Dog Days in Arkham!

Here in picturesque Arkham, Massachusetts:

the dog days have set in in earnest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

>

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

A Warning for New Members of the Crew Team

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

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

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

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

Neoconservative Eliot Cohen Is Really Shrill

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

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

Excerpts:

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

I did not know, but I might have guessed.

Another passage:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Shrill, Report to the Pentagon, Stat

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

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

Zbigniew Brzezinski Is Shriller than Ever!

Zbigniew Brzezinski is shriller than ever!

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

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

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

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

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

He reads Peggy Noonan.

His brain explodes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shrillness Vacation Report

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

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

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

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

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

Entire English Language To Join The Shrill?

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

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

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

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

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

John Kay Is Shrill!

Writing in the Financial Times, he calls the Bush administration "despicable":

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Columnists - John Kay: Pension 'crisis' helps create one : Like most advanced economies, America faces demographic problems. The numerous baby boomers, the generation born in the 25 years after the second world war, will soon retire. Their fewer children and grandchildren will have to bake their bread and nurse their illnesses. The US is relatively well placed to deal with these problems. Population imbalances are less severe than in Japan and most of Europe. And the budgetary implications are less acute: although America spends a lot on medical care, the retirement income the state provides is relatively low. Moreover, bipartisan reform in the 1980s put America's social security system on a robust footing. Contributions were increased to build up surpluses to meet the growth in retirement benefits. These surpluses will continue to accumulate until around 2018 and then, on current projections, will be run down over the following 25 years. Since longevity continues to increase and America's growing income inequality means that the contribution base is growing less rapidly than national income, it will be necessary to reform the system to ensure its viability in the second half of the 21st century. But the Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next 50 years the present system will receive contributions averaging 14.02 per cent of relevant income and pay out 14.29 per cent. So why does the second term Bush administration, which does not seem to care about the real and immediate budget deficit in its principal activities, regard the funding of social security as its most urgent economic problem? I have been poring over these figures wondering if, from a distance of several thousand miles, there is something I have missed. But there does not seem to be. The numbers are not controversial: the same ones are used by the people who say there is an urgent need for reform. The interesting question they raise is not: "What should be done about social security?" It is this: "Why is this minor and distant issue subject to such intense political attention?" There is a book on my shelves published in 1982, called The World Crisis in Social Security. I now feel slightly ashamed of my contribution to that volume. Not because of its content: my criticisms foreshadowed sensible reforms for Britain that were implemented soon after. Rather I feel ashamed for my youth and naivety and my failure to understand the game in which I was being asked to play. A retreat from public sector pension provision might create a large flow of money into the stock market. This prospect leaves financial institutions salivating. So it has always been easy to obtain funding for projects such as The World Crisis in Social Security and much of this funding has been channelled through America's rightwing think-tanks. Greed in the investment community is conjoined with the principled opposition of those for whom America's social security system, popular though it may be with voters, is the legacy of that detested socialist Franklin D. Roosevelt. Every pension system has weaknesses and there are always honest but simple scholars who can be encouraged to point them out. Hence my agreeable trip to Washington to debate "the world crisis in social security". I was joined by others who could tell of deficiencies in the pension systems of France, of Germany, and the public system of the US itself. After decades of this propaganda, it is not surprising that most people are convinced that there is indeed a world crisis in social security. It is like having a surveyor continually crawling over your house. Once every defect has been pointed out, repeatedly, even the most robust of occupiers will believe their home is on the point of collapse. The distasteful aspect of this campaign is not its effect on public debate. Politicians and policy analysts ought to be able to distinguish substance from puffery, and reality from misinformation, although there is a marked tendency for them to see only facts and figures to which they are ideologically predisposed. But the endless talk of crisis undermines the confidence of ordinary people in their security in old age and, most of all, in the ability of government to provide it. People who talk of the crisis in social security help create that very crisis. And, despicably, that is what some of these people intend.

Gary Farber Is Shrill!

So shrill that Dr. Mbogo needs to report to the Shoggoth Wing, stat, to deal with this exploding-head-case:

Amygdala: THE HEAD, IT DOTH EXPLODE. Sometimes all you need to do is just listen.

