Update: Some Cousins Ahead Of The Game

There is at least one cousin of Bush that has already been convinced to vote for Kerry. Ninth cousin twice removed, in fact.

Blood Runs Thicker Than Water, But It Can Still Run

Bush Relatives for Kerry:

As the election approaches, we feel it is our responsibility to speak out about why we are voting for John Kerry, and to do our small part to help America heal from the sickness it has suffered since George Bush was appointed President in 2000. We invite you to read our stories, and please, don't vote for our cousin!

Updated Robertson Shrillness Watch, With Special Omniscient Guest

As long time Order-watchers will recall, Pat Robertson is ineligible for the Order because he was not driven insane by the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, or simple disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration. He was mad back when George W. Bush was sniffing apostasy.

However, that doesn't prevent Robertson from being shrill on his own time. What we find most interesting is that Robertson claims that the Lord almighty is also shrill. Given that the Lord was not mad back when George W. Bush was sniffing apostasy, this would indicate that He would be eligible for the Order. Frankly, the concept of the Almighty being driven mad for any reason - much less the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, and simple disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration - scares us quite a lot. And we don't scare easily.

Robertson, in an interview with CNN that aired Tuesday night, said God had told him the war would be messy and a disaster. When he met with Bush in Nashville, Tenn., before the war Bush did not listen to his advice, Robertson said, and believed Saddam Hussein was an evil tyrant who needed to be removed.

'He was just sitting there, like, 'I'm on top of the world,' and I warned him about this war,' Robertson said.

'I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, 'Mr. President, you better prepare the American people for casualties.' 'Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties.' 'Well,' I said, 'it's the way it's going to be.' And so, it was messy. The Lord told me it was going to be, A, a disaster and, B, messy.'"

Spy Novel Author John Le Carré Is Shrill

Perhaps his British nationality makes him biased, but from one empire to another, Le Carré is shrill:

Maybe there's one good reason — just one — for reelecting George W. Bush, and that's to force him to live with the consequences of his appalling actions and answer for his own lies, rather than wish the job on a Democrat who would then get blamed for his predecessor's follies.

Probably no American president in history has been so universally hated abroad as Bush: for his bullying unilateralism, his dismissal of international treaties, his reckless indifference to the aspirations of other nations and cultures, his contempt for institutions of world government, and above all for misusing the cause of anti-terrorism in order to unleash an illegal war — and now anarchy — upon a country that like too many others around the world was suffering under a hideous dictatorship but had no hand in the events of 9/11, no weapons of mass destruction and no record of terrorism except as an ally of the United States in a dirty war against Iran.

Is your president a great war leader because he allowed himself to be manipulated by a handful of deluded ideologues? Is Tony Blair, my prime minister, a great war leader because he committed Britain's troops, foreign policy and domestic security to the same harebrained adventure?

You are voting in November. We will vote next year. Yet the outcome in both countries will in large part depend on the same question: How long can the lies last now that the truth has finally been told? The Iraq war was planned long before 9/11. Osama bin Laden provided the excuse. Iraq paid the price. American kids paid the price. British kids paid the price. Our politicians lied to us.

While Bush was waging his father's war at your expense, he was also ruining your country. He made your rich richer and your poor and unemployed more numerous. He robbed your war veterans of their due and reduced your children's access to education. And he deprived more Americans than ever before of healthcare.

Now he's busy cooking the books, burying deficits and calling in contingency funds to fight a war that his advisors promised him he could light and put out like a candle.

Meanwhile, your Patriot Act has swept aside constitutional and civil liberties that took brave Americans 200 years to secure and were once the envy of a world that now looks on in horror, not just at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib but at what you are doing to yourselves.

But please don't feel isolated from the Europe you twice saved. Give us back the America we loved, and your friends will be waiting for you. Here in Britain, for as long as we have Tony Blair singing the same lies as George W. Bush, your nightmares will be ours.

While The Order of course welcomes citizens from all corners of the Earth, there is a certian special quality to the withering critique of the Brits. Glad to have you aboard, brother Le Carré.

Brett Marston Is Shrill

He reads the Krugmanomicon and... Actually, he doesn't. He reads Foreign Affairs. But this month Foreign Affairs is shriller than the Krugmanomicon:

Brett Marston: A GOOD WAY TO SPEND 9 BUCKS THIS MONTH (13 IN CANADA): I cannot believe that anyone still thinks that this President's security policies are a reason to reelect him. One could actually make an argument that this President's reelection bid has itself made the country less safer, to the extent that he has tried to argue that the war in Iraq will allow us to fight "the terrorists" abroad "so that we don't have to fight them at home." Talk about inducing a dangerous complacency...

