Tim Haab is Shrill

Tim Haab says all politicians are STUPID:

All politicians are idiots and other obvious thoughts on high gas prices, by Tim Haab: I'm angry. I can't believe we're right back where we were a year ago. Gas prices are rising and Congress is trying to do something about it. Eighty-two Democrats and 3 Republicans in the House have proposed the Federal Price Gouging Prevention Act (H.R. 1252) otherwise known as the FPGPA, pronounced STUPID. So let's take a look a the STUPID price gouging bill...

The STUPID price gouging bill will make it a federal crime to:

...sell crude oil, gasoline, natural gas, or petroleum distillates at a price that is unconscionably excessive or indicates the seller is taking unfair advantage [of] unusual market conditions (whether real or perceived) or the circumstances of an emergency to increase prices unreasonably.

Unconscionable excessive? Unfair advantage? Increase prices unreasonably? Yikes.

Allow me to interpret. The STUPID bill makes it a federal crime to:

...sell crude oil, gasoline, natural gas, or petroleum distillates at a price that makes my constituents complain because they are too lazy to drive less at higher gas prices.

There are two possible explanations for the Democrats proposal of the STUPID bill. 1) They think the public is too stupid realize they are trying to "do something" by proposing a STUPID bill, or 2) They are idiots. Since Env-Econ readers obviously represent a cross-section of the public, and since Env-Econ readers are smart enough to know that this bill is STUPID, I have to conclude that 1) is logically impossible and therefore, 2) must be true. So we've now proven that Democrats are idiots. We're halfway there.

In looking into the STUPID price gouging bill, I came across the Republican Study Committees reports on the STUPID price gouging bill. In it, they list a set of alternative proposals for lowering gas prices. They are:

• Streamline the environmental hurdles to building new oil refineries.
• Make it easier for small refineries to increase capacity.
• Allow more offshore (e.g. Outer Continental Shelf) and inland (e.g. Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) oil drilling.

In other words...screw the environment and roll back new source review.

• Temporarily suspend the gas tax.

...because driving more is always a good short-term solution.

• Temporarily suspend the gas tax and temporarily suspend spending on all transportation earmarks in the most recent surface transportation reauthorization bill.

...because driving more on crappy roads is an even better short term solution.

• Permanently reduce the gas tax.

...because driving more on crappy roads is an even better LONG term solution.

• Waive or repeal gas formulation (e.g. oxygenation) requirements under the Clean Air Act and related regulations.

...because somehow removing solutions to environmental externalities is what everyone wants.

• Encourage private-market projects to recover usable energy from oil shale and to otherwise increase production of renewable/alternative fuel sources.
• Strengthen the existing investment tax credit for Enhanced Oil Recovery (using modern technology improvements to extract oil from previously unavailable sources) in section 43 of the IRS Code.

...because we like free-markets especially the kind that subsidize our buddies.

• Waive the tariff on imported ethanol and waive regulations that limit refined gasoline imports.

...I actually like this one because it removes an inefficient policy.

So the Republican solution is to remove all of the policies that are designed to capture the external costs of driving whcih in turn would increase the social costs of driving. Hmmmm...lower the individual cost of driving which will actually increase the overall social cost of driving. Republicans are idiots.

Since independents don't matter, I conclude my proof. All politicians are idiots.

Look, in all seriousness. High gas prices are NOT an economic or political problem. They are the result of the natural workings of markets. There is nothing wrong with the market--and no reason, other than self-preservation and the false appearance of being able to do something, for politicians to intervene. Supplies are decreasing--both temporarily through unexpected refinery shut-downs and permanently through stock depletion. Demand is increasing--both in the U.S. and worldwide. Both of these will cause gas prices to rise and that's good. If gas prices don't rise, we will consume gas even faster and run out sooner. Higher gas prices encourage conservation and encourage investment in alternatives. High gas prices might be uncomfortable while we search for viable long-term solutions, but they're more comfortable than the alternative: no gas and no solutions.

The American Enterprise Institute Would Drive Anybody Shrill!

Yes, it is Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute:

Does Economic Success Require Democracy?: When Kenneth Arrow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1972, one of the contributions the awards committee cited was his miraculous "impossibility" theorem. Decades from now, Arrow’s theorem, originally drawn in his doctoral dissertation, will be viewed as the 20th-century idea that best anticipated the 21st century.... A government is really just a mechanism that makes collective decisions for a large number of citizens who have different preferences.... In the U.S., we send signals with voting to help the government aggregate preferences.... [N]o voting scheme can be devised that will create a government that has rational preferences, where rationality is defined precisely by Arrow as meeting a number of conditions. Democracy might be a form of government that many prefer to live under, but there is nothing theoretically compelling that suggests that it is the form of government that best reflects the underlying preferences of citizens. As a result, democracies will not necessarily outperform other types of mechanisms for preference aggregation as a route to economic prosperity. Democracies will not always win.

In the latter half of the 20th century, this observation seemed irrelevant. The United States, with its free markets and democracy, defeated the Soviet Union, with its centrally planned economy and party dictatorship. But in the 21st century, things look different. Dictatorships, as in China, appear to have learned from the failure of the Soviets. While they continue to oppress political opponents, they allow a high level of economic freedom within their borders. So far, this approach is working, and in a big way.... [T]he countries that are economically and politically free are underper­forming the countries that are economically but not politically free.... [U]nfree China had a growth rate of 9.5 percent from 2001 to 2005. But China was not the whole story--Malaysia’s GDP grew 9.5 percent from 1991 to 1995, Singapore’s GDP grew 6.4 percent from 1996 to 2000, and Russia’s grew 6.1 percent from 2001 to 2005.... Dictatorships are not hamstrung by the preferences of voters for, say, a pervasive welfare state.

So the future may look something like the 20th century in reverse. The unfree nations will grow so quickly that they will overwhelm free nations with their economic might. The unfree will see no reason to transition to democracy. Meanwhile... it seems unlikely that free citizens will choose to reduce their own political freedoms. Democracies will stay in the game, but, as Arrow showed long ago, their victory is not assured.

Ummmm... Kevin, the democracies are a lot richer than the non-democracies. Doesn't that indicate that democracy is a superior form of government? Even to try to enunciate your idea that Russia's economy today is "outperforming" the econonmy of the United States--well, let's give the mike back to Kevin Hassett:

[T]here is nothing theoretically compelling that suggests that it is the form of government that best reflects the underlying preferences of citizens.... Russia’s [economy] grew 6.1 percent from 2001 to 2005.... Dictatorships are not hamstrung by the preferences of voters for, say, a pervasive welfare state.

There is nothing to be done but to collapse onto the floor in helpless laughter.

President Ahmednijad, Osama bin Laden, and Morton Kondracke

President Ahmednijad, Osama bin Laden, and Morton Kondracke: all three want to see the U.S. intervene in Iraq on the side of the Shiite ethnic-cleansing militias. Ahmednijad because he wants Iraq to be Shia rather than mixed; Osama bin Laden because he thinks a Shia Iraq will radicalize the world's Sunnis and swing them to his side.

And Morton Kondracke because--well, he gives no reason, other than that his heart is two sizes too small, and his brain is at least four sizes too small as well:

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Plan B For Iraq: Winning Dirty: By Mort Kondracke: Without prejudging whether President Bush's "surge" policy will work, the administration and its critics ought to be seriously thinking about a Plan B, the "80 percent solution" - also known as "winning dirty."... The 80 percent alternative involves accepting rule by Shiites and Kurds, allowing them to violently suppress Sunni resistance and making sure that Shiites friendly to the United States emerge victorious.

No one has publicly advocated this Plan B, and I know of only one Member of Congress who backs it - and he wants to stay anonymous. But he argues persuasively that it's the best alternative available if Bush's surge fails. Winning will be dirty because it will allow the Shiite-dominated Iraqi military and some Shiite militias to decimate the Sunni insurgency. There likely will be ethnic cleansing, atrocities against civilians and massive refugee flows.... Winning dirty would involve taking sides in the civil war - backing the Shiite-dominated elected government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and ensuring that he and his allies prevail over both the Sunni insurgency and his Shiite adversary Muqtada al-Sadr, who's now Iran's candidate to rule Iraq....

Bush wants to establish Iraq as a model representative democracy for the Middle East, but that's proved impossible so far - partly because of the Sunni insurgencies, partly because of Shiites' reluctance to compromise with their former oppressors and partly because al-Qaida succeeded in triggering a civil war. Bush's troop surge - along with Gen. David Petraeus' shift of military strategy - is designed to suppress the civil war long enough for Iraqi military forces to be able to maintain even handed order on their own and for Sunni, Kurdish and Shiite politicians to agree to share power and resources. The new strategy deserves a chance, but so far civilian casualties are not down, progress on political reconciliation is glacial, and U.S. casualties have increased significantly....

Prudence calls for preparation of a Plan B. The withdrawal policy advocated by most Democrats virtually guarantees catastrophic ethnic cleansing - but without any guarantee that a government friendly to the United States would emerge. Almost certainly, Shiites will dominate Iraq because they outnumber Sunnis three to one. But the United States would get no credit for helping the Shiites win. In fact, America's credibility would suffer because it abandoned its mission. And, there is no guarantee that al-Sadr - currently residing in Iran and resting his militias - would not emerge as the victor in a power struggle with al-Maliki's Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.

