New York Times Death Spiral Watch

Ezra Klein has, as usual, some very smart things to say:

EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect: Read James Fallows on the breathtaking banality of William Kristol's writing. Sadly, this was entirely predictable. Kristol, whatever his talents, is not known for writing, well, anything. He occasionally pens an editor's note in the beginning of The Weekly Standard. He occasionally writes a hilariously wrong op-ed in The Washington Post. He sent most of this year underperforming in a regular column at Time, from which he was eventually dropped. This is what I was getting at in my post asking which conservative you would have elevated to the op-ed page. You guys suggested a variety of smart picks: Ramesh Ponnuru, Ross Douthat, Rich Brookhiser, Tyler Cowen, Bruce Bartlett, Radley Balko, and a handful more. I'd add to that list Nick Gillespie, James Manzi, Brink Lindsey, John Miller, Daniel Drezner, Damon Linker, Christopher Preble, etc, etc.

What's offensive, to me, isn't even the spectacle of the The New York Times exhibiting such insecurity that they need to hire a flagrantly wrong, technically untalented, and ideologically ugly writer for their op-ed page -- it's being so unimaginative, so contemptuous of the best-world worth of conservatism, as to pick Kristol. I would like to read more smart, interesting, conservatives. If the Times is going to insist on packing that spot with a conservative, rather than an actual leftist (which, let's be clear, they don't have), I would like a thought-provoking conservative. But Kristol was merely the nearest right-winger at hand with enough conservative fame to act as an instant shield in conversations about the Times' ideological leanings. They picked him for cover, rather than for their reader's edification, and in doing, they served us very poorly.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Hilzoy on the Party of Moral Values and Limited Government

Hilzoy is shrill:

Obsidian Wings: "One Of Us": I just couldn't let this delightful comment by Kathryn Lopez at NRO pass unremarked. She's talking about John McCain:

I’m second to none in praising him on his surge leadership. But on a whole host of issues — including water boarding, tax cuts, and the freedom of speech — he’s not one of us."

Like von, I favor Obama among the Democrats, and McCain among the Republicans. And one of the reasons for that is that, leaving aside the odious Ron Paul, while all the Republican candidates seem to be in favor of prolonging the war in Iraq indefinitely, McCain is the only one who is not "one of us" on waterboarding. He hasn't come out against torture nearly as much as I would like, nor has he been a champion of civil liberties, but at least he seems to recognize that there's a problem there, which is more than I can say for the rest of them.

The Kool Kidz in the Republican Party might think that support for torture is a prerequisite for entry into their little club. That just shows how far the supposed party of moral values and limited government has fallen.

Spencer Ackerman Is Shrill!

It's the Bushies, again:

toohotfortnr: Instead of moving that, nope, you need to re-up: Awesome new co-worker Colin Soloway and I were talking about this at the office yesterday. This Baghdad neighborhood that the U.S. has been bombing? That's Arab Jabour, a place cited by General Petraeus and the White House as a surge success story. Luckily, Jamie Gumbrecht and Nancy Youssef of McClatchy are on top of it:

The targets were near the town of Arab Jabour, a Sunni Muslim-dominated district on Baghdad's outskirts that American officials recently held up as a security success and an example of how local Sunni tribesmen known as "concerned local citizens" had turned against al Qaida in Iraq.

But Thursday's air attack indicated that the area still has a considerable Sunni militant presence. The statement said that more than 40 targets in three large areas were hit during two passes by two supersonic B-1 bombers and four F-16 fighter jets. A U.S. military official in the area said the targets were al Qaida in Iraq weapons caches and bomb-making materials.

The blitz dropped 38 bombs in its first 10 minutes, the statement said.

Forty thousand pounds of bombs. It's counterinsurgency-rific! And goddamn it, why can't Gumbrecht and Youssef acknowledge that the surge succeeded????//

John Scalzi Is Shrill!

Your standard neolibertarian Heinlein-worshipping science-fiction author says:

Your Big Fat Election Brain Dump, 1/11/08: In a matchup, I’ll take any of the top Democratic contenders over any of the top Republican contenders, because aside from the fact that there are no Republican candidates who I have any interest in voting for (I find McCain the most congenial to me philosophically and the only one who, should he win, won’t have me looking somewhat wistfully at the New Zealand immigration site to see if I have enough points to qualify), there’s also the simple fact that no Republican administration is going to be as motivated as a Democratic one to stop doing all the fucktarded things the Bush Administration has done over the course of the last seven years. Sorry, guys, the dude has trashed your brand.

I’m not going to go so far as to say that if the Democrats nominated a circus bear I’d vote for it over any GOP candidate, although I probably would vote for a circus bear over, say, Huckabee, because the bear would almost certainly know more about foreign affairs. But Clinton or Obama (or even Edwards, although I suspect he’s already toast and just hanging about to be kingmaker)? Really, not a problem.

Well, if I were going to vote for one of the Democratic candidates, which would I vote for? Honestly, I have no clue.... I’m happy to have the two of them debate each other and give everyone a good look at their positions and such. Emotionally, Obama appeals to me... to be blunt about it, having a President Obama would make it feel like the American people were doing a Ctrl+Alt+Delete on the previous eight years, and there’s a lot of appeal to that. But Clinton’s selling point — she’s already got the presidential apparatus ready to go — is not insignificant either.... People who loathe the Clintons, singly and severally, like to... cling to the shibboleth that her negatives are so high... and thus: President McCain (in a best-case scenario). I think these people are kind of high. Hello, McFly: This is a Clinton we’re talking about. You can’t kill them, they just keep coming.... Ask yourself, Clinton loathers: if in some alternate universe 2000 had been between Dubya and Clinton (either Clinton, they come as a package deal), do you think the Clintonistas would have tolerated the Florida vote count shenanigans? Does anyone really believe that Bush would have walked out of that the winner? One of the things I’ve always said about the 2000 election is that ultimately Bush won it because the Republicans were willing to snorkle through pig shit to get it, while the Democrats, and specifically Al Gore and his people, didn’t want to get their precious widdle hands mussed. When it came down to it, Gore didn’t want it enough. “Not wanting it enough” is not going to be a problem for Clinton.

For all the people who seem to believe that Clintons are universally loathed simply for being Clintons, it’s worth remembering that for the entirety of Bill Clinton’s second term (you know, the one he was impeached in), his approval rating never dropped below 54% (according to Gallup); as a contrast, the last time Bush saw an approval rating higher than that was the first couple of weeks of his second term.... [W]hen it comes right down to wallowing in the pig shit and going after your opponent with a splintery baseball bat, no one does it better than the Clintons, and the GOP is out of practice dealing with an opponent who not only hits back but is out to break your fucking skull....

That said, I think it’s entirely possible we’ll end up with Obama as the Democratic candidate, in which case the GOP had better hope smearing still works, because that’s all they’re going to have on the dude....

• Also, the GOP field? Monkeys. Or more accurately: Jesus Monkey, 9/11 Monkey, flip-flop Monkey with perfect hair, Monkey who wins teh Internets and fails everything else, and John McCain, who is not a monkey, but who is two years shy of how old Ronald Reagan was at the end of his second term, which is worrying. I want John McCain to tell us right now who his VP choice is going to be, because I have a sneaking suspicion that knowledge is going to be relevant... and if he picks a monkey of the same quality as the rest of the GOP field, it’s back to perusing the New Zealand immigration Web site again.

But aside from McCain, seriously, y’all, what the hell? Is this field really the best you can do? Don’t get me wrong, Huckabee’s Chuck Norris ad gave me a giggle, and I think it’s nice that Ron Paul gives the “I read Atlas Shrugged every year and it gets better every time” crowd something to do through the chilly winter nights. But this is no way to run a railroad. I sincerely do hope McCain takes the nomination, because although I disagree with him substantively on a number of policy points, at least saying “President McCain” doesn’t make me want to vomit in my mouth a little, the way “President Romney” or “President Guliani” does (saying “President Huckabee” doesn’t make me want to vomit, but does make me want to sigh heavily and shake my head sadly). I can live with a President McCain. But I’m sorry for you Republicans you don’t have a better set of candidates to choose from.

Self-Shrillness from John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei

Robert Waldmann informs us that the fecklessness, incompetence, laziness, ignorance, and corruption of Washington political reporters like John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei has driven John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei into raving shrill unholy madness.

It is a spectacle. It is not often that you see people publicly confess that they are frauds hoping to be taken for fools:

Why reporters get it wrong - John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei - Politico.com: New Hampshire sealed it. The winner was Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the loser — not just of Tuesday's primary but of the 2008 campaign cycle so far — was us. "Us" is the community of reporters, pundits and prognosticators who so confidently — and so rashly — stake our reputations on the illusion that we understand politics and have special insight that allows us to predict the behavior of voters.

If journalists were candidates, there would be insurmountable pressure for us to leave the race. If the court of public opinion were a real court, the best a defense lawyer could do is plea bargain out of a charge that reporters are frauds in exchange for a signed confession that reporters are fools. New Hampshire was jarring because it offered in highly concentrated form all the dysfunctions and maladies that have periodically afflicted political journalism for years.

Let’s look back at some of the bogus narratives of this election so far. There was the “John McCain is dead” story line from last summer.... Then there was Iowa... we wrote... all about organization. Except they were won on the Republican side by Mike Huckabee, who had only the barest-bones organization.... Or Barack Obama. The reason his candidacy was not taking flight, as the wisdom had it last fall, was that he was preaching a bland message of unity and civility in a year when Democrats were eager for a sharper, more confrontational and more partisan message. Guess not.