Another Former Republican Senator Is Shrill

Marlow Cook, ex-Republican Senator from Kentucky, is shrill:

'Frightened to death' of Bush: I shall cast my vote for John Kerry come Nov 2. I have been, and will continue to be, a Republican. But when we as a party send the wrong person to the White House, then it is our responsibility to send him home if our nation suffers as a result of his actions. I fall in the category of good conservative thinkers, like George F. Will, for instance, who wrote: "This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and having thought, to have second thoughts."

I say, well done George Will, or, even better, from the mouth of the numero uno of conservatives, William F. Buckley Jr.: "If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war."

First, let's talk about George Bush's moral standards.

In 2000, to defeat Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. — a man who was shot down in Vietnam and imprisoned for over five years — they used Carl Rove's "East Texas special." They started the rumor that he was gay, saying he had spent too much time in the Hanoi Hilton. They said he was crazy. They said his wife was on drugs. Then, to top it off, they spread pictures of his adopted daughter, who was born in Bangladesh and thus dark skinned, to the sons and daughters of the Confederacy in rural South Carolina.

To show he was not just picking on Republicans, he went after Sen. Max Cleland from Georgia, a Democrat seeking re-election. Bush henchmen said he wasn't patriotic because Cleland did not agree 100 percent on how to handle homeland security. They published his picture along with Cuba's Castro, questioning Cleland's patriotism and commitment to America's security. Never mind that his Republican challenger was a Vietnam deferment case and Cleland, who had served in Vietnam, came home in a wheel chair having lost three limbs fighting for his country. Anyone who wants to win an election and control of the legislative body that badly has no moral character at all.

We know his father got him in the Texas Air National Guard so he would not have to go to Vietnam. The religious right can have him with those moral standards. We also have Vice President Dick Cheney, who deferred his way out of Vietnam because, as he says, he "had more important things to do."...

The Washington Post Editorial Page Is Shrill!

For four years the Washington Post editorial page has averted its gaze to avoid seeing and has plugged its ears to avoid hearing the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, and sheer disconnection from reality of George W. Bush and his administration. But now the dam has broken and THEY ARE SHRILL!!!!

Mr. Kerry on Prisoners (washingtonpost.com): In a statement drawn up in response to our questions, the Democratic nominee declares that "a Kerry administration will apply the Geneva Conventions to all battlefield combatants captured in the war on terror." The result is an important new distinction between the presidential candidates. In our view, Mr. Bush's decision in February 2002 to set aside the Geneva Conventions was one of the most damaging mistakes of his presidency. It led directly to the imprisonment of hundreds of foreigners at Guantanamo Bay without any legal process, until the Supreme Court intervened earlier this year. Mr. Bush's decision also led to the sanction by senior administration officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, of harsh interrogation techniques that are illegal under the Geneva Conventions. As several official investigations have found, these techniques soon "migrated" from Guantanamo to U.S. field units in Iraq and Afghanistan, leading to hundreds of cases of torture, homicide and other abuse, and a shameful stain on the international reputation of the United States.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld still refuse to acknowledge the terrible consequences of the decisions they made, much less correct their mistakes. In a letter published on this page today, Mr. Rumsfeld's spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, once again claims that no policy or decision made by a senior official had anything to do with the abuses at Abu Ghraib. To bolster his case, he selectively cites official investigations that have, in fact, proven the opposite. For example, Gen. Paul J. Kern, whom Mr. Di Rita quotes, testified to Congress last month that techniques approved by Mr. Rumsfeld in December 2002 -- including nudity, painful stress positions and the use of dogs to incite fear -- "found their way into documentation that we found in Abu Ghraib." The Schlesinger commission, also cited by Mr. Di Rita, determined that Iraq commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez approved similar practices, "using reasoning from the President's memorandum" of 2002. It also concluded, "There is both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels" for the crimes at Abu Ghraib.