Iran formerly backed the SCIRI and its Badr Brigades but recently switched allegiances - foolishly, my Congressional source contends - to al-Sadr, who's regarded by other Shiites as young, volatile and unreliable. Under a win dirty strategy, the United States would have to back al-Maliki and the Badr Brigades in their eventual showdown with al-Sadr. It also would have to help Jordan and Saudi Arabia care for a surge in Sunni refugees, possibly 1 million to 2 million joining an equal number who already have fled.

Sunnis will suffer under a winning dirty strategy, no question, but so far they've refused to accept that they're a minority. They will have to do so eventually, one way or another. And, eventually, Iraq will achieve political equilibrium. Civil wars do end. The losers lose and have to knuckle under. As my Congressional source says, "every civil war is a political struggle. The center of this struggle is for control of the Shiite community. Wherever the Shiites go, is where Iraq will go. So, the quicker we back the winning side, the quicker the war ends.... Winning dirty isn't attractive, but it sure beats losing."

Matthew Yglesias Is Driven Shrill by the New Republic

Trained professionals may be called to the scene:

Matthew Yglesias: It's no surprise to see that James Kirchick, assistant to New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz, shares his patron's passion for the cause of keeping Paul Wolfowitz in office at the World Bank. Kirchick says Wolfowitz's critics are making baseless charges: "As Jon Chait noted in his excellent Netroots article, liberals are increasingly adopting the 'no enemies on the left' strategy that the right has used so effectively for decades to police its own ranks . . . Wolfowitz's critics could care less about the fact that there is little to no evidence of wrongdoing. What they care about is that he was a Republican who was an architect of the Iraq War, which has no bearing on the good job he's done at the World Bank."

That's preposterous. Kirchick is talking about a Sebastian Mallaby column. Mallaby wrote for The Economist for over a decade, supported the Iraq War, and is the author of a recent book about the World Bank. He doesn't dislike Wolfowitz as bank president because he can't abide by Republicans or Iraq War supporters. He dislikes Wolfowitz because he thinks he's a bad choice to run the Bank. And Mallaby, unlike Kirchick or Peretz, knows something about the World Bank (Chait is no doubt thrilled to have his work cited favorably in this context by a fellow bold seeker of the Truth like Kirchick).

More surprising is Isaac Chotiner's post below in which he doesn't understand why Wolfowitz's corrupt dealings would undermine World Bank anti-corruption efforts. The reason is that said efforts are taking place in the world of power-politics rather than the world of abstract logic. The Bank is in a position to try to use its financial clout to force developing world governments to alter their policies. How well something like that works will have something to do with whether people in the developing world are inclined to believe that coercion is being deployed out of honest concern for their well-being or else if it's some kind of imperialist scam. Wolfowitz's behavior, and the Bush administration's tolerance of it, makes it highly non-credible that his anti-corruption stance is motivated by sincere concern for good governance. And when people doubt the motives of would-be reformers, that makes it very hard to achieve reforms.

The Bush Administration Threatens to Go too Far

Let me join Atrios in warning the Bush Administration: It would be inappropriate and dangerous for them to use nuclear weapons against Paul Wolfowitz:

Eschaton: More Wolfowitz: ABC: "IN A SIGNIFICANT SHIFT A WHITE HOUSE OFFICIAL SAYS 'ALL OPTIONS ARE ON THE TABLE' IN THE CONTROVERSY OVER WORLD BANK PRESIDENT PAUL WOLFOWITZ." They might nuke him?

Ezra Klein Is Driven into Shrillness by the Mad Jihadist Fantasies of Paul berman

Afghanistan and Iraq as just "places to begin":

Ezra Klein: Dispatches From When The Country Went Crazy: Kill 'em All Edition: While writing this post yesterday, I came across this gem from Paul Berman, writing in a January 2004 Slate forum reconsidering the Iraq War.  "[The] largest of facts," he wrote, "is the rise of a certain kind of political movement—movements animated by paranoid hatreds, by apocalyptic fantasies, and by the fanatical desire to kill people en masse. These have been the big totalitarian movements, Nazism, Fascism, Stalinism, and a few others—movements whose greatest goal was to destroy liberal civilization...The totalitarian visions live on. Only, instead of being called fascism or some other name from the past, the visions of the present are called radical Islamism and Baathism and suchlike, with doctrines duly descended from their European progenitors—the totalitarianism of the modern Muslim world."

I forget the elegant disingenuousness with which the war was often sold.  Notice how Berman recasts a fight against Saddam Hussein as a war against a unified totalitarian ideology.  This despite the fact that the Baathism, under Saddam's Iraq, and radical Islamism, under Khomeini's Iran, had spent over a decade killing each other (with America arming not one, but both).  Notice how these movements are ripped of positive -- which is different than "good" -- goals and recast as a mindless attack on "liberal civilization."

But that's just the start of the crazy.  Remember, here, that Berman was the author of the hugely influential liberal hawk manifesto Terror and Liberalism, and a main character in George Packer's The Assassin's Gate.  He goes on to write: "Sept. 11 did not come from a single Bad Guy—it was a product of the larger totalitarian wave, and the only proper response was to comprehend the size and depth of that larger wave, and find ways to begin rolling it back, militarily and otherwise—mostly otherwise. To roll it back for our own sake, and everyone else's sake, Muslims' especially. Iraq, with its somewhat antique variation of the Muslim totalitarian idea, was merely a place to begin, after Afghanistan, with its more modern variation."

Iraq and Afghanistan were just places to begin!  We were supposed to take on every country with a whiff of autocracy and a useable set of prayer mats!  It's staggering stuff.

Anxious Masculinity

Pandagon is shrill:

More on the tide of anxious masculinity that engulfs the nation, or at least the punditry at Pandagon: There are roughly two stories about Democratic politicians in the media: Girly Men and Uppity Bitches. On a gut reaction, I’d say they prefer the mainstream media prefers to giggle at the Girly Men and the right wing prefers to feed them stories about that, but if need be, they’ll go with Uppity Bitches. In fact, they stories are kind of boilerplate in what the “hook” that excuses calling someone a Girly Man or an Uppity Bitch is, usually a completely unfair accusation of excessiveness that Republicans will never, ever get dinged for.

Compare, if you will, the boilerplate attempts to raise a stink about Democrats using official planes. When Clinton first went into office, the big non-story had something to do with Air Force One and an airport hold-up and was basically a big non-story, but the entire point of it was to get it into the media that Bill Clinton Has His Hair Cut Professionally Like A Woman. Granted, if he didn’t get regular haircuts, he’d start to resemble the long-haired hippie that wingnuts sincerely think he was, but no matter. The main thing is pushing the narrative in the media at every opportunity that Democratic politicians are Girly Men. In comparison, they tried the same damn stunt on Nancy Pelosi—pushed a non-story about her use of official planes but this time the main point is to raise horror that an Uppity Bitch thinks she gets to use official planes, as if she was the Speaker of the House or something. Apparently, she was expected to walk around wide-eyed saying, “Shucks, y’all, a little ol’ girl like me doesn’t deserve this. I’ll walk, thanks. I could probably use the exercise.” (Punctuate with a giggle).

Liberals hear these non-controversies and our minds get stuck on the class issues, because there are legitimate questions about how much money there is in the top echelons of government these days, but make no mistake, the mainstream media pundits under their piles of make-up and hairspray and the right wing operatives who push the stories in an effort to win elections so they can cut taxes for the very rich do not give a flying fuck about the class issues. Everything is about implying being a liberal man makes you a pussy and liberal women just need someone to show them the pimp hand.

If you pay very close attention to the way Democrats and liberals are dismissed by the right and in the mainstream, you’ll notice that it’s the same set of dismissals issued to silence and discredit women out of hand. Despite all indicators that we marched off to war because a bunch of neocon wingnuts watched way too many war movies in the 80s, the idea that liberals are ruled by emotions and conservatives are rational still has play (look at any Sensible Liberal® defending his support for the war, and you’ll see that myth played out). Luckily, the self-evident nonsense that posits that the wonk-heavy side of the aisle is a bunch of hankie-clutching sobbing babies (women), but the side that harbors people who vote because they don’t like being told they’re a monkey, who have conflated gun control with having their peckers sawed off with rusty knives, and who rushed to war on the basis of having a flag snapped in their face one too many times—they’re the “rational” ones. And it’s all because Republicans have been coded as masculine, and the Democrats as feminine, and thanks to sexism, we believe that masculine is more rational than feminine, regardless of piles of evidence to the contrary.

Republicans I know in real life and our conservo-bots who show up here to clog the comments with regurgitated propaganda love the saying, “If you’re not a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, but if you’re not a conservative when you’re older, you have no brain.” Or some variation therein. If you actually expend a moment’s thought on that saying, it becomes obvious how stupid it is, particularly if you’re a member of any group that conservatives have targeted to be misused, which is to say if you’re not white, not rich, not male, not fundamentalist Christian or not straight. But the reason it seems like it makes sense is it’s a fancy way of saying liberalism is feminine, childish and irrational.

Ideological Idiocy in Iraq

This is ridiculous. Because some diplomats in Iraq see reopening of factories as "Stalinist," they oppose and are actively impeding steps that might help to reduce the horrific violence in Iraq. I am going to count to ten while you read this:

Defense Skirts State in Reviving Iraqi Industry, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post: Paul Brinkley, a deputy undersecretary of defense, has been called a Stalinist by U.S. diplomats in Iraq. One has accused him of helping insurgents build better bombs. The State Department has even taken the unusual step of enlisting the CIA to dispute the validity of Brinkley's work.