These were only appetizers to the main course of humiliation. After a barrage of coverage that all but anointed Obama as the New Hampshire winner... that exercise in groupthink was stopped cold by the actual votes. Whoops.

Looks like we have a trend here. Our own publication, Politico, did its part in promoting several of these flimsy story lines. We used predictive language in stories. We amplified certain trends and muffled the caveat.... When we started Politico, we vowed to be more transparent than news organizations traditionally have been about how we do our work — and how we sometimes err. In that spirit, here are some thoughts about why this profession, supposedly devoted to depicting reality, obsesses about so many story lines that turn out to be fiction.

1. Horse race frenzy: We are addicts. Do not listen to any reporter who says otherwise. It is why reporters leave their homes, spouses and families for long stretches to cram into crummy hotels and smelly buses to cover campaigns. The Web has made us a bit less defensive about this than we were in the past. That’s because we now have metrics — based on what stories get clicked on — that show our readers are obsessed with the horse race, too....

2. The echo chamber: Check out the nicer restaurants in Manchester, N.H., or Des Moines, Iowa, in the political season and you will see the same group of journalists and pols dining together almost every night. We go to events together, make travel plans together and read each other's work compulsively. We go to the same websites — the Drudge Report, Real Clear Politics, Time’s “The Page” — to see what each other is writing, and it’s only human nature to respond to it. That is one chief reason the “Hillary is inevitable” and “Hillary is toast” narratives developed so quickly and spread so rapidly.... There is a defense of sorts here, too. Even Clinton aides themselves started the day believing they were going to get blown out. But just because well-placed people are in the echo chamber does not mean the noise is accurate.

3. Personal bias: This one is complicated. Most reporters, in our experience, really do work hard to separate their personal feelings from their professional judgment.... Reporters are human, and some did seem swept up in the same emotions many voters experienced when they saw a black man win snow-white Iowa by preaching a gospel of change.... McCain also benefits from the personal sentiments of reporters. Many journalists are enamored with McCain because of the access he gives and, above all, the belief that he is free of political artifice.

Hillary Clinton, cautious and scripted, got the reverse treatment. She is carrying the burden of 16 years of contentious relations between the Clintons and the news media. Many journalists rushed with unseemly haste to the narrative about the fall of the Clinton machine....

Things are not all bad. Politico is part of a broad, technology-inspired movement that has led to more open and more exhaustive coverage of this presidential race than ever before. A lot of that coverage is damn good. As far as what’s bad, there is generally one good answer to excesses and hype in political journalism: Respect the voters. That means waiting to find out what they really think.

Stupidest Man Alive Nomination

John Podheretz: >Commentary » Blog Archive » IOWA: A Very Cheerful Rudy Giuliani: On MSNBC, Rudy Giuliani is making a very smiley, happy showing of himself. The result in Iowa could not have been better for Giuliani tactically. Romney has been injured. Huckabee won, but did not apparently win by a huge margin, and there won’t be many other states where evangelicals make up fully three-fifths of the primary electorate. And John McCain did not, it seems, come in third with a surprising showing, but fourth with a very modest showing. If McCain beats Romney in New Hampshire, Romney will have a difficult time going on — but McCain clearly hasn’t yet turned the corner and brought conservative Republicans back in his corner. And Fred Thompson’s third-place showing wasn’t impressive enough to kick his campaign back to life. With no one especially strong on the Republican side through the first few states, the Giuliani strategy of betting it all on Florida on January 29 and the big states on February 5 is looking better than it did a week ago.

TBogg Reads National Review So We Don't Have to

From TBogg:

TBogg - “…a somewhat popular blogger”: All Jesus deliveries to the back door please... By: TBogg Friday January 4, 2008 12:37 pm Over at The Corner they are indulging in some soul searching (as of this writing, no soul has yet been located) over what it means to their party when when the snake-handling yokels that they have been stringing along for all of these years, finally show up and the front door and want to marry their sister.

And here are the highlights:

The Corner on National Review Online: Re: Now for Something Completely Different   [Rich Lowry]: Something has been bothering me about my friend's comments I posted earlier. The thing about Huck rejecting "Rovian" politics. That might be true in some symbolic sense, but if we take Rovian politics as it is conventionally defined as massively turning out the base and using negative, personal wedges against an opponent, Huckabee did both. He blew out the Romney turn-out model the way Bush did Kerry's in 2004 because evangelicals showed up in an off-the-charts turnout. As for the negative stuff, he never went up on the air, but he (subtly) used the religion card against Romney and frankly used the class card. He did the latter at basically every campaign stop. So if this is the new politics, it's going to come with a subtly nasty undercurrent.

Question   [Kathryn Jean Lopez]: David Brooks writes: "[Huckabee] sensed that conservatives do not believe their own movement is well led. He took on Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush." Even? Is there any movement conservative who ever confused President Bush with a/the leader of the conservative movement? A conservative choice. More conservative than other viables. But movement guy?

Re: Exit Polls   [Ramesh Ponnuru]: Like Mark Hemingway’s correspondent, I think a lot of the commentary about the Republican results in Iowa is beside the point. As he says, what jumps out at you from the exit polls is that Huckabee crushed Romney among evangelicals and Romney crushed Huckabee among everyone else. These numbers powerfully suggest that Romney couldn’t really have done better in Iowa. His strategy was premised on there not being a candidate who could unite evangelicals the way Huckabee did. Being more “genuine,” or doing more to appeal to people making less than $50,000, wouldn’t have helped. Yes, as David Brooks implies in his column today, Romney had more appeal to people higher up the income scale. But religion made a bigger difference; and if evangelical voters in Iowa tend to have lower incomes than other Republicans, then the income divide in the party could be partly illusory. If Huckabee’s rise makes Republicans revamp their agenda to appeal to working-class voters, they will be doing a smart thing for a dumb reason. So could Romney have followed a strategy that relied less on Iowa? It’s hard to see how, if he was going to run as a conservative alternative to McCain and Giuliani. John Ellis is a smart political observer who argues, as many others do, that Romney should have run as a candidate of “new ideas” rather than a “700 Club” Republican. Well, first off, these things aren’t mutually exclusive (or Republicans would be not just in bad but hopeless shape). But second, there was no way that a pro-choice Mitt Romney could have beaten Rudy Giuliani in the primaries. And once he flipped on that issue, all of the attacks on him as plastic, etc., were baked in the cake.

Resurrecting Fred   [Kathryn Jean Lopez]: I still contend people shouldn't get too excitable about last night. But I also imagine — especially with all the excitablility — that I can't be the only one wondering if Fred Thompson might just be handed a window before this is all over? Actually, I know I'm not. I'm getting pro-Fred mail like I haven't seen since people were enthusiastically wanting to draft him back almost a year or less ago. I think conservatives much rather give Thompson the possibility of a second look than McCain.

Rudy Time   [Mark R. Levin]: The biggest beneficiary of the Huckabee win in Iowa is not Huckabee, it's Rudy. The biggest beneficiary of a McCain win in New Hampshire would be Rudy. Romney's strategy was to win Iowa and New Hampshire. He has now lost Iowa. Rudy is waiting to pounce in the next tier of states. That has always been his strategy.

Relax.   [Mark R. Levin]: Huckabee will not be the Republican nominee. 

Isn't Anyone Reading Exit Polls?   [Mark Hemingway]: Or so asks a reader: "Huckabee took 14% of the vote and came in fourth in the Iowa caucus among non-evangelicals according to the NBC Republican exit poll [other polls come out about the same].  Huckabee's principle voting block was female born-again Christian Republicans living in non-urban rural areas with a population below 10,000.  I dearly love such people, but demographically in the country at large there aren't that many of them." When Huckabee moves out of caucus Iowa and into primary state America, he's going to get killed.

Huck Rides a Donkey   [Mark Hemingway]: Arkansas political columnist David J. Sanders, who has written about Huckabee for NRO here and here, has a good piece in the WSJ arguing that Huck is more religious left than religious right.

Dog-Eat-Dog   [Stephen Spruiell]: I watched the Iowa Democratic caucuses on C-SPAN last night, and so I must rant about the stupidity of the process: 400 Iowa Democrats wandering around a high-school cafeteria, harassing each other for two hours by repeating the same worn-out lines we've heard a million times before about each candidate...

Now, Kill the Iowa Caucus   [Jonah Goldberg]: We now have  a brief window of opportunity to drive a stake through the heart of the Iowa Caucus. Or so I argue in my column today.

Quick Question   [Jonah Goldberg]: Hey does anyone know if one can smoke cigars indoors in the "Live Free or Die" state?

Reagan, Iowa, 1980   [James S. Robbins]: K, lest we forget, Ronald Reagan's 1980 Iowa loss set up a timeless Ronnie moment. Bush Sr. came out of his 1980 Iowa victory with self-described "Big Mo." Reagan challenged him to a debate, which the Nashua Telegraph agreed to sponsor. But due to election law intricacies, Reagan chose to pay for it himself. When all the candidates turned up for what the Bush team thought was going to be a two-man debate, chaos erupted, and Reagan tried to explain the circumstances. The editor of the Nashua Telegraph ordered the sound man to turn off Reagan's microphone, leading to the timeless moment when Reagan forcefully stated "I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!" He then took 51% in New Hampshire in a seven way race.