President Bush said the public's decision to reelect him was a ratification of his approach toward Iraq and that there was no reason to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in prewar planning or managing the violent aftermath.

This is because, boys and girls, elections are like magic beans. Once you have one, everything is magical and glowy and wonderful! All errors are magically wiped away, and everyone who committed any is either instantly killed and replaced by clone or made a member of the Cabinet. See, Bush secretly fired Rumsfeld and replaced him with an identical clone! Same for the other folks "staying on." Explains a lot, doesn't it? And it's a brilliant solution...

The Star-Tribune Is Shrill!

Fly, shrill horrors trapped in unholy madness, fly!

Editorial: Social Security/Blacks get more, not less, from it: Of all the lies -- let's call them by their right name -- that the Bush administration is spreading about Social Security, none is as vile as the canard Bush repeated last Tuesday, when he said, "African-American males die sooner than other males do, which means the [Social Security] system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people. And that needs to be fixed." That is an entirely phony assertion; it has been debunked by the Social Security Administration, by the Government Accountability Office and by other experts. Bush and those around him know that. For them to repeat what they know to be a blatant lie is despicable fear-mongering.

Bush didn't make up this phony line on his own; it comes from the Heritage Foundation, which a number of years ago did a study purporting to show that because African-Americans have a shorter life expectancy than whites, they get less in return for the taxes they pay into the Social Security system.

But when the Heritage study was examined by actuaries at the Social Security Administration and by the Government Accountability Office, serious methodological flaws and numerous bad assumptions were uncovered. For example:

• Heritage failed to factor in the progressivity of Social Security benefits; on a taxes-paid to benefits-received ratio, those with lower incomes get more back. Blacks tend to earn less than whites, and thus their Social Security benefits are larger in comparison to taxes they pay.

• Social Security is more than retirement benefits. It also includes survivor and disability benefits. Blacks benefit disproportionately from those programs. While blacks are 11 percent of the workforce, for example, they are 18 percent of those receiving disability benefits. Almost half the blacks receiving Social Security -- 47 percent -- are getting disability benefits or survivor benefits.

The Social Security actuaries found that Heritage had exaggerated substantially the amount blacks pay in Social Security taxes and low-balled the benefits they receive. "In fact," the actuaries said, "results from more careful research reflecting actual work histories for workers by race indicate that the non-white population actually enjoys the same or better expected rates of return from Social Security than for the white population."

The GAO reached the same conclusion. It said that, "In the aggregate, blacks and Hispanics have higher disability rates and lower lifetime earnings, and thus receive greater benefits relative to taxes [paid] than whites."

Andrew Sullivan Is Still Shrill

His shrillness has now spread to encompass his friends at National Review:

www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish: DENIAL, AGAIN: NRO's Denis Bowles says that the entire substance of the hundreds of cases of abuse and torture can be summarized thus:

Is there any substance to [Human Rights Watch's] complaints? Well, yes — you should not make terrorists stay up late listening to Ratt and you should not make Iraqi convicts get naked and then laugh at them. If you're an American soldier doing these kinds of things, you'll be punished, even as others also try to punish your fellow soldiers and your country.

The only word for this is denial. Please, Denis, read the reports. At least thirty inmates have died after "coercive techniques" in U.S. custody. The government itself has conceded that the U.S. has tortured five inmates to death. Hundreds more have been hospitalized or permanently physically scarred. Even if you radically restrict your analysis to the night shift in Abu Ghraib, the abuses far outstrip forcing people to listen to music or laughing at nakedness. What has happened to American conservatism when it is reduced to ridiculing genuine and important issues of human rights?

Turn it around: why would anyone ever think that torturing 30 people to death would disturb the National Review?

WaPo Goes WaCko

Harold Meyerson stared into the abyss, and discovered the abyss staring back at him. Today he's focusing on the mendacity and malevolence:

But when historians look back at the Bush presidency, they're more likely to note that what sets Bush apart is not the crises he managed but the crises he fabricated. The fabricated crisis is the hallmark of the Bush presidency. To attain goals that he had set for himself before he took office -- the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the privatization of Social Security -- he concocted crises where there were none.

...