His transgression? To begin reopening dozens of government-owned factories in Iraq. Brinkley and his colleagues at the Pentagon believe that rehabilitating shuttered, state-run enterprises could reduce violence by employing tens of thousands of Iraqis. Officials at State counter that the initiative is antithetical to free-market reforms the United States should promote in Iraq.

The bureaucratic knife fight over the best way to revive Iraq's moribund economy illustrates how the two principal players in the reconstruction of Iraq -- the departments of Defense and State -- remain at odds over basic economic and political measures. The bickering has hamstrung initiatives to promote stability four years after Saddam Hussein's fall. ...

"There has been a surprising degree of venom and hostility" between the departments, said a senior U.S. government official involved in Iraq policy.

The dispute between State and Brinkley has become so pitched that he has effectively stopped working with the U.S. Embassy and is setting up his office elsewhere in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone. ...

Disagreements among Americans about how to deal with Iraq's government-run businesses began shortly after U.S. forces arrived in Baghdad in April 2003. The first U.S. adviser to Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Minerals, retired ambassador Timothy Carney, wanted to reopen many of the country's 192 state-owned factories, which, according to the World Bank, employed more than 500,000 people before the war.

But the U.S. occupation administrator, L. Paul Bremer, deemed that to be bad economic policy. Many factories had produced substandard goods before the war and had since been looted. Fixing them would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Bremer wanted private investors to buy the factories, even as workers continued to be paid to stave off hardship.

But the hoped-for private investors never arrived. Factories remained shuttered, and the Iraqi government whittled down the payroll subsidies. Some former workers found new jobs. Others, U.S. military officials believe, joined the insurgency.

In the early months of the occupation, the State Department wanted to resuscitate the state-owned enterprises; the Pentagon's civilian leadership, dominated by neoconservatives, rejected the idea of supporting government-run industry. By last year, the positions had been reversed. Military commanders began arguing to restart the factories... Because State was now running the show in the Green Zone, its opposition carried the day.

Then Brinkley arrived in Baghdad. ... Brinkley's initial mission last summer was to simplify Defense Department contracting to give Iraqi firms a better chance of providing goods and services to the U.S. military. While he was in Iraq , ...[he visited] a bus and truck factory south of Baghdad that had a modern assembly line, talented managers and skilled employees. All but 75 of 10,000 employees had been laid off because the Iraqi government ... was no longer buying the vehicles. Many furloughed workers had joined the insurgency, the factory manager told Brinkley.

"It was clear that the approach we as the United States government had taken toward state-owned enterprises was a mistake," Brinkley said. "We were pretty direct and vocal about it."

The U.S. Agency for International Development estimates that nearly half of Iraqis are unemployed or work fewer than 15 hours a week, but those figures do not include hundreds of thousands who once worked for state-owned enterprises and continue to collect about 40 percent of their original salaries. If they are counted, Brinkley believes, the true figure for unemployed and underemployed Iraqis may approach 70 percent. ...

After touring more than 50 facilities, Brinkley's team deemed about 20 worthy of repair, including factories that made car parts, textiles, leather goods, fertilizer and hand-woven rugs.

But when Brinkley ... revealed his plans to officials at the embassy in Baghdad last fall, they bristled. ... Brinkley said embassy staffers called him a Stalinist bent on restoring a command economy. Another told him that if he rehabilitated factories, Iraqis "are going to use those machines to make more complicated weapons to kill our troops with." ...

Embassy officials warned Brinkley that if he opened factories in Sunni areas first, he risked angering Shiites. Moreover, the electricity needed by production lines would mean less for residences. Would people really be happier, embassy officials asked, if they had jobs but less power at home?

The embassy's in-house think tank, the Joint Strategic Planning and Assessment Office, also joined the fray, issuing an internal memorandum declaring that "trying to give these enterprises a new lease on life will make Iraqis poorer without reducing the violence." The memo, written by an economist from the Rand Corp. working on contract for the embassy, added that "resuscitating state-owned enterprises is a bad idea."

State asked the CIA to assess the link between employment and attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, two U.S. government officials said. The CIA's subsequent regression analysis found no statistically significant tie between the two phenomena, the officials said. The CIA also told State that the vast majority of insurgents questioned by U.S. interrogators in Iraq claimed to be employed, one official said.

Brinkley ... countered with an analysis from the military's Joint Warfare Analysis Center, which asserted that a slight increase in job satisfaction among Iraqis led to as much as a 30 percent decline in attacks on coalition forces...

Embassy opposition was not Brinkley's only problem. His plan to have Iraq's Finance Ministry pay for repairs at the factories ran counter to Bremer's edict, issued in 2004, that prevents the Iraqi Central Bank from funding state-owned enterprises. Brinkley arranged for two Iraqi banks to provide $5.6 million in loans to six factories, and he plans to announce a second round of loans totaling about $20 million.

The White House was enthused enough about Brinkley's initiative to ask Congress earlier this year for $100 million to underwrite his efforts. Congressional appropriators scaled that back to $50 million, but Brinkley believes even the lower amount would still put about 100,000 Iraqis back to work. ...

Despite persistent violence and the slow pace of reconciliation among Iraqi leaders, Brinkley said, he continues to believe the United States can help stabilize Iraq. ... As his profile has risen in Washington, his critics in Baghdad have become less strident. But, he added, he still does not "have people from the embassy jumping onboard to help."

There are people dying by the scores daily and some stupid ideological battle between government agencies is getting in the way of attempts to do something that might, just might, help by putting Iraqis back to work. Slap whatever feel-good, right-wing radio appropriate name you want on it, "Operation Seeds of Capitalism," whatever, put the propaganda people on it, but this idiocy needs to stop. Right now Iraq needs stability and if this can help, then set free-market principles aside and do what's needed to help get Iraqis working again.

Where's the leadership? Somebody - the president comes to mind - needs to step in here, quit wasting our time, our money, and most of all quit wasting lives, and make a call one way or the other. Stop the stupid bickering among government agencies, get rid of anyone who won't cooperate or isn't capable, and get everyone united and moving in a common direction. That's what leaders do.

How many Iraqis could have been hired with the money wasted by the CIA to run some stupid regression with data that can't possibly be reliable to produce results that nobody is going to believe anyway, or with the money used to hire the Rand economists to write a memo so that one government agency can fight with another. We can't even measure employment here reliably, so how did the do it in a war zone with few formal labor markets that nobody travels to? Phone surveys?

How about this. Instead of the president going on vacation all those times since the war started, or instead of going on any more, how about working a day or two more, getting briefed on this problem and making a call so that everyone can work toward a common goal. That's not too much to ask when people are giving their lives in this effort. But if that's too much for the president to handle, then at least give someone else the authority to make a final call. But to continue bickering over these ideological issues for years is inexcusable. And it wasn't all ideological, some was financial. "Fixing them would cost hundreds of millions of dollars." Yeah, but how much did it cost not to fix them?

Open the factories and support the farms as needed. It if takes government subsidies, there are worse things in the world to worry about. That won't provide enough employment, so hire the rest of the unemployed to do something, anything, let half dig holes, then hire the other half to fill them back up, do public works, anything at all, but get the Iraqis employed to the extent possible. It may not work to stop the violence, it probably won't work at this late date, but it's still worth a try.

If that's too Keynesian or Stalinist for the president, if he insists on free-market principles, then he should get everyone united behind that. Yesterday would not have been too late. But I hope he remembers this. The free market approach may work in the long-run, and if the country ever gets stabilized, I hope we can move Iraq steadily in that direction over time. But reminiscent of Keynes' admonition "In the long-run we're all dead," we can't wait any longer. We need to do something now.

I don't mean for any of this to be construed as a reason for staying in Iraq any longer than absolutely necessary, we need to leave as soon as we possibly can and our obligation to help the Iraqis is independent of that decision. But no matter what the majority of us want, it looks like we're going to be in Iraq for as long as the president remains in office and doing what we can to help the Iraqis to rebuild and reopen farms and factories to provide employment and produce essential goods is one way to make the best of time we have left.

The Jesus Christ-Hating Conservatives of Conservapedia Attack!

John Quiggin reads the Jesus Christ-hating conservatives at Conservapedia, and his head explodes. Here is what he finds:

Essay: Adultress Story - Conservapedia: Increasingly many Christian churches, including the Catholic Church, are reciting, teaching and popularizing the Pericope de Adultera... [the Woman Taken in Adultery] set forth at from John 7:53-8:11.... Bartleby's quotations include its famous line, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone"; and sermons are increasingly based on it. Arguments against the death penalty often cite this passage.... Nearly all modern scholars agree that this Pericope de Adultera is not authentic. Bruce Metzger, a leading biblical scholar, put it this way[1]: "The evidence for the non-Johannine origin of the pericope of the adulteress is overwhelming. It is absent from such early and diverse manuscripts as Papyrus66.75 Aleph B L N T W X Y D Q Y 0141 0211 22 33 124 157 209 788 828 1230 1241 1242 1253 2193..."

Amid this scholarship, why is the emphasis on this passage increasing? The answer lies in its liberal message: do not criticize or punish immoral conduct unless you are perfect yourself. But one need not be perfect before he can recognize and punish wrongdoing in himself and others. Civilized society may not depend on stoning to deter immoral crimes, but it does depend on retribution enforced by people who are themselves sinners.

Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor couldn't have put it better than the authors of Conservapedia do here.

---

[1] Of course, what Metzger says is not that the passage is un-Christian, but that it is non-Johannine, not that it is non-Christian: "The account has all the earmarks of historical veracity. It is obviously a piece of oral tradition which circulated in certain parts of the Western church and which was subsequently incorporated into various manuscripts at various places. Most copyists apparently thought that it would interrupt John's narrative least if it were inserted after 7.52..."

Tenet Produces Most Jaw-Droppingly Stupid Paragraph In Human History

A Tiny Revolution is shrill:

A Tiny Revolution: Tenet Produces Most Jaw-Droppingly Stupid Paragraph In Human History: In George Tenet's new book, he touches on the 1998 incident where the CIA failed to predict India's underground nuclear tests. A former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, David Jeremiah, headed a commission to examine how this happened. Tenet writes:

One major conclusion of the Jeremiah report was that both the US intelligence and policy communities had an underlying mind-set that Indian government officials would behave as ours behaved. We did not sufficiently accept that Indian politicians might do what they had openly promised—conduct a nuclear test, as the incoming ruling party had said it would. The lesson learned is that sometimes intentions do not reside in secret—they are out there all to see and hear. What we believe to be implausible often has nothing to do with how a foreign culture might act. We would learn this in a different way years later with regard to Iraq. We thought it implausible that someone like Saddam would risk the destruction of his regime over noncompliance with UN resolutions. What we did not account for was the mind-set never to show weakness in a very dangerous neighborhood—particularly in regard to a growing Iranian military capability. Relying on secrets by themselves, divorced from deep knowledge of cultural mind-sets and history, will take you only so far.

I don't think my jaw had ever literally dropped before I read this.

There is so much extraordinary human dumbness in it I'm going to have to rest a while before getting into it.

Michael Barone: Threat or Menace?

Michael Barone: is it stupidity, or is it mendacity?

He clearly remembers predicting, decades ago, that shifts of American population out of the northeast would create permanent Republican dominance, because people who moved to the Republican sunbelt would turn into Republicans:

[P]olitical analysts grasped the implications of the vast movement from Rust Belt to Sun Belt, a tilting of the table on balance toward Republicans...

And he remembers that it didn't work out that way:

[W]ith California leaning heavily to Democrats, that paradigm seems obsolete...

Although it is the case that "obsolete" is a strange way to say "wrong."

But never mind that. Today Michael Barone is back, making a very big deal of the difference between Los Angeles and Orange counties--part of the sinister, liberal, un-American coastal megalopolis of Los Angeles which real Americans are fleeing--and Riverside and San Bernardino counties--the heartland-American nuclear-family-friendly wholesome metropolitan area of the Inland Empire to which real Americans are moving:

OpinionJournal - Featured Article: [T]he Coastal Megalopolises... [show] a pattern you don't find in other big cities: Americans moving out and immigrants moving in, in very large numbers, with low overall population growth. Los Angeles... had a domestic outflow of 6% of 2000 population in six years--balanced by an immigrant inflow of 6%.... This is something few would have predicted 20 years ago. Americans are now moving out of, not into, coastal California.... High housing costs, high taxes, a distaste in some cases for the burgeoning immigrant populations--these are driving many Americans elsewhere....

Coastal Megalopolises are increasingly a two-tiered society, with large affluent populations happily contemplating (at least until recently) their rapidly rising housing values, and a large, mostly immigrant working class working at low wages and struggling to move up the economic ladder.... Los Angeles is starting to look like... Mexico City and São Paulo. Democratic politicians like to decry what they describe as a widening economic gap in the nation. But the part of the nation where it is widening most visibly is their home turf... where, in exquisitely decorated Park Avenue apartments and Beverly Hills mansions with immigrant servants passing the hors d'oeuvres, they raise most of their money.

The bad news for [Democratic politicians] is that the Coastal Megalopolises grew only 4% in 2000-06, while the nation grew 6%...

While Barone says that this is "bad news" for Democratic politicians "in exquisitely decorated Park Avenue apartments and Beverly Hills mansions with immigrant servants passing the hors d'oeuvres," he says that it is good news for Republicans:

You see an entirely different picture in the 16 metro areas I call the Interior Boomtowns (none touches the Atlantic or Pacific coasts).... Domestic inflow has been a whopping... 15% in the Inland Empire (California's Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, where much of the outflow from Los Angeles has gone).... Domestic inflow was over 200,000 in the Inland Empire.... The Interior Boomtowns generated 38% of the nation's population growth in 2000-06...

That's a huge weight to place on the spreading-out of Los Angeles--for it is all Los Angeles. The full megalopolis, Greatest Los Angeles--Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties--grew faster than the country as a whole from 2000 to 2006, increasing in population by 1.4 million between 2000 and 2006 to 17.7 million (with Inland Empire Riverside and San Bernardino accounting for just over half of that increase).

But, says Barone, the spreading-out of Los Angeles into Riverside and San Bernardino counties is going to make a huge difference:

What's now in store is a shifting of political weight from... Coastal Megalopolises, where both secular top earners and immigrant low earners vote heavily Democratic, toward the Interior Megalopolises, where most voters are private-sector religious Republicans.... House seats will shift from the Democratic coast to the Republican Inland Empire and Central Valley. Demography is destiny...

Michael Barone: stupid, or mendacious? We report, you decide.

Fish Rots from the Head! (Stanley Fish, That Is): Hoisted from Mark Thoma's Comments

Over at Mark Thoma's http://economistsview.typepad.com/, Bruce Wilder writes:

Economist's View: Spinning in Circles: Spin is making statements of fact, which encourage a particular judgement by suggesting a narrative analysis, favorable to one's own point of view and values. The fact that the statements of fact are selective, and the selection favors a particular narrative, is, by itself, legitimate. Political affairs necessarily involve contests in which conflicts are resolved, conflicts where the goals and desires of opposing groups are mutually exclusive. Rs want lower labor cost; Ds want higher wages. There might be resolutions, where both get some of what they want, but such happy solutions are not privileged or guaranteed.

The classic and definitive example of BushSpeak spin is certainly the infamous 16 words. Here is an analysis by Tristero of Hullabaloo:

For many of us, it was quite clear from the instant they were uttered that the famous 16 words were a bald-faced lie of monumental proportions:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Why were we positive Bush was lying? Because no one who is telling the truth talks like this about such a serious subject. Notice the first five words. It's not that Saddam recently sought significant quantities yadda yadda, but only that "the Briitish government has learned." If there was any real evidence, and if Bush had any real confidence in that evidence, I assure you there would be no qualifications. Nevertheless, the impression created - via context and sentence structure and possibly even verbal emphasis when delivered - was not that the British government reported something the US couldn't confirm despite the obvious importance of doing so, but rather that Saddam was acquiring nuclear bombs. Notice also the utterly superfluous but rhetorically important "significant" - as if the acquisition of even a single grain of uranium by Saddam would be anything less than totally alarming to an American public that had been told to expect the next Sept 11 as a mushroom cloud. No. An honest president with legitimate concerns for America's safety would have begun, "The US government has learned," and then proceeded actually to spend some time describing how and what we learned. The State of the Union is exactly the place to lay out such a case, if there was any legitimacy to it.

Therefore, it was clear that no one in the Bush administration - including Bush himself, or he surely would have approved a stronger statement that was less carefully hedged - believed for a second that Saddam had recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. They just wanted you to believe it, and they were prepared to lie about it.

Now, it is certainly possible to look at the 16 words, and confirm that they are perfectly truthful, and, therefore, Bush was not "lying". Here is the analysis by factcheck.org. But, of course, factcheck.org is missing the deliberate deception, which Tristero (correctly, imo) immediately detects.

Brad's claim is like Tristero's, and Fish's claim is like that by factcheck.org.

Like Tristero's claim, Brad's turns on the speaker's genuine judgment being substantially different from the one he is trying to induce in his audience.

That the speaker should choose not to acknowledge some validity to the judgement of an opponent, not in the room, seems, well, par for the course...

I suggest a distinction between "spin" and "lies". When you spin something, you are attempting to get your reader or hearer to see it like you do. When you lie, you are attempting to get your reader or hearer to see it like you don't.

I also suggest a distinction between first-order and second-order lies. Rove is trying to get his listeners to see it like he doesn't. Fish it trying to convince his readers that Rove is just "spinning"--trying to convince them that Rove sees it in a way that Rove in fact does not.

The New York Times Editorial Page Is Shrill

Boy are they shrill:

Mr. Bush Alone - New York Times: If Mr. Bush hopes to salvage anything from his 20 months left in office, and, more to the point, if he wants to play a constructive role in the accelerating Iraq endgame, he needs to understand how much has changed in this country, and how tragically little has changed in Iraq. The American people are no longer willing to write blank checks of blood and treasure to an Iraqi government that has refused to stop rampaging Shiite militias, has failed to approve constitutional changes to bring estranged Sunni Arabs back into the political system, and has still not come up with a way to share oil revenues fairly. Now it wants to give itself a two-month summer vacation. Mr. Bush needs to face up to this grim reality and abandon his fantasies of ultimate victory and vindication. Otherwise, he could find himself, and America’s best long-term interests, run over by a bipartisan rush toward the nearest exit.