Huckabee, Candidate of the Elites?   [Mike Potemra]: I was talking tonight to a veteran of the Republican Governors Association in Washington, D.C. This seasoned political operative told me that if you asked the staffers there back when both Huckabee and Romney were governors, the staffers would have strongly preferred Huckabee. The conventional wisdom, of course, is that Huckabee is the populist candidate backed by ignorant yahoos while Romney is the elitist candidate backed by effete, impudent snobs. Now, the Huckabee (and Obama) moment probably won't last, and the heavy-hitter front-runners will probably end up being nominated, but this insight from a D.C. politics-watcher reassures me that Huckabee can appeal even to the all-important "insider" vote . . . . (For what it's worth, the political guy I'm quoting is a McCain backer.)

The Tale of the GOP Caucuses   [Rich Lowry]: Here's one way to look at it: 60% of voters were evangelicals. Huck beat Romney among them 45-19%. 40% weren't evangelicals. Romney beat Huck among them 33-13%.

The Romney Response   [Kathryn Jean Lopez]: A Romney circler emphasizes to me in the virtual spin room: "Huckabee is a pro-life Jimmy Carter – he will be rejected by econ and natl security conservatives.He would be the death knell of the social conservatives as players within the party – hopefully enough will come to their senses." For them it is about that Reagan coalition. The one Rollins says is dead and thus is determined to destroy. But I'm sensing some nervous optimism that this can be remedied for them. We'll have more of a sense on Tuesday.

The McCain Fallout   [Ramesh Ponnuru]: Almost entirely good, I should think. Romney is taken down several pegs. McCain's failure to get third won't matter: The press set him up so he could win but couldn't lose. The Democratic results will be the bigger headline, though, and they might hurt McCain if they draw New Hampshire independents to vote in the Democratic primary rather than the Republican one. It's good news for Giuliani, too, since it increases the likelihood of a split result in the first states and thus gives him the time he needs to get to Florida.

Bill Schneider and Others   [Kathryn Jean Lopez]: are pointing out the high percentage of evangelical voters who have reportedly turned out. Anti-Huck people are freaking. Deep breaths. As Bill Bennett just pointed out on CNN, evangelicals aren't necessarily a voting block, as much as Pastor Huckabee has tried to suggest (and prays?) they are in his identity-politicking. Just ask Mark DeMoss...

Steve Suh is Shrill!!

He writes:

Cogitamus: Broder's Wisdom For Today: Via Atrios, we see that Iowa is stupid and yucky and has cooties:

When you're reading the returns from the Iowa caucuses, you are viewing them through a double distortion mirror.

The outcome of Iowa's first-in-the-nation voting is skewed by two big factors. The turnout is ridiculously small, barely 20 percent of the eligible voters. And those who choose to caucus are hardly representative of the population as a whole.

But New Hampshire, well, that state is well-behaved and bathes regularly:

The Democratic Party of New Hampshire is a balanced blend of college-trained, high-tech people and educators, with a leavening of retirees and a significant ethnic, urban contingent in Manchester and Nashua, as well.  The Republican Party here is a small-business and professional class, with some blue-collar elements and a spillover of former Massachusetts residents living along the southern border.

New Hampshirites are indeed a fair folk, industrious, honest and plain-spoken.  They live in picturesque hamlets deep in the forest and while away the winter hours listening to the village elders tell stories of their ancestors.

Iowans have been known to go to moving picture shows and, it is rumored, use devious means to turn their grain products into strong beverages.

Besides being yet another installment of Centrism and Civility: The Path to Progress, the real purpose of Broder's column is to give everyone the basis they need to dismiss Iowa's results when Huckabee and Edwards win.  Until this column I, despite my predictions, wasn't really sure if Edwards in particular could pull it off, but Broder seems convinced.

They Look at Rows of Numbers!!!

Perhaps not absolutley shrill, but relatively so:

Economists View: "Not Remotely the Same as Good at Getting it Right": Why oh why do I read anything at the NRO and, if I do, why do I ever bother with Jerry Bowyer? He says:

Gas Bags, by Jerry Bowyer, NRO: ...Gas-price hikes will never, ever, ever cut into consumer spending. It’s a mathematical impossibility. Here’s why: Gas prices are a component of consumer spending.

You see, when gas prices climb from $2 a gallon to $3 a gallon, one of the components of retail spending goes up. ...

Sure, if people spend more money on gas, they may very well spend less on soft drinks. But that’s a substitution, not a decrease in overall spending. The spending simply shifts from one retail category to another.

So why don’t we ever hear this? Well, with a few notable exceptions, mainstream TV commentators don’t know the facts, which often are buried in the details. You can’t just read a financial press release from a government organization (or worse yet, the blurb about the press release) and understand what the data are saying. A Larry Kudlow, a Steve Forbes, a Dan Yergin, a John Rutledge, an Art Laffer, a Brian Wesbury — these folks actually read the reports, including the tables in the back. They look at rows of numbers; in the case of a consumer-spending report, they note the row that is devoted to gas stations.

Meanwhile, the ... only numbers they master are the phone numbers of their favorite producers. Good at getting on the air is not remotely the same as good at getting it right.

He is arguing that input costs don't matter, but of course that's wrong. It's just not true that "Gas-price hikes will never, ever, ever cut into consumer spending," see the 1970s for one counterexample. Or do a simple thought experiment. If the price of oil went up to, say, $1,000 a barrel tomorrow, would real GDP stay at its current level, or might you expect a decline in GDP, in the short-run at least? And if GDP falls, then consumer spending will fall along with it.

Maybe the problem is that the people he so admires are simply looking at tables of numbers rather than doing actual econometric investigations solidly grounded in economic theory, something that involves more than, say, two lines drawn on a graph (see the completely uninformative graph he has plotted in this article for his latest along these lines - that graph tells us nothing whatsoever, but Bowyer appears to place great stock in the relationship between the two variables over the last 11 months - it's almost comical to see the graph put forward as serious analysis). Seriously, try doing actual econometric analysis instead of looking at "rows of numbers; in the case of a consumer-spending report, ... the row that is devoted to gas stations." Even when you try to get sophisticated and compare two rows at once, that isn't adequate (hey, both are going up!). Doing so leads to false conclusions like tax cuts pay for themselves because you haven't bothered to consider factors like trend growth in tax receipts (to name just one omitted variable in the typical "analysis").

Anyway, Bowyer - who isn't an economist but plays one at the NRO - should realize that "good at getting an article at the NRO is not remotely the same as good at getting it right," something he has shown time and again.

D-squared Digest Is Shriller than Ever!

It's a very nice Christmas present from Daniel Davies:

D-squared Digest -- FOR bigger pies and shorter hours and AGAINST more or less everything else: Is Tom Wolfe the American Martin Amis?

I've hated Wolfe for a long time. Basically, starting half way through Bonfire of the Vanities, when I noticed that a) every single time a female character is introduced, we have to sit through a frankly creepy half-page description of her breasts[1], and b) that Wolfe seemed to believe that the ethnic nickname of the Irish in New York was "Harps", and that he kept on breaking off his story for some really silly jock-sniffing eulogies to the character, strength and downright manliness of anyone with Irish ancestry[2]. I thought it was a really bad book (the film was much better[4]). But anyway, every other fucker apparently liked it (though I have to say, very few actual traders, who usually love anything set in their milieu, even the appalling Ben Affleck vehicle "Boiler Room". And on the basis of that plus the "New Journalism", Wolfe has been taken seriously for a long time.

No more, I think. He's written the following blurb for a book which pupports to prove that modern American liberals are actually fascists (in other words, for a complete waste of time and paper - I have no more interest in how the author tries to make his case than in discussing the ins and outs of geocentrism. Since modern American liberals visibly aren't fascists, "engaging with the arguments" in this book is purely for the sort of people who like playing "Who's Line Is It Anyway?" type games).

In the greatest hoax of modern history, Russia's ruling "socialist workers party," the Communists, established themselves as the polar opposites of their two socialist clones, the National Socialist German Workers Party (quicknamed "the Nazis") and Italy's Marxist-inspired Fascisti, by branding both as "the fascists." Jonah Goldberg is the first historian to detail the havoc this spin of all spins has played upon Western thought for the past 75 years, very much including the present moment. Love it or loathe it, "Liberal Fascism" is a book of intellectual history you won't be able to put down—-in either sense of the term.

Hahahaha. Credibility gone.

I wish the greatest of commercial success on "Liberal Fascism". If it really takes off it will be like an infestation of herpes in the credibility of all sorts of leading right-wing commentators. The short term displeasure at seeing its author enriched is surely as nothing to the lip-smacking prospect, in four or five years' time, of being able to dismiss half the commentariat with an airy wave of the hand and a cheerful "yes, but didn't he write that embarrassing praise for 'Liberal Fascism'".

Napoleon said that when you saw your enemy making a mistake, you must never interrupt him. I wouldn't want to deprive my mates at Sadly No! of their fun, but I would really caution against being too hard on this book.

[1] I am told that this dirty-old-man tendency reached apotheosis in I am Charlotte Simmons, which I did not read because it did not get good reviews.

[2] An irritating Wolfe trope foreshadowed in "The Tangerine-Flake Baby" and the New journalism, most particularly the stock-car racing pieces, which in retrospect are chock full of bizarre racial biology theories about the "Scots Irish[3]" heritage of people in the Appalachians, and therefore of "Southern Culture" more generally.