In fact, Social Security is on a sounder footing now than it has been for most of its 70-year history. Without altering any of its particulars, its trustees say, it can pay full benefits straight through 2042. Over the next 75 years its shortfall will amount to just 0.7 percent of national income, according to the trustees, or 0.4 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That still amounts to a real chunk of change, but it pales alongside the 75-year cost of Bush's Medicare drug benefit, which is more than twice its size, or Bush's tax cuts if permanently extended, which would be nearly four times its size.

...

In short, Social Security is not facing a financial crisis at all. It is facing a need for some distinctly sub-cataclysmic adjustments over the next few decades that would increase its revenue and diminish its benefits.

Politically, however, Social Security is facing the gravest crisis it has ever known. For the first time in its history, it is confronted by a president, and just possibly by a working congressional majority, who are opposed to the program on ideological grounds, who view the New Deal as a repealable aberration in U.S. history, who would have voted against establishing the program had they been in Congress in 1935.

Frederick Kagan of the Weekly Standard Succumbs to Shrill Unholy Madness!

Writing from some strange Virtual Kishinev, Frederick Kagan succumbs to shrill unholy madness and denounces Donald Rumsfeld--the head of the cossacks--while still declaring his love for George W. Bush, the Little Father, Batiyushka, the friend of us all. Ah! If only the Czar knew what the cossacks were doing in his name! The Little Father would save us!

I don't know if there are enough free beds in the Shoggoth Wing to hold the entire Weekly Standard staff:

Fighting the Wrong War: [We] find fault with Rumsfeld precisely because we do support the president and the war.... Rumsfeld has much to answer for, as well. Claims that there are no serious problems with military policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, or with the equipment our soldiers have, or with the number of troops available, are childish and damaging to efforts to identify and solve real problems....

[T]the most serious criticism... that he has refused to expand the American military.... Rumsfeld's defenders assure us he is not responsible. Only Congress can approve an increase in military end-strength; Rumsfeld has never opposed increasing the armed forces; more troops in Iraq wouldn't help anyway. These are the arguments deployed in behalf of the secretary of defense... they are evasions.... In no sense can Rumsfeld claim to have rushed aid to the Army in any way that is helpful in the current crisis. He has, in fact, consistently and vociferously opposed congressional attempts to offer such aid.... He has argued consistently that it would be better to "rearrange" the active and reserve components of the Army, and he has argued for increasing use of civilian contractors to free up soldiers for combat duties....

Congress has not been the problem here. Nor is it fair to blame Clinton entirely for this problem. Clinton downsized the military excessively, to be sure, and left an Army obviously too small for the missions it faced. But Rumsfeld has been in office for four years....

With more troops in Iraq during and immediately after the war, we would have been able to do the following things that we did not do: * Capture or kill thousands of Iraqi soldiers who were at that time still concentrated in combat units and had not yet melted back into the countryside with their weapons and their skills. * Guard the scores of enormous ammunition dumps from which the insurgents have drawn the vast majority of their weapons, ammunition, and explosives. * Secure critical oil and electrical infrastructure that the insurgents subsequently attacked, setting back the economic and political recovery of Iraq. * Prevent the development of insurgent safe havens in Najaf and Falluja, or at least disrupt them at a much earlier stage of formation. * Work to interdict the infiltration of foreign fighters across Iraq's borders.

If the U.S. Army had begun expanding in 2001, we would have been able to: * Establish reasonable rotation plans for our soldiers that did not require repeatedly extending tours of duty beyond one year. * Avoid the need to activate reservists involuntarily. * Dramatically reduce the frequency with which soldiers return from one year-long tour only to be sent immediately on another. * Let the troops that would still have been overstrained know that help really was on the way.

The U.S. military did not do these things because of Rumsfeld's choices.... [I]n no previous American war has the chief of the military administration refused to focus on the war at hand, preferring programs that could not help soldiers then in the fight to survive and win.... Rumsfeld's attitude has already led to a series of mistakes that have made a difficult situation more difficult. It has put the administration on the defensive about its conduct of a policy that is vital to America's national interest. It has distracted attention from the problem of winning the current war--our most important priority today bar none. These problems don't result from the liberal media or the antiwar crowd making a ruckus about nothing. They result from Rumsfeld's stubborn adherence to a wrongheaded policy. Surely, with the election safely over, there is no longer any need to protect the architect of these mistakes.