Higher Broderism Watch: Jonathan Alter

Jonathan Alter is one of the best reporters and commentators that the "mainstream media" has. He is author of an excellent book on FDR, which I hope to properly appreciate sometime. Which is why his willingness to go to the mattresses in defense of the Higher Broderism--to buy into the fake narrative that the journalists who have covered for the Bush administration tell themselves--is, I think, very instructive.

Jonathan Alter engages in some preliminary throat-clearing about how much he hates weblogs:

Jonathan Alter: There's one dimension of the blogosphere that never ceases to amaze me: Some people disbelieve nearly everything they read in the "mainstream media" -- and believe nearly everything they read online. Never mind that the ground-breaking reporting on which they base their opinions often comes from the MSM publications like Newsweek, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. That's because until now, few online publications have invested enough money to undertake original reporting, which is much more expensive than mouthing off at home...

And then Alter defends the Higher Bwodewiswm by attacking Jebediah Reed:

Reed is a bad reporter, and his bad reporting of a 30-second sidewalk conversation involving me, Edsall and former Sen. Mike Gravel is now rocketing around the web.... [E]n route to lunch, we passed [thomas] Edsall walking the other direction.... I don't remember [Edsall] calling Broder "the voice of the people," but if he did, it was said with a pleasantly arch tone, neither serious nor sarcastic.... [W]hatever disagreements we may have with recent Broder columns, he is an honest reporter and no ivy tower thumb-sucker.... I explicitly told Reed that [lunch] was off-the-record, and he explicitly agreed. (Not a good habit to get into, Jebediah, screwing with that one.) I should have known better than to trust a reporter I didn't know, but throwing him out of the lunch so that Gravel and I could talk didn't seem sporting. Reed quotes me as uncomfortably saying, "I have to get going," when one of Gravel's comments about the Bush daughters was supposedly too mind-blowing for the clueless pundit to absorb. The only problem with that rendition was that... I had to catch a plane.... I took my leave (paying for Reed's lunch, plus that of the Gravel entourage) at a different point in the conversation than reported in the story, but accuracy would not have fit Reed's thesis any better than it did in the case of the sidewalk chat.... Tom Edsall['s and my]... batting averages--and David Broder's--are a helluva lot higher than the Jebidiah Reeds of the world...

Reed responds:

Fresh Intelligence : Radar Online: The last thing I had in mind when I wrote that profile of Mike Gravel at the Columbia rally was getting into a Web tiff with you. I've read and enjoyed many of your columns. So when you called me out as a "bad reporter" in your HuffPo screed, it would have been traumatic if I wasn't sure my reporting from that day was bulletproof.... Tom Edsall did say that David Broder is the "voice of the people," and he did say it as I reported.... Gravel was accusing Broder of not believing in popular democracy.... Edsall, without changing the tone of the conversation, said: "He [Broder] is democracy. He's the voice of the people." It sounds like you might not have heard Edsall, but--scout's honor--it was not said archly.... [Y]ou're welcome to pop by Radar HQ and listen to the exchange on tape.

Accusing me of being a bad judge of tone is one thing--accusing me of being unethical is quite another.... You say the lunch was off the record and that I accepted those terms and then broke the agreement. Here's what really happened: I made arrangements with Mike Gravel's press agent, Alex Colvin, to meet up with the candidate.... When the rally was finished, Alex invited me to join the senator for lunch. That invitation was extended to me as a reporter, not as a friendly guest at an off-the-record sit-down with Jonathan Alter. Throughout the lunch, you might remember, I had my tape recorder running and sitting on the table as I was taking notes. The question of what was on and off the record came up precisely once: You were talking about a segment you'd done... and asked me not to use what you had just said, noting that the Edwards piece hadn't aired yet. I said no problem, made a somewhat exaggerated gesture of putting down my notebook, and, of course, abided by that agreement. I picked up my pad and started taking notes after the conversation turned back to Gravel...

I've got to score this one for Jebediah Reed.

Alter lacks credibility for three reasons. First of all, reporters shouldn't try to take conversations off the record or say that they tried to take conversations off the record--only sources should try to take conversations off the record, and reporters should let them do so only when they have the best of reasons for fearing unjust and unfair retribution. Second, Reed has a tape, and is either correct or is the best bluffer alive. Third, Alter pours gasoline on his remaining credibility and lights it afire when he makes his claim that:

[W]hatever disagreements we may have with recent Broder columns, he is an honest reporter and no ivy tower thumb-sucker...

As a tenured ivory-tower thumb-sucker myself, I am an expert on who is and who is not one.

Let's look at Broder's recent record:

May 10: The mad rush of states to advance their nominating contests in hopes of gaining more influence has produced something so contrary to the national interest that it cries out for action.... This way lies madness. Instead of there being a steady progression of contests, challenging and whittling the field of contenders in the wide-open races to select a successor to George W. Bush, it is going to be a herky-jerky, feast-or-famine exercise that looks more like Russian roulette than anything that tests who can best fill the most powerful secular office on Earth.... This crazy calendar sets up one of two scenarios -- both scary. If one candidate in each party wraps up the nomination... on Feb. 5.... The time from February to Labor Day will be boring beyond belief. But if nothing is decided by the night of Feb. 5, the chance of a quirky result from the oddity of the political geography of the remaining states will be greatly increased. Democrats will have to compete in Indiana and North Carolina, where they rarely win in November. Republicans will be judged in Massachusetts and Vermont, where their party membership is minuscule...

Broder's complaints are that things will either be "boring" or that we risk a "quirky result from the oddity of the political geography"--apparently forgetting that we have been getting quirky results from New Hampshire and South Carolina for quite a while now. This is thumb-sucking: the tongue is on the nail, and the digit is inside the mouth.

Let's continue:

May 6: In this moment, the commander in chief has a clear plan -- to apply more military force in and around Baghdad in hopes of suppressing the sectarian violence and creating space for the Iraqi politicians to assemble a functioning government. It is a high-risk policy with no guarantee of success. But it is a clear strategy...

No. It is not a clear strategy. A strategy would be a plan, for example a plan for how to create a fuctioning Iraqi government out of factions that are now trying to kill each other. What Bush has is a hope that a functioning government will somehow emerge. Hope is not a plan. This is thumb-sucking: not only is the tongue on the nail and the digit inside the mouth, but the lips are sealed around the base of the thumb, and there is definitely suction here.

And it goes on:

May 5: Giuliani... appeared stumped.... Chris Matthews asked... if the repeal of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision would be a "good day for America."... Giuliani offered an unenthusiastic, "It would be okay.... It would be okay to repeal. It would be [okay] also if a strict constructionist judge viewed [ Roe] as precedent, and I think a judge has to make that decision." "Would it be okay if they didn't repeal it?" Matthews pressed. "I think the court has to make that decision, and then the country can deal with it," Giuliani said.... Giuliani's equivocation was pointed up...

To be conflicted about abortion is an honorable position. But Broder doesn't see it that way: he sees Giuliani as engaging in "equivocation" and as "stumped." The base of the thumb has now been stuffed into the mouth, and there is a gagging sound.

And the next search result for "David Broder" at the Washington Post:

May 4: I have come to have deep respect for the wisdom of the American people, who, in 2004, chose to reelect George W. Bush as president. I have been very critical of his policies, economic, diplomatic and military. But I am unwilling to assume that I am so much smarter than the voting public that I will dismiss as worthless someone they have chosen as president of the United States.... My preference is for governors [as candidates for president]; I think running a government is good training for running a government. I also recognize that the current president makes that presumption harder to sustain...

Unable to remember that he had just said that we must respect the wisdom of the American people's choice of George W. Bush. The mouth is now locked around the wrist. The entire hand has now disappeared inside David Broder's mouth, and the slurping sounds are very unpleasant.

Let's click on the next search result:

May 3: Thankless Bipartisanship: "There are issues that are too big for either party to solve by itself," [Lamar] Alexander told me. "Globalization and competitiveness are two of them. Immigration is the next one on the agenda. And then there is health care." He pointed out that the bipartisan breakfast sessions that he and Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut have been hosting regularly this year have included discussions of health policy. As a byproduct of the breakfasts, "10 of us, five Republicans and five Democrats, have written the president saying that we are ready to work with him on a bill that has two principles -- universal coverage and private markets. We hope he responds." Iraq looms as the supreme test, of course... Alexander... says "it was a mistake" for the president not to seize on the Baker-Hamilton commission recommendations as the basis for a bipartisan answer to the dilemma of the war.... Meantime, Alexander has a gentle reminder for the press that our mind-set means that "unfortunately, bipartisan success, even on the biggest, most complex issues, has an excellent chance of remaining a secret. Despite the size of the accomplishment, the passage of the 208-page 'America Competes Act' was barely noticed by the major media. This is not a complaint, merely an observation. More than ever, the media, outside interest groups and party structures reward conflict and the taking of irreconcilable positions. There is little reward for reconciling principled positions into legislation"...

The 'America Competes Act' was not passed into law. It simply cleared the Senate by an 88-8 vote. It channels an additional $10 per American to the NSF each year. Don't get me wrong--boosting the NSF budget by an extra $10 per American is a good thing. But in the context of a federal budget of $7,000 per American per year, GDP of $40,000 per American per year, and Iraq war costs $500 per American per year--this 'America Competes Act' is not an outsized accomplishment, no matter how much David Broder approvingly quotes Lamar Alexander's claims that it is one.

David Broder's lips are wrapped around his elbow. The thumb, the hand, the wrist, and the forearm have disappeared inside David Broder's mouth. And we're only at the bottom of the first page of search results.