[3] The "Scots Irish", beloved of Wolfe, PJ O'Rourke, etc, are the same people as the Ulster Protestants btw. Not a bad bunch intrinsically and all that, but I mean really, me neither.

[4] Although I have to say that when a cinematographer of the calibre of Brian de Palma casts a black actor with a wide nose, then takes a wide-angle lens and films that actor in a close-up from a position just below his face, he knows exactly what he's fucking doing and I regard it as the visual equivalent of the worst racial epithets.

John Scalzi Gets Medieval on MSNBC!!

Downright shrill, in fact:

Why We’re All Going to Hell, Part 54,302: A multi-billionaire industrialist donates 97% of his fortune to help fund clean water in Africa, education for blind children, and housing for the mentally ill, and it’s presented by one of the largest news organizations in the world in terms of what it means for Paris Hilton...

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Jonah Goldberg Drives Andrew Sullivan Shrill!

Sullivan writes:

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan: O Frabjous Day! 17 Dec 2007 05:36 pm: Jonah Goldberg's party might be dragging citizens off the street, incarcerating them without charges for four years and torturing them (if you haven't heard of Jose Padilla, you've been reading too much NRO), they might have suspended habeas corpus indefinitely, they might be wire-tapping your phone without warrants, they may be claiming presidential authority to ignore laws and treaties ... but the real fascism can be found in:

a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.

Be afraid.

David Corn Is Shrill!

Huckabee does it to him:

Mike Huckabee: Playing Both Sides of the Pulpit: not too long ago, Huckabee was quite willing to be divisive. In a 1998 book decrying American culture, Huckabee was no seeker of common ground. He drew stark lines, equating environmentalists with pornographers and homosexuality with pedophilia and necrophilia. He also declared that people who do not believe in God tend to be immoral and to engage in "destructive behavior." He drew a rather harsh picture of an American society starkly split between people of faith and those of a secular bent, with the latter being a direct and immediate threat to the nation.

The book, Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence, was hardly a call to come together. Huckabee wrote it with George Grant in response to the March 24, 1998, school shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The book was published in early June of that year, its cover featuring a blurry photograph of a young boy pointing a gun at the reader.

In Kids Who Kill, Huckabee argued that school shootings were the product of a society in decline, a decline marked (and caused) by abortion, pornography, media violence, out-of-wedlock sex, divorce, drug use, and, of course, homosexuality. Huckabee and his coauthor bemoaned the "demoralization of America," observing, "Despite all our prosperity, pomp, and power, the vaunted American experiment in liberty seems to be disintegrating before our very eyes." Huckabee, who was governor at the time and a well-known social conservative, blasted away at those whom he held responsible for America's ills, and he took a rather tough stand against government social programs and their advocates. In lamenting the "cultural conflicts" besetting the country, he wrote,

Abortion, environmentalism, AIDS, pornography, drug abuse, and homosexual activism have fragmented and polarized our communities.

Why was he lumping environmentalism with activities he considered sinful? He did not explain further. A few pages later, Huckabee complained,

It is now difficult to keep track of the vast array of publicly endorsed and institutionally supported aberrations—from homosexuality and pedophilia to sadomasochism and necrophilia.

Huckabee did not say what public endorsement of pedophilia or necrophilia he had in mind. But he did seem to be equating homosexuality with both.

Throughout the book, Huckabee warned of going soft on immorality. He slammed those Christians who accept a "misguided version of 'tolerance'" and do not voice outrage at cultural deterioration. Mocking such Christians, he huffed, "We don't want to offend anyone." He denounced what he termed "radical ideological secularism," and he declared, "in the name of civil liberties, cultural diversity, and political correctness, a radical agenda of willy-nilly moral corruption and ethical degeneration has pressed forward." Without identifying any secularists by name, he wailed,

The legal commitment of ideological secularism to any and all of the fanatically twisted fringes of American culture—pornographers, gay activists, abortionists, and other professional liberationists—is a pathetically self-defeating crusade that has confused liberty with license.

This is not the rhetoric of a fellow looking to heal divisions within American society. And Huckabee approvingly quoted a "pastor-patriot" of the early 1800s who said, "Every considerate friend of civil liberty, in order to be consistent with himself, must be the friend of the Bible." That's a rather fundamentalist definition of a civil libertarian.

In Kids Who Kill, Huckabee addressed the decline of manners and civil discourse in American life. He favorably cited the trenchant analysis of the modern media culture that Neil Postman, a liberal critic, presented in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. Huckabee argued that the entertainment industry "is conditioning kids to kill." But he also groused about unnamed "modern government-sponsored social engineers," claiming that "virtually every dollar poured into" government social programs "has only made matters worse." With such a remark, he was planting himself firmly in the government-is-the-enemy camp.

Elsewhere in the book, Huckabee denounced no-fault divorce and claimed that "equality in the workplace has ironically worked against women in innumerable ways." Looking for an expert on this matter, he pointed to a 19th-century author named Peyton Moore, who once noted, "Whenever we attempt to muddy the distinctions—the God-given distinctions—between men and women, it is always the women who ultimately lose." He didn't say that women should stay at home. But he heaped scorn on those who advocate workplace equality for women.

So what to do about a culture that breeds kid killers? Faith is more important than policy or politics, Huckabee argued. The "Judeo-Christian religion," he wrote, states "that faith counteracts the destructive effects of sinful actions and activities." That's what you would expect a religious-minded person to believe. But Huckabee went further and declared that nonbelievers tend to be evildoers:

Men who have rejected God and do not walk in faith are more often than not immoral, impure, and improvident (Gal. 5:19-21). They are prone to extreme and destructive behavior, indulging in perverse vices and dissipating sensuality (1 Cor. 6:9-10). And they—along with their families and loved ones—are thus driven over the brink of destruction (Prov. 23:21).

Huckabee is certainly entitled to his religious beliefs and his own view of human nature. He is free to think that nonbelievers cannot be trusted. But should Huckabee be allowed to play both sides of the pulpit? Kids Who Kill presented a black-and-white perspective: environmentalists, homosexuals, civil libertarians, supporters of social programs, advocates of workplace equality, and nonbelievers are on the dark side and allied with the forces of decline; people who believe in the Bible are the decent Americans. In 1998, Huckabee was claiming a religion-oriented cultural war was under way in the United States and he was happy to be a warrior for his side. Now he says he wants to bring together a "polarized" society. His 1998 book—full of unforgiving rhetoric—indicates that Huckabee is more comfortable creating divides than bridging them.

Ezra Klein Is Shrill!

He is shrill at New York Times columnist Tom "Airmiles" Friedman:

Ezra Klein: Better Press Corps, Etc: In some ways, I think Matt is giving Tom Friedman too much credit when he says that, "in order to reach a pox on both houses conclusion [Friedman] finds himself ignoring the very strong similarity between auctioned permit plans and carbon tax plans." I wouldn't, in this case, chalk up to ideology what I can attribute to incompetence. Instead, I'd bet that Friedman simply doesn't understand that auctioned permit plans are essentially equivalent to carbon tax plans.

This could've been caught, of course. Any expert would have noticed the misunderstanding at the heart of Friedman's argument. But no expert saw the piece before publication. So far as structural problems go in journalism, the way we do fact checking is actually a big one. Friedman's column probably went to some mid-level fact checker at The New York Times, who looked on the web sites of the various candidates, marked down that they had nothing called a "carbon tax" in their plan, and put a big checkmark on the day's Tom Friedman column. Same with Kit Seelye's piece, which went to some intern, who checked her quote and the googleability of the facts, and okayed the article.

For the sort of errors Seelye and Friedman are making to be caught, their copy would actually have to be evaluated by someone who understands the relevant policy issues. Anyone familiar with climate policy could have identified the problem with Friedman's argument, anyone with an interest in health policy, or basic statistics, could have seen the glaring methodological screw-up at the heart of Seelye's piece. But no such individuals were asked to weigh in on their pieces. Instead, the rough drafts went to the "fact checkers," who do something different and altogether less relevant.

Scott Horton on Joe Klein

Scott Horton is shrill:

"Salon 1, TIME 0": the Bush Administration’s FISA apologists work feverishly to exploit the intellectually lazy. I am very surprised and very disappointed to see Joe Klein in that crowd. And disappointing as that discovery was, what followed was even worse. Time’s follow-up to the well-deserved criticism has been defensive and its concessions of factual error grudging. And all of this reflects not so much an error on the part of Klein as the Time editors. This has been an extremely bad week for Joe Klein. But it doesn’t change my positive opinion of him and his abilities. And if he’ll just give us another work of the quality of Primary Colors, I’ll forgive him entirely.

Update.... I expected a “grudging” correction. But this isn’t a correction at all, it’s an acceptance of a world of divided red and blue realities. Perhaps next Time will tell us that Republicans believe that WMDs were found in Iraq, but Democrats do not. The word for this and other excuses offered up by Klein in the last few days is simple: unprofessional. This isn’t coming from the journalist I have known and respected for so many years. Something has happened.

Time Magazine Drives Jane Hamsher Shrill!

She writes:

Firedoglake - Firedoglake weblog » Honest Criticism vs. Right Wing Bullying: All Things Aren’t Equal: It’s rather shocking to see how discombobulated Time Magazine has become over the whole Joe Klein/FISA debacle. Did they learn nothing from the Washington Post’s Deborah Howell episode? If they thought they could get away with jamming their fingers in their ears and singing “la la la I can’t hear you,” the Chicago Tribune just stuck it to them by printing a genuine correction to the Klein abomination:

A Time magazine essay by Joe Klein that was excerpted on the editorial page Wednesday incorrectly stated that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act would require a court approval of individual foreign surveillance targets. It does not.

