was in in the morning telling him he had to recognize Israel, and George Marshall was there in the afternoon telling him he'd step down as secretary of state if he did. It was a mess. Messes aren't all bad....

Reagan could tolerate dissent and ambiguity. He could even tolerate disrespect, which is what some within occasionally showed him. He didn't really care. His ego wasn't delicate. FDR could tolerate tension and dissent too, and in fact loved setting his aides against each other.... George W. Bush, on the other hand, does not tolerate dissent, argument, bitter internal battles. He is the decider. He decides, and the White House carries through. He is loyal to his aides, who carry out his wishes.... [H]is aides move forward with the sharpness and edge of those who know their livelihoods and status are secure. Bruce Bartlett has written of how, as a conservative economist, he was treated with courtesy by the Clinton White House, which occasionally sought out his views. But once he'd offered mild criticisms of the Bush White House he was shut out, and rudely, by Bush staffers. Why would they be like that? Because they believe that as a conservative, Mr. Bartlett owes his loyalty to the president. He thought his loyalty was to principles.

There are many stories like this, from many others. It leaves friends on the outside having to self-censor or accept designation as The Enemy. It leaves a distinguished former government official and prominent Republican saying, in conversation, "Those people aren't drinking the Kool-Aid, they're sucking it from a spigot!"... John Snow, a bright and accomplished man, might as well, as Treasury secretary in the Bush administration, have been what Woody Allen said he saw when, years into his psychotherapy, he finally turned from his couch and looked to see who he was talking to, only to find his therapist was actually a melon on top of a baseball bat....

Sometimes Mr. Bush acts as if he doesn't know you don't have to look for trouble, it will find you. When you are the American president, it knows your address by heart. I know that on some level he knows this. The president has taken, those around him say, great comfort in biographies of previous presidents. All presidents do this. They all take comfort in the fact that former presidents now seen as great were, in their time, derided, misunderstood, underestimated. No one took the measure of their greatness until later. This is all very moving, but: Message to all biography-reading presidents, past present and future: Just because they call you a jackass doesn't mean you're Lincoln....

Even Tim Russert Is Finally Shrill

Using his sekrit knowlige gained from six years of covering George W. Bush, Tim Russert patiently explains to Imus that the cossack--Rumsfeld--works for the Czar--Bush--and that every call for Rumsfeld to quit is also a call for Bush to either quit or to allow himself to be neutered:

Imus:

IMUS: Is there anything going on with the Rumsfeld story that is -- I mean, the President is pledging this support and all that, and that's usually the kiss of death, but not always. But probably not with this guy. But what do you hear?

RUSSERT: Well, I knew something was happening when I had John Murtha on several months ago and he talked about his plan for a timetable. And I got several calls from people at the Pentagon and others and they said, "You know Murtha's right." And I was stunned because you don't usually get those kinds of calls. They were obviously people who would not allow me to broadcast their names. And then it continued with General Zinni who came on "Meet the Press" and said that Secretary Rumsfeld should resign. So the last couple of weeks, as I talked to people, one former general said we have the equivalent of a civil war going on at the Pentagon. The generals are trying to reclaim control of the war because they do believe serious mistakes were made. That's a very serious statement. And then, someone very close to the President said to me, you know, he won't fire Rumsfeld because it would be the equivalent of firing himself. He can't acknowledge that it was such a big mistake, in so many ways. And so Rumsfeld will stay. And that's the decision that the President has made and I think Rumsfeld will stay and try to see this through.

Late to the party, Tim. Very late to the party.

Yet More Shrill Screeds of Bush Hatred!

Greater Shoggoth Ryan Lizza brings us news from the National Review chapter of the Ancient, Hermetic, and Occult Order of the Shrill:

How Bush can save his presidency: e Bush-haters are at it again. This one complains about "the sad state of the Bush administration." This one here burbles, "I think this Administration is the most politically and substantively inept that the nation has had in over a quarter of a century."

And those are just the guys at National Review.