I'm sorry, Jonathan. But until you admit that David Broder is the biggest noisily-slurping arm-sucker stalking Pennsylvania Avenue today, you have no credibility.

Ezra Klein Is Shrill, But Not Shrill Enough

Ezra Klein writes:

Ezra Klein: Interesting!!: Michael Kinsley offers this throwaway line in an otherwise fun review of Hitchens' new book:

Under the unwritten and somewhat eccentric rules of American public discourse, a statement that contradicts everything you have ever said before is considered for that reason to be especially sincere, courageous and dependable...

It's remarkable that prominent journalists will simply admit that an easy way to attract a reputation for intellectual independence is to engage in an endless series of ideological repositionings, and this does not appear to give them pause. All due acclaim to Kinsley for writing it, but this is actually a problem, not just an endearing quirk in a noble profession. Kinsley, in fact, goes onto explain how Hitchens has made a career out of exploiting this loophole...

Shrill, Ezra, but not quite shrill enough. For Kinsley explains how he also made a career out of exploiting this loophole, and then found himself with a problem:

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything - Christopher Hitchens - Books - Review - New York Times: At The New Republic in the 1980s, when I was the editor, we used to joke about changing our name to “Even the Liberal New Republic,” because that was how we were referred to whenever we took a conservative position on something, which was often. Then came the day when we took a liberal position on something and we were referred to as “Even the Conservative New Republic.” As this example illustrates, among writers about politics, the surprise technique usually means starting left and turning right. Trouble is, you do this once and what’s your next party trick?...

Get shriller, Ezra.

My Local Paper is Shrill

Dead Canadians tell no tales. Or better, there are no tales about dead Canadians:

Find the dead Canadians, A Register-Guard Editorial Published: Thursday, May 10, 2007: Here's a suggestion for a way to troubleshoot the U.S. Senate's gutting of legislation that would have allowed consumers to purchase prescription drugs from Canada and other industrialized nations: Begin with a dragnet for dead Canadians.

The bodies ought to be easy enough to find. With more than 33 million residents exposed to prescription drugs that U.S. senators believe are too dangerous to sell to Americans, Canadians must be dropping dead by the dozens while waiting in line for hockey tickets. That's reason enough for Americans to continue paying the highest prescription drug prices in the world.

Thank goodness, 49 safety-conscious members of the Senate on Monday had the courage to keep the plague of dead Canadians from spreading south into the American heartland.

OK, as far as anyone knows, no Canadians actually have died from taking Canadian prescription drugs, many of which are made in the United States and approved by the Food and Drug Administration. And the FDA acknowledges that it can't find a single American who's been harmed by taking drugs purchased from licensed Canadian pharmacies.

But that doesn't mean it couldn't happen. Still, it seemed as if the bipartisan legislation sponsored by Sens. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, took great pains to address safety concerns. ...

That wasn't enough for Mississippi Republican Thad Cochran, who added a "poison pill" amendment...

The Cochran amendment wasn't really about ensuring the safety of imported drugs. It was about protecting the profits of the powerful pharmaceutical industry, one of the biggest contributors to political campaigns. Once again, those contributions have paid off handsomely.

Alberto Gonzales Would Drive Anybody Shrill

He "hasn't thought" about habeas corpus:

Think Progress » Gonzales: ‘I Haven’t Really Thought About’ Habeas Corpus: Under the Bush administration, U.S. citizens can be detained as enemy combatants and arrested without being charged of any crime. At today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales whether any U.S. citizens are “being held today, for over a month, who have been denied habeas corpus or access to an attorney.” Instead of giving an answer, Gonzales replied, “[Y]ou’re asking me a question I hadn’t really thought about.” Sherman then followed up and asked whether there any “U.S. citizens being held now by foreign governments or foreign organizations, without access to attorneys, as a result of rendition.” Gonzales again said, “It’s just — quite frankly, I hadn’t thought about this.”

The Final Friedman?

Republican Representative John Boehner says we must have progress in Iraq, or support will fade among Republicans. Looks like Republicans are finally starting to reluctantly accept that it's time to start considering alternatives:

Sunday Sampler Platter, By Brian Knowlton, The Caucus: The biggest news from the Sunday talk shows was probably the declaration of doubt by the Republican leader of the House, Representative John Boehner, about whether his fellow Republican lawmakers would continue to support President Bush on Iraq if no progress is evident by early autumn.

On “Fox News Sunday” today, Mr. Boehner, warned today that unless progress is evident in Iraq by early fall, many Republican lawmakers would begin losing patience....

Mr. Boehner ... told Fox News, “By the time we get to September or October, members are going to want to know how well this is working, and if it isn’t, what’s Plan B?”...

How do we decide if we need to go to plan B, that is, how can we tell if there is progress? According to Boehner, we set benchmarks. From Crooks & Liars:

BOEHNER: …I'm clearly for benchmarks. I had a benchmark proposal I introduced in January with a number of my colleagues that laid out benchmarks.

It laid out a way to measure the progress in Iraq. It required the president to report to Congress every 30 days. And the idea behind it was to try to measure the progress, intervene when you need to, to try to ensure success.[..] ...

And that's the whole point. I'm for benchmarks that are for success. I'm not for benchmarks with artificial timelines, yanking funds, trying to ensure that there's failure in Iraq.

WALLACE: So you would oppose benchmarks with teeth.

BOEHNER: I just don't think that's something that makes a lot of sense here. I'm for benchmarks. Let's measure the progress. Every month, you know, the administration can figure out, "All right, how do we want to go here?"

That is a bit confusing, isn't it? We can use benchmarks to measure progress, but not failure? Think Progress has more:

Last week, Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) compared the war to a Cardinals-Cubs baseball game. Reinforcing the notion that conservatives are deeply out of touch with the realities of the war, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) today compared Iraq to the small plastics and packaging company he used to run in Ohio.

Boehner used his analogy to justify setting teethless benchmarks for the Iraqi government. “I owned a small business. I have benchmarks every month, but if I didn’t meet the benchmarks and if I missed the profit margin, I didn’t shut down the business. I didn’t yank the funds and close up the door.” ...

Let me see if I have this right. You set a benchmark. If you exceed it, you go to the airwaves and say "See, we were right, the surge is working!" But if you miss the benchmarks, no big deal, just reset them:

Mr. Bush acknowledges that these benchmarks are important. Yet he refuses to insist, or let Congress insist, that Baghdad achieve them or face real consequences. Each time Baghdad fails a test, Mr. Bush lowers his requirements and postpones his target dates — the kind of destructive denial Mr. Bush called, in another context, the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Kevin Drum has an opinion:

No more Friedmans after September? That's what Jonathan Weisman and Thomas Ricks suggest in the Washington Post today...

When September rolls around Gen. David Petraeus is almost certain to report that things are tough but progress is being made on the ground. And he'll have metrics of some kind to back him up. What else is he going to do, after all? You can almost write his script right now.

But political progress? There are virtually no positive signs right now, and after 18 months of stalling it's unlikely that 18 more weeks are going to make a difference. What's more, I'm inclined to think that there are at least a handful of moderate Republicans who are genuinely serious about abandoning Bush this time around. This time, it looks like six months might really mean six months.

Artrios issues the shrill bottom line:

Friedman Forever: The WaPo is crystallizing September as the supposed Iraq drop dead date for Bush. But it won't be. A few more Republicans will be peeled off, but that's it. The major Republican presidential candidates will still be telling people that if we leave Iraq the terra ists will be hanging out at their local Applebees. Bush is going to cling to his pet war until the end. Movement conservatives will set up yet another stupid web site about victory. Bill Kristol and the rest of the conservative pundits will still be on board.

It ain't gonna magically end in September.

Unfortunately, I think that's probably right.

Mickey Kaus Drives Mark Kleiman Shrill

Mark writes:

The Reality-Based Community: Mickey Kaus and David Horowitz: separated at birth?: Mickey Kaus finally explains why he spends all his time attacking liberals when he claims not to be a conservative: he's still acting out juvenile New Left fantasies about smashing the liberal Establishment. Will someone gently tell Mickey that Mao is dead? As Joe Louis might have said, there may be a whole lot wrong with liberalism, but there's nothing George Bush, Karl Rove, and Grover Norquist can fix.

Frank Rich is Shrill!

Time for Condi to try something new, telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth:

Is Condi Hiding the Smoking Gun?, by Frank Rich, Opinion, NY Times: . . . . Thus Ms. Rice was dispatched to three Sunday shows last weekend to bat away Mr. Tenet’s book before “60 Minutes” broadcast its interview with him that night. But in each appearance ... [she] was persistently at odds with ... the public record. She must be held to a higher standard — a k a the truth...

It’s now been nearly five years since Ms. Rice did her part to sell the Iraq war on a Sept. 8, 2002, Sunday show with her rendition of “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Yet there she was last Sunday ..., claiming that she never meant to imply then that Saddam was an imminent threat. ...[S]he is still covering up the war’s origins. On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” she claimed that intelligence errors before the war were “worldwide” even though the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Mohamed ElBaradei publicly stated there was “no evidence” of an Iraqi nuclear program and even though Germany’s intelligence service sent strenuous prewar warnings that the C.I.A.’s principal informant on Saddam’s supposed biological weapons was a fraud.