When I was calling around trying to find out what the editing process at Time was on the piece, I asked several people about how a column actually gets into print there. I’ll spare you the story of everyone sitting around the conference table pitching their ideas (”I think I’ll take the Democrats to task for being lax on national security this week…” “Oh, Joe! Such golden insights…that’s why we pay you the big money…”) and skip right to the part where everybody in the building is worried about the right wing beating them up for being too liberal.

This is a Very Serious Concern for the editorial class at Time Magazine. On the other hand, liberals such as ourselves calling out Klein for being wildly inaccurate and a dupe for Republican hacks (as well as his vanity-soaked editors, who won’t allow the magazine to acknowledge the mistake even after Klein did so himself) are considered a giant pain in the ass. It does, however, accommodate everyone’s desire to shrugs their shoulders, pat themselves on the back and conclude that if they’re being criticized by both sides they’re probably doing everything right. They then retreat to the bar and hope eventually everyone will just shut up and it will all blow over.

There is a systemic problem of perspective here. These critiques are not equal. When Greenwald called out Klein, it was based on his column’s demonstrable factual inaccuracy. Glenn is a noted First Amendment lawyer who has written two books addressing the subject of FISA law. You can’t just dismiss him by calling him a partisan and shrieking until he goes away. His analysis needs to be addressed on a point-by-point basis, and a failure to do so will get you Paul Lukasiak in your comment section.

The right wing, on the other hand, becomes incensed when someone does not subscribe to their narrative and dares to challenge (or even meaningfully question) those in authority. The Pravda-like cheerleading on behalf of the state that this encourages should be highly objectionable to every journalist interested in the perpetuation of a free press, especially since the wingnuts would like to see anyone who does not respond to that authority with basset-like obedience subjected to the annihilation of William Wallace.

Case in point. I’m on the RedState mailing list, and this is the email I got from them today:

Dear RedState Reader:

RedState is calling for CNN to fire Sam Feist, their political director; and David Bohrman, Senior Vice President and Executive Producer of the debate.

During last night’s debate, which CNN billed as “a Republican debate, and the goal was to let Republican voters see their candidates,” CNN either knowingly or incompetently allowed hardcore left wing activists to plant questions and Anderson Cooper willingly gave one of those activists a soapbox so he could harass the Republican candidates about military policy.

Simple googling would have revealed these left wing activists.

Had CNN done its homework, this would not have happened. They either willfully let it happen, or incompetently bungled it. Either way, heads should roll.

Likewise, we hope one or more of the GOP Presidential candidates will call for a do-over debate on substantive policy issues.

You can read our Directors post here.

All the best,

Erick Erickson, Editor, RedState.com

When the Democratic YouTube debates were broadcast, we were delighted by the fact that candidates were being asked honest and tough questions by real people, including right wing gun nuts. Nobody complained, we were happy that the questions weren’t being asked by media hogs who had their own agenda (see Russert, Tim). The fact that the Republicans could not stand up to that kind of discussion, which did not take place within their hermetically sealed world view, was something people predicted at the time. Last night’s embarrassment came not because of liberal questions, but rather because the GOP has an exceptionally poor lineup pandering to an extreme, delusional minority.

The Time Magazine folks can look to these bullies for their journalistic etiquette cues at their own peril. Stenography is certainly the path of least resistance these days, but the copious amounts of alcohol required to obliterate one’s professional pride in the process can be a bit hard on the internal organs.

Isaac Chotiner Becomes Even Shriller!

Speaking truth appears to be becoming a habit for him:

THE NEW REPUBLIC | Blogs: Rock Bottom : Earlier I alluded to David Samuels' dreadful profile of Condoleezza Rice in The Atlantic last year, but now it seems that Samuels has topped himself with a disgraceful and incoherent piece on the state of American Jewry. After classily referring to the "less-evolved" parts of the world, Samuels jumps right into his thesis, which is that American Jews are under constant attack:

Yes, Jewish life in America remains a flowering paradise compared with the realities of being a Jew in contemporary Britain or France. But it is impossible to ignore the fact that America has changed, too. At bookstores in major airports, I am no longer surprised to be greeted by a pictures of a smiling former U.S. president comparing Israel to the loathsome apartheid government of South Africa, or a Harvard professor explaining how a small but powerful coterie of Jews is responsible for the misfortunes that have befallen America in the Middle East.

The horror, the horror--Jimmy Carter has published a bad book. Then this:

Lobbyists for AIPAC are being put on trial for the crime of gossiping with U.S. government officials over lunch, an offense of which every single foreign lobbyist in Washington--and every working journalist--is guilty. Again, the American Jewish community is silent, for fear of making things worse.

Is Samuels implying that the lobbyists were put on trial simply because they were Jewish? There is no evidence for this, but who cares? And anyway, Samuels is busy taking the entire weight of American Judaism and placing it firmly on his shoulders:

Every American Jew has been quietly putting together their own pocket-sized file of stories they would rather not tell the children. There is the story...

"Every" American Jew? That's quite an ambitious statement. Finally:

In private, I hear it is simply too painful and depressing to contemplate the idea that there will be no easy peace between Israel and the Palestinians, that American Jews have become scapegoats for popular unease about terrorism, that political anti-Semitism has become normative thought among large sectors of the global intelligentsia, or that the tension between Israel and the United States will continue to grow as a future administration seeks a way out of the present morass in Iraq and comes to terms with a nuclear-armed Iran.

One wonders who Samuels is spending his time with, and thus who is telling him these things. Regardless, it's an astonishingly bad essay.

Condi Rice and Elizabeth Bumiller Drive Isaac Chotiner Shrill!

Isaac Chotiner raves:

Condi Media Watch: Today's edition comes courtesy of Elisabeth Bumiller, whose front page NYT story discusses Rice's "evolution" on the matter of U.S. engagement in Middle East peace talks. Bumiller's piece has all the hallmarks we've come to know and expect from gushing Condi profiles. First, an early sentence (which the author must know is grossly exaggerated) about Rice's committment to some particular cause:

Nearly seven tumultuous years later, Ms. Rice, as secretary of state, has led the Bush administration to a startling turnaround and is now thrusting the United States as forcefully as Mr. Clinton once did into the role of mediator between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Bumiller really believes this? Next, we have the supposed "causes" of Rice's views:

Ms. Rice’s thinking on the Middle East changed for several reasons, her aides said. She has been under increasing pressure to get involved in the peace negotiations from European and Arab leaders whose support she needs for the campaign of diplomatic and economic pressures on Iran. She considers it equally important, her aides said, to shore up the moderate leadership of Mr. Abbas, who is facing a sharp internal challenge from the more militant Hamas faction.

Then, the all-too-telling anecdote:

Ms. Rice, who had heralded the election as a symbol of the new stirrings of democracy in the Middle East, was so blindsided by the victory that she was startled when she saw a crawl of words on her television screen while exercising on her elliptical trainer the morning after the election: “In wake of Hamas victory, Palestinian cabinet resigns.”

“I thought, ‘Well, that’s not right,’” Ms. Rice recalled. When the crawl continued, she got off the elliptical trainer and called the State Department.

“I said, ‘What happened in the Palestinian elections?’” Ms. Rice recalled. “And they said, ‘Oh, Hamas won.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, Hamas won?’”

Oh dear. Finally,  the belated admission that the reasons behind Rice's "maturation" are very easily explained. 

Since then, Ms. Rice has made eight trips to the region, and her supporters say she remains determined against the odds. “She knows very well if she doesn’t do anything, she will be Iraq,” a European diplomat and a friend of hers said.

For the best/worst example of this sort of hagiography, be sure and check out David Samuels' profile from last year.

Paul Krugman on George W. Bush and Mark Halperin Sitting in a Tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G

Paul Krugman writes:

On coming across: Why I’m not a proper political journalist:: In his op-ed today, Mark Halperin describes George W. Bush during the 2000 campaign as follows:

He came across as a man of principle who did not lust for the White House; he was surrounded by disciplined loyalists who created a cheerful cult of personality about their candidate.

Meanwhile, I didn’t do the up-close-and-personal stuff; I looked at what he actually said about policy. And from my point of view he “came across” as someone who lied, systematically and consistently, about taxes and Social Security. I did notice the cult of personality — but it scared me:

This suggests a terrible prospect. Soon we may have a president who lost the popular vote, who won the electoral vote only after bitter controversy, who needs to act with unprecedented humility and discretion to avoid ripping the country apart. But he will have surrounded himself with obsequious courtiers.

But you see, I’m just a shrill Bush-basher; we should leave judgments about character up to the professionals who thought Bush was a bluff, honest guy you’d like to have a beer with.

Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Krugman R'lyeh Wagn'nagl Fhtagn!! Krugman Fhtagn!! KRUGMAN FHTAGN!!!!

---

One thing worthy of note. Carlyle Group CEO David Rubenstein's reaction to George W. Bush:

David Rubenstein: you know if you said to me, name 25 million people who would maybe be President of the United States, he wouldn't have been in that category...

That was the reaction of everybody not on Bush's payroll who has met Bush I have talked to--everybody except our elite Beltway press, that is.