We must admit that the prognosis for Frederick Kagan is poor. Should he ever realize that what he is attacking are not *Rumsfeld's* but *Bush's* policies, he will never recover.

Raise Your Hand If You Didn't Expect Another Former Bush Administration Official To Write A Bitter Screed?

Shocked, Shocked! Christine Todd Whitman has the paperwork, we await her application to the order.

It's the Joint Chiefs of Shrill!

The Washington Post reports that the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and 11 other high ranking officers have been driven to sheer unholy madness by the possible appointment of an Attorney General who writes legal justifications for the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces sending our troops abroad to make "ass pyramids".

"Today, it is clear that these operations have fostered greater animosity toward the United States, undermined our intelligence gathering efforts and added to the risks facing our troops serving around the world," the officers wrote, referring to the Bush administration's detention and interrogation policies.

Although it stops short of directly opposing Gonzales's nomination, the three-page letter contains sharp criticism of his decisions related to military legal issues and argues that he is "on the wrong side of history."

"Repeatedly in our past, the United States has confronted foes that, at the time they emerged, posed threats of a scope or nature unlike any we had previously faced," the letter reads. "But we have been far more steadfast in the past in keeping faith with our national commitment to the rule of law."

Lew Rockwell is Shrill, and not just about Capitol Hill

Lew Rockwell takes time off from keeping 747's from falling apart in flight to point out that the emperor isn't the only one who is naked:
The Reality of Red-State Fascism

A positive agenda of liberty is the only way we might have been spared the blizzard of government controls that were fastened on this country after Bush used the events of 9-11 to increase central planning, invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and otherwise bring a form of statism to America that makes Clinton look laissez-faire by comparison. The Bush administration has not only faced no resistance from the bourgeoisie. it has received cheers. And they are not only cheering Bush's reelection; they have embraced tyrannical control of society as a means toward accomplishing their anti-leftist ends.

After September 11, even those whose ostensible purpose in life is to advocate less government changed their minds. Even after it was clear that 9-11 would be used as the biggest pretense for the expansion of government since the stock market crash of 1929, the Cato Institute said that libertarianism had to change its entire focus: "Libertarians usually enter public debates to call for restrictions on government activity. In the wake of September 11, we have all been reminded of the real purpose of government: to protect our life, liberty, and property from violence. This would be a good time for the federal government to do its job with vigor and determination."

The vigor and determination of the Bush administration has brought about a profound cultural change, so that the very people who once proclaimed hated of government now advocate its use against dissidents of all sorts, especially against those who would dare call for curbs in the totalitarian bureaucracy of the military, or suggest that Bush is something less than infallible in his foreign-policy decisions.

Yet More People Approach Shrillness...

Ex-CEA Chief Economist Andrew Samwick has accepted a visiting appointment this spring at Miskatonic University in picturesque Arkham, Massachusetts. Here he writes in theWall Street Journal:

WSJ.com - The Economic Crystal Ball: Cloudy, or Clearing?: My biggest question about economic policy in 2005 is whether the federal government will make tangible progress in putting its fiscal house in order. For example, if we are in a cyclical upturn, then why are our tax and spending policies such that we are running budget deficits (even including the Social Security surplus) in excess of $400 billion? Why have we settled for a rather timid goal of merely cutting that budget deficit in half over five years? Leaving aside the longer-term solvency issues of Social Security and especially Medicare for the moment, if the president and Congress cannot balance the budget with six quarters of growth at a 4.4% annual rate and steady growth in the economic forecast, then I will be considerably less optimistic next year that price changes will be mild and that economic growth will continue....

Cutting taxes isn't the rational way to make the government smaller, the one true purpose of a Republican administration's fiscal agenda. The way to do that is to reduce government spending so that tax rates can subsequently be lowered with the budget in balance over the business cycle. We are nowhere close to that scenario, and so discussions in Washington policy circles of yet more tax cuts are particularly unhelpful. Taxes may be "bad," but long-term deficits are surely much worse. The president needs to keep some of his tax cuts, rescind or sunset the others, rationalize the alternative minimum tax, and then move on to entitlement reform of Social Security and Medicare, which remain the long-term fiscal challenges....