Of the Sunday interviewers, it was George Stephanopoulos who went for the jugular by returning to that nonexistent uranium from Africa. He forced Ms. Rice to watch a clip of her appearance on his show in June 2003, when she claimed she did not know of any serious questions about the uranium evidence before the war. Then he came as close as any Sunday host ever has to calling a guest a liar. “But that statement wasn’t true,” Mr. Stephanopoulos said. Ms. Rice pleaded memory loss, but the facts remain. She received a memo raising serious questions about the uranium in October 2002, three months before the president included the infamous 16 words on the subject in his State of the Union address. Her deputy, Stephen Hadley, received two memos as well as a phone call of warning from Mr. Tenet.

Apologists for Ms. Rice ... like to say that this is ancient history... We’re all supposed to move on... Try telling that to families whose children went to Iraq to stop Saddam’s nukes. Besides, there’s a continuum between past deceptions and present ones, as the secretary of state seamlessly demonstrated last Sunday. ...

This country needs facts, not fiction, to make its decisions about the endgame of the war, just as it needed (but didn’t get) facts when we went to war in the first place. To settle for less is to make the same tragic error twice. ...

Ms. Rice is stonewalling his investigation by rambling on about separation of powers and claiming she answered all relevant questions in writing... If former or incumbent national security advisers like Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski could testify before Congress without defiling the Constitution, so can she. As for her answers to Senator Levin’s questions, five of eight were pure Alberto Gonzales: she either didn’t recall or didn’t know.

No wonder the most galling part of Ms. Rice’s Sunday spin was her aside to Wolf Blitzer that she would get around to reflecting on these issues “when I have a chance to write my book.” Another book! As long as American troops are dying in Iraq, the secretary of state has an obligation to answer questions about how they got there and why they stay. If accountability is ever to begin, it would be best if those questions are answered not on “60 Minutes” but under oath.

Sally Quinn Drives Joshua Micah Marshall into Shrillness!

Marshall writes:

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: April 29, 2007 - May 05, 2007 Archives: Sally Quinn: I am impressed by Obama because here's a black guy who's finally overcome blackness. Late Update: Quinn's larger point is that: "We [i.e., frivolous Washington insiders who haven't read the numerous articles about who Obama's advisors are] don't know who he is. Who are his people? Whom does he surround himself with? Whom does he listen to? Who gives him advice?"

NO QUARTER Is Shrill!

Their letter to George Tenet"

NO QUARTER: Letter to George Tenet: We agree with you that Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials took the United States to war for flimsy reasons. We agree that the war of choice in Iraq was ill-advised and wrong headed. But your lament that you are a victim in a process you helped direct is self-serving, misleading and, as head of the intelligence community, an admission of failed leadership. You were not a victim. You were a willing participant in a poorly considered policy to start an unnecessary war and you share culpability with Dick Cheney and George Bush for the debacle in Iraq.

You are not alone in failing to speak up and protest the twisting and shading of intelligence.  Those who remained silent when they could have made a difference also share the blame for not protesting the abuse and misuse of intelligence that occurred under your watch.  But ultimately you were in charge and you signed off on the CIA products and you briefed the President.

This is not a case of Monday morning quarterbacking.  You helped send very mixed signals to the American people and their legislators in the fall of 2002.  CIA field operatives produced solid intelligence in September 2002 that stated clearly there was no stockpile of any kind of WMD in Iraq. This intelligence was ignored and later misused.  On October 1 you signed and gave to President Bush and senior policy makers a fraudulent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)—which dovetailed with unsupported threats presented by Vice President Dick Cheney in an alarmist speech on August 26, 2002. You were well aware that the White House tried to present as fact intelligence you knew was unreliable.  And yet you tried to have it both ways.  On October 7, just hours before the president gave a major speech in Cincinnati, you were successful in preventing him from using the fable about Iraq purchasing uranium in Africa, although that same claim appeared in the NIE you signed only six days before.   

Although CIA officers learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered bin Laden an enemy of the Baghdad regime, you still went before Congress in February 2003 and testified that Iraq did indeed have links to Al Qaeda.

You showed a lack of leadership and courage in January of 2003 as the Bush Administration pushed and cajoled analysts and managers to let them make the bogus claim that Iraq was on the verge of getting its hands on uranium.   You signed off on Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations.  And, at his insistence, you sat behind him and visibly squandered CIA's most precious asset—credibility."   

You may now feel you were bullied and victimized but you were also one of the bullies.  In the end you allowed suspect sources, like Curveball, to be used based on very limited reporting and evidence.  Yet you were informed in no uncertain terms that Curveball was not reliable.  You broke with CIA standard practice and insisted on voluminous evidence to refute this reporting rather than treat the information as suspect.  You helped set the bar very low for reporting that supported favored White House positions, while raising the bar astronomically high when it came to raw intelligence that did not support the case for war being hawked by the president and vice president.

The Rambling Ineloquent Decider Commander Guy

Eugene Robinson can't believe what he hears. Just when you think George Bush can't sound any more foolish and out of touch:

Lost in the Fog With Commander Guy, by Eugene Robinson, Commentary, Washington Post: Is George W. Bush even trying to make sense anymore? On Wednesday, speaking to the Associated General Contractors of America, Bush gave himself a new nickname. ...

"And as you know," ... "...I'm the Commander Guy."

That leaves me somewhat confused. If he's now the Commander Guy, does that mean I have to stop calling him The Decider? Or does he spend some days deciding and other days commanding?

Maybe there were further clues to the president's decision-making style in the rambling talk he gave a couple of weeks ago at Tippecanoe High School in Tipp City, Ohio. He recalled that just before his inauguration in 2001, the head usher at the White House called and asked what color rug he wanted in the Oval Office. He delegated the task ... to his wife, Laura.

"But I said, I want it to say something -- the president has got to be a strategic thinker and I said to her, make sure the rug says 'optimistic person comes to work.' Because you can't make decisions unless you're optimistic that the decisions you make will lead to a better tomorrow." The result, he said, is "this fantastic rug that looks like the sun. And it just sets the tone for the Oval Office."

While discussing the situation in Iraq, Bush told the Tipp City audience that "I happen to think there will be an additional dividend when we succeed -- remember the rug?" Does that make the rug an Assistant Decider? Will the rug get a Medal of Freedom, just like George Tenet?

That Ohio appearance generated so many new Bushisms that it's hard to know where to begin. Asked about the polls showing the unpopularity of the war and his own low approval rating, Bush said, "I've been in politics long enough to know that polls just go poof at times." Asked about immigration, Bush said, "There are jobs Americans aren't doing. . . . If you've got a chicken factory, a chicken-plucking factory or whatever you call them, you know what I'm talking about."

Um, sure, Mr. President, we follow you. All the way to the chicken factory.

Those in the crowd at Tipp City also learned from the president that Iraq is definitely not another Vietnam. But the president added, "There are some similarities, of course -- death is terrible." ...

[T]o the extent that carelessness of speech reflects carelessness of mind, much more is at stake. The Commander Guy's rationale for sending more U.S. troops to fight and die in Iraq is as elusive as his reason for starting the war in the first place. He says his goal is victory, but he can't explain coherently what victory would look like, much less how to get there...

What is the man talking about? ... President Bush now says that even after "success" in Iraq -- after more American and Iraqi deaths -- there will still be sectarian violence and there will still be suicide bombers killing innocent civilians. Which is the situation right now. So why stay in Iraq even one more day, except to validate the unwise decisions of our ineloquent Commander Guy?

Jonathan Chait Says the Shrill is Gone

Or, more precisely, that it's never been there. Brad DeLong sets Chait straight with a tepid, but effective level of shrillness:

Don't Let Jonathan Chait Draw Your Bathwater!, by Brad DeLong: Here's something I wrote last November:

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Economist hopes for a grand bargain on Social Security reform:

So Washington is full of rumours that 2007 will bring a Grand Bargain on social security reform.... Nancy Pelosi and her friends may be loath to touch social security but they are worried that poorer Americans don't have enough of a retirement nest egg.... Democratic wonks have all kinds of ideas for getting ordinary Americans to save more.... If Mr Bush wants to sort out social security and the Democrats want to revamp the government's role in the rest of retirement security, there is clearly room for a compromise... combine the Gale/Gruber/Orszag ideas for restructuring retirement tax subsidies with the Liebman/MacGuineas/Samwick social security reform plan... [which] is probably the best bipartisan plan around and, importantly, includes a mandatory individual contribution to a personal retirement account. By restructuring tax subsidies for retirement saving so that poorer Americans got a hefty top up to their mandatory contributions from Uncle Sam and you might convince enough Democrats that a system which includes personal accounts makes sense...

Back in 1998, 1999, and 2000 there was a deal to be struck: bring the existing Social Security system back into balance with a combination of (small) tax increases and (moderate) future benefit cuts, and supercharge it with add-on private but regulated and insured personal accounts. But neither Gingrich, Hastert, Armey, Delay, or Lott were interested in such a deal--it would give another substantive public-policy victory to Bill Clinton, you see.... But the deal... is still there to be struck, if program design and decision-making can be moved out of the White House to locations with credibility.

And here's what Duncan Black--"Atrios"--of Eschaton said about me:

Eschaton: No!: Look, people who advocate adding "personal accounts" to Social Security are just stupid people. Really, just morons. There's no reason to do it.... If you think some Social Security contributions should be invested in the stock market (I don't) to raise returns overall, then... an index fund.... I still think that's a bad idea, but there's a rationale for it. There's no rationale for dividing that up into millions of individual accounts....