CNN Has Driven Josh Marshall Shrill

He wants to close CNN down:

Talking Points Memo | Can We Just Close Down CNN?: Probably like a lot of people I was stunned at the amazingly lame and I'd say fairly offensive diamonds or pearls question that closed out last night's debate. I'd assumed they'd just given the last question to a complete dingbat. Seems CNN got the girl to ask that one rather than a question about Yucca Mountain. Just to be clear, I'm not above a few cutesy or fun questions. But it's a friggin' presidential debate. And don't ask the first competitive female candidate for president her jewelry preferences.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates Makes Stan Collender Shrill!

Stan Collender writes:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates Sells His Soul | Capital Gains and Games: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates yesterday became the latest member of the Bush cabinet to say something that can easily be proven wrong to support the White House. As reported in the Washington Post, Gates said that a delay in getting the funds requested by the president for Iraq and Afghanistan would soon force him to start laying off employees and ceasing operations at bases. Gates should know better, and should know that someone would quickly call him out on this. A 140-year old law, the Food and Forage Act (41 U.S.C. § 11), which was put in place during the Civil War, allows the Pentagon to spend what it needs even when no appropriation has been enacted. According to law firm Holland and Knight , which published a brief note about this back in 2001:

Under the Anti-Deficiency Act (31 U.S.C. § 1341), a contracting officer is prohibited from making or authorizing an expenditure or obligation exceeding an appropriation. An exception, however, is found at 41 U.S.C. § 11, The Food and Forage Act, which permits a DoD contracting officer to incur an obligation in excess of an appropriation for food, fuel, forage and related items necessary to meet current year needs.

Gates' phony prediction of dire consequences if Congress did not provide the money requested by the White House soon was nothing more than a PR ploy. It will accomplish nothing. What's really disappointing about this is that Gates up to now has mostly tried to stay above he fray. He has acted as if his personal credibility, which his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, squandered, was vitally important to his and the military's overall success. He even seemed to break with the White House on a number of issues and took harder stances than the administration wanted him to take. This statement shows that Gates has decided that his credibility is not as important as it used to be.

David Broder Drives Matthew Yglesias Even Shriller!

It is remarkable that the presses that print the Washington Post continue to run. One would think that nature itself would rebel against such unholiness:

Matthew Yglesias: "The American People": David Broder is a prominent newspaper columnist. He also obviously doesn't care for Bill Clinton. And that's what's going to happen now and again -- prominent columnist dislikes prominent politician. But for some reason instead of Broder saying that he, Broder, has some kind of problem with Clinton followed by an explanation of the nature of his beef -- an argument about Bill Clinton -- warns us darkly that "The former president's intervention" on the campaign trail in South Carolina raises "the prospect of a dual presidency" which "will test the tolerance of the American people far more severely than the possibility of the first female president -- or, for that matter, the first black president."

Broder doesn't go on to try to present any research or data to back up that claim. And why should he? After all, in this context "the American people" doesn't refer to the people who live in America, rather it means David Broder or, possibly, Broder plus some of his friends who, acting in their capacity as The Great and the Good, eschew the first person (plural or singular!) and write instead in the voice of "the American people." But the real American people like Bill Clinton, liked him throughout the impeachment farce, liked him throughout the alleged "Clinton fatigue" era, like him today, would have elected him to a third term, etc., etc. etc.

Most Americans Are Shrill!

55% of voters are members of the shrill, unbalanced cult that believes that George W. Bush has committed impeachable offenses:

Think Progress » Majority believe Bush has committed impeachable offenses: A new American Research Group poll finds that 55 percent of voters believe President Bush has “abused his powers” in a manner that rises “to the level of impeachable offenses under the Constitution,” yet just 34 percent believe he should actually be impeached. Fifty-two percent say that Vice President Cheney has similarly abused his powers, with 43 percent supporting impeachment.

Paul Berman Defies Description

The evil and sinister Atrios does something nobody should ever do: he forces us to read Paul Berman from 2004. Never beneath the dead, uncaring stars has so much mendacity, stupidity, disconnection from reality, and incompetence been compressed into such a small space. It is a dimension-warping singularity of horror:

Liberal hawks reconsider the Iraq war. - By Paul Berman: The war [in Iraq] was brought on... by the mass totalitarian movement of the Muslim world-—the totalitarian movement that, in its radical Islamist and Baathist wings, had fostered a cult of indiscriminate killing and suicide. The true strategic goal of such a war can only be to discourage and defeat that movement.... What would be a complete victory? The rise of liberal societies and liberal ideas. That is because the opposite of totalitarianism is liberalism. And so, our goal has had to be: to damage and discourage the Muslim totalitarians and to hearten and aid the Muslim liberals.

Are these strategic goals so impossible to see? On Sept. 10, 2001, the totalitarian wave in the Muslim world appeared to be at high tide... the most gruesome tyrannies were in power, in the name of sundry versions of the totalitarian ideology....

And today? The larger totalitarian movement in the Muslim world has been dealt two very powerful blows. The Taliban no longer rules Afghanistan and has been reduced to a guerrilla insurgency. The Baath in Iraq has likewise been reduced to a guerrilla insurgency. Some 45 million Afghanis and Iraqis, who had previously been confined to the lowest ranks of hell, are now engaged in a very tough fight—a fight in which there is at least a plausible hope of achieving a better society, animated by liberal values... liberal-minded Afghanis and Iraqis have been given a somewhat shaky boost... which can only encourage their fellow-thinkers in other parts of the Muslim world. Strategic goals? These are the strategic goals.

Why don't people understand these goals and accomplishments?... The blame, a lot of it, does fall on Bush, who... has given a very muddy picture of the reasons for war.... But some of the blame falls as well on the anti-Bush naifs who pretend not to hear when anyone speaks about the larger reasons and goals—the people who pretend that WMD and non-existent conspiracies were the only reasons for war and pretend that the only serious goals were the arrests of a couple of men, or the achieving of a magical utopia tomorrow, and pretend that if war has still not ended, we have gotten nowhere at all.... [T]he prospects of the totalitarian movement are looking a lot less healthy today than they did on Sept. 10, 2001 and the prospects of Muslim liberalism are looking up, somewhat.

Fred Kaplan writes, "Please, don't talk to me about the crack Polish division." I can't help myself—-I've got to talk about it. To see Polish troops taking part in the overthrow of Baathist tyranny is, in my eyes, hugely inspiring. No country on Earth has fought harder over the decades against totalitarianism than Poland, and the Poles are fighting now. Poland is not a rich country, and every society contributes what it can (if it chooses to contribute at all). But the Poles are contributing.... They are the enemies of totalitarianism. They... understand what so many people find difficult to understand: In Iraq as in Afghanistan, a liberal war is going on—-liberal in the philosophical sense, meaning liberty.

Andrew Sullivan Drives Ankush Shrill!

Ankush writes:

Ezra Klein: Sullivan on Obama: I should've taken Charles Kaiser's advice and skipped Andrew Sullivan's cover story for The Atlantic, about how Barack Obama is the second coming of Christ.  It is a stunningly bad piece of work -- reductive, overwrought, bloated, and, perhaps above all, patronizing. 

The setup doubles as an example of numerous overblown passages in the piece:

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

Needless to say, Sullivan can hardly provide actual proof for all of the steps in this argument, even if you substituted more modest adjectives for the grandiose ones he's used.  But proof, in a piece like this, is beside the point.  The Atlantic is giving us access to the mind of a serious thinker who is writing about Big Ideas.  The exercise needn't be marred by serious reporting or  self-reflection.

Nor, apparently, meaningful editing of any sort.  Setting aside the sheer length -- 6,300 frequently repetitive words -- the piece is fraught with ridiculous claims. Sullivan tells us, on the issue of health care, that "[b]etween the boogeyman of 'Big Government' and the alleged threat of the drug companies, the practical differences [between the political parties] are more matters of nuance than ideology. Yes, there are policy disagreements, but in the wake of the Bush administration, they are underwhelming."  This, as readers of this blog no doubt know, is not true, just like it's not true that "Democrats are merely favoring more cost controls on drug and insurance companies."  (There is, after all, the small matter of universal health care.)  Sullivan informs us that "[i]f Roe were to fall, the primary impact would be the end of a system more liberal than any in Europe in favor of one more in sync with the varied views that exist across this country."  He seems unaware that Congress has power to regulate abortion; overturning Roe does not simply turn the issue over to the states.  Sullivan tells us that "Islamist terror . . . could pose an existential danger to the West."  This is just silly.  Rest assured, everyone, the West will continue to exist.

Much of Sullivan's piece reads like a pitch from the candidate's camp itself: Obama, "and Obama alone," can move us beyond this unprecedentedly rancorous moment in our politics.  Sullivan's uncritical embrace of this argument is not particularly surprising.  As Kaiser puts it, "Barack is Andrew's latest infatuation. The fact that Sullivan's previous love objects have included Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, the war in Iraq, and unsafe sex makes this endorsement slightly less exciting for the rest of us." 

The more novel part of Sullivan's argument goes like this: 

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy.

...

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

It's tempting to ignore the ridiculously overblown language -- "first and foremost," "not a notch, but a logarithm," "close" to "the crudest but most effective weapon," " in ways no words can" -- but this is the argument.  Sullivan doesn't give us his own account of what it is that "fuels Islamist ideology" -- like so much else, one suspects he hasn't thought it through; the casual lumping together of disparate groups with disparate motivations is the first clue -- but it's not difficult to sketch simple rejoinders to some possible claims.  If they hate us because we're not fundamentalist Muslims, another Christian president, however brown-skinned, isn't going to do the trick; if they hate us because we support Israel, occupy parts of the Middle East, or otherwise do things they don't like, they might want to see some actual policy changes before they quit on the whole militancy thing at the first sight of a brown-skinned man.  This isn't to say that Obama's election wouldn't be a powerful indication of progress in America's racial politics, or that this wouldn't help us somewhat on the international stage, but we see here Sullivan's tendency to take a decent idea and magnify it to a preposterous scale.  (Hence, the end of AIDS.)

At bottom, however, Sullivan may simply be engaged in projection:

Earlier this fall, I attended an Obama speech in Washington on tax policy that underwhelmed on delivery; his address was wooden, stilted, even tedious. It was only after I left the hotel that it occurred to me that I’d just been bored on tax policy by a national black leader. That I should have been struck by this was born in my own racial stereotypes, of course. But it won me over.

Do his "racial stereotypes" involve non-white people being unable to talk about tax policy?  In any event, others with non-aesthetic concerns (even those Islamist ideologues) will look beyond Obama's face.  They may be interested, for instance, in his actual policies -- though they will need to turn to sources outside of Sullivan's piece to learn anything about them.

The remarkable thing here is that I'm an admirer of Obama's, so I'm hardly opposed to people writing about how much they like him.  But The Atlantic can do better than this -- much better than this.  I remain baffled as to why purportedly serious publications treat Sullivan with such high regard. 

The Economic Analyses of David Malpass Claim Another Victim

Barry Ritholtz is shrill:

The Big Picture | Quote of the Day: Malpass (WTF?) on the Dollar : In the WSJ Op-ed section today, David Malpass seems ti be having a hard time figuring out why the Greenback is in trouble.

He's our Quote of the Day:

Dollar weakness is neutralizing the positive effects of the Federal Reserve's interest-rate cuts. As the dollar spirals downward, weakened by Washington's indifference and market expectations of more rate cuts, liquidity drains from the U.S. into inflation hedges like gold and, in the case of entrepreneurship and risk-taking capital, to countries with strengthening currencies. This drain undercuts the growth impact of the Fed's recent rate cuts, complicating the recovery from the August credit-market turbulence. Question: What's harder to sell than a complex loan during a credit crunch? A dollar-denominated one.

No, no, no, no, no!

Its not the that Fed cuts are being neutalized by the weak dollar -- its the Fed cuts are CAUSING THE WEAK DOLLLAR.

(Yes, I am getting shrill)

Always Lowering the Level of the Debate, Aren't You Kevin?

Kevin Drum has decided to run a worst weblog post of all time contest:

The Washington Monthly: All-Time Wingnuttiest Blog Post Contest:

While the rest of the blogosphere concerns itself with the worthy task of choosing the all-time best blog posts, I'm keeping my focus where it belongs: on the all-time worst blog posts. And thanks to help from my commenters, plus commenters over at FDL and John Cole's place, we now have an official list of nominees.

A note on methodology: Several prose stylings that seem like they ought to be on the ballot missed out because intensive research by the PA staff determined that they weren't actually blog posts. "Objectively pro-terrorist" deserves recognition, for example, but it came from a Michael Kelly column, not a blog post. Ditto for "The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead — and may well mount a fifth column," which Andrew Sullivan wrote for the Sunday Times, not his blog. Or John Derbyshire's musings on women over the age of 20. And "Lucky Duckies" was a Wall Street Journal editorial. Since this contest is all about blog wingnuttery, these contenders were sadly but firmly disqualified....

All-Time Wingnuttiest Blog Post Contest...

Ann Althouse: "Let's take a closer look at those breasts."

Steven Den Beste (shortly before the Iraq war started): "It's the waiting that wears."

John Derbyshire (after the Virginia Tech shootings): "Where was the spirit of self-defense here?....It's not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons."

Ben Domenech: "Pachyderms in the Mist"

Kim du Toit: "The Pussification of the Western Male"

Pam "Atlas Shrugs" Geller: "My Sharia!"

Jonah Goldberg (before Katrina): "Attn: Superdome Residents....grow gills...."

Robert Hahn: "I will suggest that President Bush understands money better than any President we have ever had."

Hugh Hewitt: "I'm sitting in the Empire State Building...."

John Hinderaker: "It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius...."

Michelle Malkin: "The Defeatocrats Cheer"

Glenn Reynolds: "Maybe we should rise above the temptation to point out that claims of a 'quagmire' were wrong....Nah."

Lee Siegel: "The Origins of Blogofascism"

Bill Whittle (after Katrina): "Tribes"

Unfortunately, U.S.S. Clueless author Steven den Beste is attempting to rig the contest by cutting off access to his entry--whether in the hopes of winning or losing or even what "winning" and "losing" this contest really mean not being clear. But here is a flavor:

USS Clueless - The guiding philosphy behind the EU: Just what, exactly, is the European Union really supposed to be?... The answer is that the purpose of the European Union is to roll back the post-war experiment in western Europe with capitalist representative democracy, and to restore Europe to its rightful place at the center of the world's stage by displacing the US as the predominant power in the world. The driving motivation behind it is a religious belief, along with a nostalgia for past greatness, profound distrust of the masses, and resentment of American power and influence, as well as outright fear of what America might decide to do with its unprecedented position in the world....

Out of [American intervention in WWII and NATO], Western Europe got fifty years of freedom, peace and rising prosperity. I know of no case in history of a military occupation which was as benign and beneficial to the occupied nations. But there was a price to be paid. Europe got freedom, peace, prosperity, but also apathy, decadence and insignificance. It paid the price in a drastic reduction of power and prestige.... There is no better way to make a proud man hate you than to give him charity and assistance and for him to know that he must rely on it. He may be grateful for each individual act of kindness, but he will resent his dependency and hate you for constantly reminding him of his weakness....

Added to this was a secular religion called Marxism, which had strongly influenced European political thought for the previous hundred years and which remained powerful and persuasive for some, who clung to it with a fervor usually seen in the most die-hard fundamentalists of Christianity or Islam.... Extremist Muslims have come to hate the US not only because our way of life and our beliefs are nearly diametrically opposite to what their religion says is a virtuous life, but also because we're drastically more successful than they are. America is a living heresy; we live lives filled with sin, and somehow or other we seem to escape the punishment of Allah (though there's always hope for tomorrow if only they pray hard enough). There can, of course, be only one explanation: we're being protected by Satan. And thus opposition to the US is a holy war, because America is blasphemy just by existing.

And to orthodox Marxists, America is also blasphemy. Our capitalist system refuses to self-destruct the way Marx predicted it would. America found an answer to the problem Marx identified.... And so it is that European Socialists hate America for the same reason the Muslim extremists do: This isn't what The Prophet said would happen. We were promised that we would win!...

And here is Steven den Beste in the Wall Street Journal:*

From the Wall Street Journal editorial page: There's another year and a half in Mr. Bush's current term, and by the end of it [November 2006], [Iraq] will either be a complete shambles or else it will clearly be on the road to success, and I think it's unlikely to be a shambles.... [I]f there's anything you should know about Americans by now, it's that we're problem solvers.... We stuck with the occupations of Germany and Japan for 50 years. I feel confident we'll stick with this, too.

Much of the reputation we've gained in the world comes from how we act when we're not challenged. There's steel in us, too, but we don't show it much. It only really comes out in war, and when we've been at peace for several decades there's a tendency to think that we used to have that kind of steel, but that we don't any longer. That's wrong, and every generation the world learns that anew. Going into World War II, many in Europe said that Americans used to be willing to fight back in the days of Lincoln but had become decadent and soft. History proves otherwise, of course.

That steel is still there, it's just that we don't feel any need to show it when it isn't needed. But when the issues are sufficiently important to us, we'll still make major sacrifices. The memory of 9/11 runs deep. I'm becoming convinced that few in Europe truly understand just what that really meant to us, the anger and the hatred it raised. It's not the kind of thing we get over. We're not going to forget it. We haven't forgotten Pearl Harbor, either. That doesn't mean we consider Japan an enemy, but it does mean that we did what we needed to in order to make sure Japan would never do anything like that to us again. When we truly decide to solve a problem, we try to solve it permanently. And we're not going to forget 9/11. On some level or another, it's going to be a major political issue here for the next few decades, until we're convinced that the danger is gone. Arab extremism is no longer something that happens a long ways away and that we can ignore, so we aren't going to. It is their problem, but 9/11 made it ours. Now we'll solve it....

[T]he one thing we're not going to do is to surrender. We'll try to solve this as humanely as we can, but solve it we must, and I believe that this nation will do whatever it needs to in order to remove the danger facing it. If an American city gets nuked by a terrorist, things are going to get extremely ugly. So even America-haters in Europe had better hope that this works, because the alternative is much worse. (Which is a really good reason why they'd also better stop trying to make it fail.)

Right now the Democrats are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, in thrall to their extreme wing, and trying to peddle a message full of recriminations. But they'll soon realize that their message of hatred, panic and shame isn't selling to the majority of voters here, and they'll either fade into political insignificance for the next 20 years, or (far more likely) the idiots will get marginalized and more-practical voices will emerge. Within a year, the argument will no longer be about whether we should have gone in. It will be about what we should do next.

The Democrats won't have any influence until they actually look toward the future and start talking about what they think we actually should do. Bitching about what actually happened will get them headlines, but it isn't ultimately going to get them enough votes to win. And I think that they know it...