Social Security is a lovely program which works just fine and really needs no changes other than extraordinarily nonurgent tweaks to the tax formula at some point.... There's no need to strike a "grand bargain" which combines some stupid things with some smart things because there's no need to do so. Leave it alone.... People who continue to argue that there is [a problem] - and that the problem can be "solved" with the magic private accounts fairy - either have broken brains or are attempting to push an agenda for ideological reasons or for personal enrichment for themselves and their kind...

Here's what Jonathan Chait says about the relationship between people like Duncan Black and people like me:

Matthew Yglesias: [A]s Chait puts it in his conspiracy-minded phrasing, "the two groups [the activist liberal netroots and the 'wonkosphere' of more journalism-oriented bloggers] generally regard one another as allies and criticize one another tepidly if at all..."

Tepidly.

"Stupid people... morons... broken brains... push[ing] an agenda for ideological reasons or for personal enrichment..."

Tepidly.

Don't let Jonathan Chait draw your bathwater. I'm just sayin'.

Matthew Yglesias points out what is really going on:

A less conspiratorial way of putting it would be that we in the wonkosphere don't criticize netroots activists all that frequently or vehemently because we tend not to disagree with them on the merits all that frequently about matters of fundamental importance. And, after all, why should it be otherwise? I'm a liberal journalist, liberal activists are liberal activists, and the reason the adjective "liberal" fits in both cases is that we subscribe to similar worldviews. When we disagree, we disagree--but it's not extremely frequent...

Matthew Yglesias Gets Shriller

Mattherw Yglesias explains why he--and I--think that Thomas Edsall would contribute more to society if he stopped writing and took a job replacing the bunny rabbit in a cosmetics animal testing laboratory:

Matthew Yglesias: The Problematics of Pundit: Thomas Edsall's latest piece for TNR is, I think, a great example.... Edsall thinks... that when Harry Reid made is "war is lost" comment he raised the stakes in an unnecessarily risky way... it would have been better to say something like "Bush has lost the war." The claim that "Bush has lost the war" is a more politically effective message than "the war is lost" seems reasonable, and writing a column on that subject is a reasonable thing to do....

Edsall's column could have noted what Reid said, noted that it provided the fodder for right-wing attacks, and then defended Reid by saying "but of course Reid was right -- the war is lost, the Bush administration lost the war, and the right is on the warpath because they know Reid is in the neighborhood of a message that will devastate the GOP in 2008: Bush lost the war, and John McCain (or Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson) and the entire Republican congress clapped from the sidelines while he did it."

Alternatively, you could write the column Edsall actually did write, which is full of lamenting Reid's boneheaded political error, piling on with those calling Reid a blunderer, etc., etc., etc. The two columns are both based around the same thesis about the Iraq War and national security, but one is a pro-Reid "fighting Dems" kind of column and the other is an anti-Reid "concern troll" kind of column.

It would be silly to pretend that Edsall isn't aware of the different consequences that these different columns will have. These consequences, moreover, extend beyond the political sphere to things writers are more likely to care about--like their actual careers.... Edsall's penchant for spinning substantively left-of-center views into attacks on Democratic elected officials... earn[s] him praise from Mickey Kaus as "one of the subtlest and best-informed political reporters around--and a Democrat allergic to bogus Dem optimism." The bulk of the incentive structure points... to writing the column the way Edsall did....

"Dems who bash Dems" like to think of... [it] as an act of bold truth telling.... [But] praising the courage of someone with the guts to knock Harry Reid in these circumstances is like hailing someone who fires on unarmed demonstrators for speaking truth to power.

Matthew Yglesias Is Driven Shrill by Jonathan Chait

Matthew Yglesias writes:

Defending the netroots: Bloggers counter Jonathan Chait: Nothing, however, infuriates quite like being misrepresented, so I'll start with myself:

Even Matthew Yglesias, who writes one of the most independent-minded liberal blogs, confessed in March that he had soft-pedaled his opposition to gun control. "I don't write much about this issue because, hey, I don't want to be a wanker," he wrote...

Chait... is misinterpreting my intention.... I was not soft-pedaling my opposition to gun control at all.... Rather than "confessing" to a pattern of soft-pedaling my views on the issue, I was--in my mind at least -- bragging that, unlike many other professional journalists, I don't go out of my way to harp on points of disagreement with the liberal orthodoxy purely in order to bolster my credentials as an independent-minded blogger.

Yglesias does not say: "I don't want to be *called* a wanker by the netroots." Yglesias says: "I don't want to *be* a wanker." It's not an outer-driven fear of sanctions that induces conformity. It's an inner-driven desire not to mislead and misrepresent.

Chait doesn't get that. He understands that one might not want to be called a wanker--it might harm one's career. But the idea that one might not want to be a wanker--that doesn't occur to Chait.

Duncan Black Is Shrill!

Not that Duncan Black's shrillness is news or anything. But Franklin Foer is running out of time at the New Republic:

Eschaton: Wanker of the Day:Franklin Foer, for continuing to publish [Lawrence Kaplan]

Duncan links to Matthew Yglesias:

Matthew Yglesias: Lawrence Kaplan (with Bill Kristol) February, 2003:

The United States may need to occupy Iraq for some time. Though the UN, European and Arab forces will, as in Afghanistan, contribute troops, the principal responsibility will doubtless fall to the country that liberates Baghdad. According to one estimate, initially as many as 75,000 US troops may be required to police the war’s aftermath, at a cost of $16 billion a year. As other countries’ forces arrive, and as Iraq rebuilds its economy and political system, that force could probably be drawn to several thousand soldiers after a year or two. After Saddam Hussein has been defeated and Iraq occupied installing a decent democratic government in Baghdad should be a manageable task for the United States.

Now here's Kaplan in March 2006:

The administration intends to draw down troop levels to 100,000 by the end of the year, with the pullback already well underway as U.S. forces surrender large swaths of the countryside and hunker down in their bases. The plan infuriates many officers, who can only say privately what noncommissioned officers say openly. "In order to fix the situation here," Sabre Squadron's Sergeant José Chavez says, "we need at least 180,000 troops." Iraq, however, will soon have about half that. An effective counterinsurgency strategy may require time and patience. But the war's architects have run out of both.

And now, naturally, in May 2007 he says congressional liberals are ignorant about Iraq.

The Shrill Jonathan Schwartz Eviscerates Jonathan Chait

Jonathan Schwartz: terrible as a tentacled army with banners from the eighth dimension:

This Modern World » Blog Archive » Jonathan Chait engages in original intellectual inquiry: You’ve probably seen the New Republic has published a long piece about blogtopia by Jonathan Chait, a senior editor there. It somehow manages to be intensely irritating while still vaguely laudatory about what the online world has accomplished. Here’s my favorite part: "[P]ropaganda should not be confused with intellectual inquiry. Propagandists do not follow their logic wherever it may lead them; they are not interested in originality.... At the narrow level, the netroots take part in a great deal of demagoguery, name-calling, and dishonesty. Seen through a wider lens, however, they bring into closer balance the ideological vectors of propaganda in our public life. Take the case of Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a slain soldier who camped out at Crawford, Texas, in August 2005, demanding to meet with President Bush. The press corps did not treat her as a serious story, and understandably so–there were many parents of fallen soldiers with strong views on Iraq, so why should hers hold such weight? But the netroots took hold of the Sheehan story, harping on it for days, and forced it onto the national agenda. This is the sort of thing conservatives have been doing for years. The Swift Boat Veterans For Truth deserved no special credibility, either, but, in 2004, the right-wing media apparatus elevated them onto the national stage. Was the veneration of Sheehan intellectually shabby? Without a doubt. Was it, considered as a whole, a bad thing? That is not so clear."

Yes, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and Cindy Sheehan are exactly the same “sort of thing.” Just compare:

• Swift Boat Veterans for Truth garnered attention by falsely claiming Kerry was “lying about his record” in Vietnam
• Cindy Sheehan garnered attention by falsely claiming her son is dead

  Thank you, Jonathan Chait, for following your logic wherever it led you. It’s this type of original intellectual inquiry that blogs—-hampered as they are by their demagoguery and dishonesty—-just can’t touch.

More Journamalism from the Washington Post

Robert Waldmann notices that Michael Abramowitz, Peter Baker, and Jonathan Weisman of the Washington Post fact-check White House flack Dana Perino, calling her a liar:

Robert's Stochastic thoughts: Still the important news is Bush's isolation. His best friends are abandoning him like rats leaving a sinking ship. The article concludes with a debate about what Bush said 4 years ago:

[Dana] Perino said, "Look, I've never heard him describe it that way, absolutely not. Let me just remind everybody... the President never said 'mission accomplished.'...

After arriving on the carrier deck wearing a flight suit and carrying a helmet, Bush stood below a huge banner saying "Mission Accomplished" and addressed the crew. "My fellow Americans, major combat operations in Iraq have ended," he announced. "In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed"...

But Robert wrote too soon. They have reedited the article to remove all mention of Dana Perino and to remove Bush's claim four years ago that the U.S. had prevailed:

Bush Keeps Vow to Veto War Funding Bill - washingtonpost.com: The long-anticipated veto, the second of Bush's presidency, came on a day of dueling events staged by the White House and Congress aimed at securing the political advantage in the debate. Although the bill was approved last week, Democrats waited until yesterday to deliver it to the president so that it would coincide with the fourth anniversary of the day Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished"...

Journamalists