It's time to turn over the microphone to Daniel Davies:

D-squared Digest -- FOR bigger pies and shorter hours and AGAINST more or less everything else: [P]eople don't necessarily want a Smarter Stephen den Beste. Part of the joy is watching a man who knows nothing about anything except the innards of mobile phones trying to understand a complicated world around him with no sources of information other than the Internet. What people want is a Shorter Stephen den Beste; one that doesn't take about ten thousand words to get from A to halfway through the downstroke of B. So I'll be posting one-sentence summaries of posts on the USS Clueless, on a reasonably regular basis, until I get bored. Here's today's batch:

• I've never served in uniform.
• My dislike of the French is independent of any facts about the world.

Canadian Tax Cut Stupidity

Conservatives drive Stephen Gordon to shrillness:

Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: The federal government's proposed tax cuts are just as stupid as we'd feared: The federal government's proposed tax cuts are just as stupid as we'd feared

Sigh. The Conservatives set out an Economic Statement this afternoon, and it includes a measure to further reduce the Goods and Services Tax (GST) from 6% to 5%. From this, I infer that the Conservative government is willfully stupid:

* Reducing the GST is bad economics. Just ask anyone who has given any thought to the matter.
* Reducing the GST is bad - or at best, pointless - politics. Just ask voters.

Now, I can understand that the Conservatives are in the business of cutting taxes. But the intelligent way of implementing that agenda involves cutting stupid taxes and keeping (or even increasing) smart taxes. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the Conservative way of implementing this agenda. According to Table A.1 on this page, the GST cut accounts for over 60% of the reduction in taxes over the next five years. Stupid, stupid, et cetera.

Okay, yes, they are accelerating the previously-announced rate at which the federal government would be reducing corporate taxes (Table A.2 from the same page), and that's a good thing. But it's not enough to dispel the odour of ideologically-driven amateurism.

 

Shrill Laffering

This is relatively shrill, but not shrill enough:

Economist's View: A Convenient Lie: As soon as you read this from Pete Du Pont:

Inconvenient Tax Truths: Al Gore believes global warming is "an inconvenient truth." Here are some economic truths that America's liberal leadership finds too inconvenient to support. ... Tax rate reductions increase tax revenues. This truth has been proved at both state and federal levels, including by President Bush's 2003 tax cuts on income, capital gains and dividends. Those reductions have raised federal tax receipts by $785 billion.

There's no need to read any further, he's revealed himself (yet again) as a political hack. The saddest part is that some people actually believe these lies.

It's also too bad that under Rupert Murdoch the Wall Street Journal's editorial page has continued to print these lies to support an ideology, lies that helped to push through tax cuts that did not raise revenues by $785 billion or at all, but instead lowered revenues by hundreds of billions of dollars according to Congressional Budget Office estimates.

 

And Matthew Yglesias and Dave Roberts Are the Light-Bringers of the Shrill!

Matthew writes, apropos of French President Sarkozy's embrace of carbon taxes:

Matthew Yglesias: Sarkozy Hearts Carbon Tax: French President Nicholas Sarkozy calls for a carbon tax for France. Dave Roberts notes: "U.S. right-wingers like to use Sarkozy as a rhetorical bludgeon, showing that Europe is moving toward the U.S. rather than vice versa. I wonder if this will cause any of their little pea brains to short-circuit." Probably not. The capacity to sustain massive cognitive dissonance is part of the job.

Atrios Is God-Hero of the Shrill!

Atrios reminds us of one of Joe Klein's finest hours:

Eschaton: **Arab Spring:** Oh God I'd forgotten about this one.

One can only imagine the Republican wrath and utter ridicule--the Rush Limbaugh fulminations-—if, say, John Kerry had proposed a similar policy: Let's pin our Middle East hopes on the statesmanship of Hizballah and Hamas. But that is where the democratic idealism of the Bush Doctrine has led us. If the President turns out to be right—and let's hope he is—a century's worth of woolly-headed liberal dreamers will be vindicated. And he will surely deserve that woolliest of all peace prizes, the Nobel...

The Columnists of America Drive Reed Hundt Shrill!

Positively unearthly in its shrillness:

No I can't post the links | TPMCafe: Because I don't really want you to have to read these pieces in the opinion pages du jour: George Will's sentences amount to euthanasia by reading; David Broder's rhapsody about informed choice of doctors misses only the enormous point that you can't choose what you can't pay for; Tom Friedman's applause for hybrid taxis ought to be a condemnation of Detroit and not praise of a mayor who in any case has failed to do anything significant to green New York in terms of building materials and energy generation, while California is showing the real way forward. And the media's inability to report candidly what's really going on in Congress or agencies is reaching new depths.

I know about wireless broadband issues, by study and experience, and so I know Judy Chevalier's piece in the New York Times today is informed, analytically sound, and informative. What a startling contrast to the above. The question begged is:

Why don't all newspapers use folks like Professor Chevalier, a brilliant economist at the Yale School of Management? As Paul Krugman also demonstrates, there are in the academy, analytically brilliant, very well-prepared, and extraordinarily literate people who are able and willing to write opinion pieces to the length and timing and relevance standards of newspapers. Why should any publisher want misinformed, verbally dull, and dangerously ignorant people like Broder and Will to take the ink away from them? And no, this isn't a partisan point. Goodness knows, the conservative stance is endemic to most economists on many issues. But anyone should rather hear George Mason or Chicago economists on any topic rather than Broder or Will on their chosen themes.

Of course, Homer nodded occasionally and the academy can betray one. For instance, David Kennedy's astonishingly stupid attack on Paul Krugman makes me doubt whether the former's history of the Depression was accurate.

The Washington Post Drives Glenn Greenwald Shrill!

It is indeed a wonder that they can face themselves in the mirror every morning:

Glenn Greenwald - Political Blogs and Opinions - Salon: Fred Hiatt's concern over "costly litigation" for AT&T and Verizon: Of all the dumb and dishonest arguments in favor of telecom amnesty -- and there are many -- the dumbest and most dishonest is that it is unfair to subject telecoms to the "high costs" of defending against these lawsuits. It should come as no surprise, then, that this is the principal argument The Washington Post's Fred Hiatt advances today in his latest call for telecom amnesty:

As we have said, we do not believe that these companies should be held hostage to costly litigation in what is essentially a complaint about administration activities.

In 2005, the total revenue of Verizon -- from telephone services alone -- was $75 billion. ATT's total 2006 revenue was $63 billion. Whatever the "costs" of defending these lawsuits are, it is a minscule -- really undetectable -- amount to these companies. Whatever the telecoms' motives are in wanting amnesty for their lawbreaking, being relieved from "costly litigation" has nothing to do with it. Trite pseudo-populist rhetoric about the "high costs" of litigation might work when it comes to lawsuits against small businesses or individuals.... [T]elecom lawsuits could be "costly" if telecoms are found -- without any good faith basis -- to have broken the law and/or violated the constitutional rights of their customers. But to claim that telecoms like AT&T or Verizon -- whose revenues are measured in the tens of billions of dollars -- care in the slightest about "litigation costs" from a single set of lawsuits is just preposterous, really just a stupid thing to say. These telecoms have been participating in this "costly litigation" for the last two years and they seem to be managing...

Condi Rice Has Driven Somebody--I Am Not Sure Who--Shrill!

This is a classic of its kind:

Mid Wife To Our Times (Updated 21-10-07) | Stop The Spirit of Zossen 2.0: Cher Condi, recall, past her ‘Warrior Princess’ days, told us in 2006 that we are seeing the ‘birth pangs’ of a new Middle East. This was after she told us that politics from above could and would create a New Democratic Man/Woman in the region. All quietly forgotten today by her cheerleaders at a couple of think tanks and a few prominent blogs that thrive on gossip and factoids dropped like table scraps to them.

Like any good survivor, she now pretends she was always against Cheney and the Neocons. Yet if she is truly the World’s 4th Most Powerful Woman and can’t even persuade Tom Lantos to chill on a genocide resolution (and aren’t Neocons supposed to be in favor of declaring bold truths?), what is she good for? So many are now willing to set her up as the martyr who Stood Against Cheney...

Jonah Goldberg Drives Chet Scoville into Shrillness!

This is ugly: > Shakesville : First, you'll recall, Jonah Goldberg's unbook was to be entitled Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton, and was to have been released sometime during the late Middle Ages. >Then, he switched the date to December 2007, and re-titled it Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods. But there were two problems with this: one, Whole Foods is owned by a libertarian not a liberal, and two, Hegel's too hard for Jonah to read -- also, not a fascist of any description. But personally, I was kind of bummed that Jonah had dropped Mussolini from the subtitle, for reasons you'll see in a moment. >But now, the new release date is to be early next year, and the new new re-re-title is to be Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Well, he's dropped the "totalitarian temptation" thing, but now of course he faces a new problem. Even if you think Mussolini was a member of the "left" (and he wasn't), he was certainly and unambiguously never a member of the American left, or the American anything. But who cares? Mussolini's back in, which means I get to throw this in Goldberg's face repeatedly, just as I'd hoped to: >>Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposed to the doctrines of liberalism, both in the political and economic sphere. -- Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism >Let me encourage lots of people to do the same. >As an added bonus, you might want to look at the list of Amazon tags to the book that Cathie from Canada found, including: >>propaganda (37) missed deadlines (26) fairytales for simple people (24) wingnut welfare (23) unintentional comedy (20) banged out by howler monkeys (19) what a boat load of crap (17) attend to luciannes bunions (13) chickenhawk (12) libburluls are stoopit (6)... >Priceless.