Without any change in policy, there is every reason to expect that a second Bush term would produce more scandals like Abu Ghraib. As the history of the past three years demonstrates, such abuses result when the rule of law is set aside. That's why we welcome Mr. Kerry's pledge to resume full U.S. compliance with the Geneva Conventions. Such compliance does not prevent a U.S. president from holding enemy combatants indefinitely or from denying them prisoner-of-war status. It does not prevent American forces from conducting interrogations. But it does ensure that the United States will operate according to the same international standards that it wishes to see applied to its own service members and citizens. "We will abide by a principle long enshrined in our military manuals," says the Kerry statement: "That America does not treat prisoners in ways we would consider immoral and illegal if perpetrated by the enemy on Americans." That strikes us as a policy that is both more in keeping with American standards, and more likely to be successful in practice, than that pursued with such disastrous results by Mr. Bush.

What's The Opposite of "Shrill" in Farsi?

Guess who hasn't been driven to shrill unholy madness by the mendancity, malevolence, incompetence, and sheer disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration?

TEHRAN, Iran - The head of Iran's security council said Tuesday that the re-election of President Bush (news - web sites) was in Tehran's best interests, despite the administration's axis of evil label, accusations that Iran harbors al-Qaida terrorists and threats of sanctions over the country's nuclear ambitions.

Historically, Democrats have harmed Iran more than Republicans, said Hasan Rowhani, head of the Supreme National Security Council, Iran's top security decision-making body.

"We haven't seen anything good from Democrats," Rowhani told state-run television in remarks that, for the first time in recent decades, saw Iran openly supporting one U.S. presidential candidate over another.

We've heard that the mullahs take time out from building nuclear bombs at least five times a day in order to walk outside and chant "four more years! four more years!," but we don't believe it.

Former Senator Bob Smith (R-NH) Gets Shrill About The GOP

Goodness, Republican Bob Smith sounds mighty shrill as suggests that GOP leaders should check the operation of their moral compass:

This is a far cry from the party of Lincoln that proudly and correctly stood on principle to outlaw slavery. It is a far cry from the party of great and principled statesmen like Mel Thomson, Norris Cotton, Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt. What a contrast between those great Republicans and current party leaders, who refuse to speak out against this despicable action by pathetic political hacks.

James Tobin, President Bush's 2004 New England campaign chairman and the Northeast political director of the Republican Senatorial Committee in 2002, said, "These allegations date back to years and have absolutely nothing to do with the present campaign."

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

Mr. Tobin, these allegations have everything to do with the present campaign because the people must feel confident that the 2002 election fraud will not be repeated. The best way to restore confidence is for all those involved to tell the truth now.

New Hampshire Democrat Party Chair Kathy Sullivan said, "The public should know Tobin's role in this, along with the roles of any other high-level GOP officials."

Kathy and I have not agreed very often, but she is absolutely correct. We need the truth now to restore confidence in the coming election. She has a right to be angry. Can you imagine the Republican outrage if the Democrats had been guilty of similar conduct? Does a party that refuses to tell the truth before Election Day deserve our vote on election day?

Yet for the first time in New Hampshire history, there is a cloud of suspicion over the election of a U.S. senator. What is the recourse for Gov. Shaheen if the election was unfair? She can sue, complain and even watch the guilty admit what they did, but she still is not a senator. If she lost fair and square, the issue is over. If she lost because of fraud, then the truth must set us free for fair elections in 2004 and beyond.

It is times like this, as our ranks swell at ever-increasing rates, that we must be thankful to The Elders who, with great foresight, predicted these events and made sure that there was enough cheese dip for everone at our weekly bowling tournament. And with more red shirts (no pun intended) walking in the door every day, these friendly games are getting a LOT more competitve. (For example, the blue shirts no longer spot their opponents five shots of tequilla.)

Insiders Suggest Suppressed CIA Report is Shrill

Hmmm, "an exhaustive 17-month investigation by an 11-member [CIA] team" is being suppressed by the Bush administration? What shrill contents lurk therein?

It is shocking: The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. Although the report by the inspector general's office of the CIA was completed in June, it has not been made available to the congressional intelligence committees that mandated the study almost two years ago.

"It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that "the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward."

When I asked about the report, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, said she and committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) sent a letter 14 days ago asking for it to be delivered. "We believe that the CIA has been told not to distribute the report," she said. "We are very concerned."

"What all the other reports on 9/11 did not do is point the finger at individuals, and give the how and what of their responsibility. This report does that," said the intelligence official. "The report found very senior-level officials responsible."

By law, the only legitimate reason the CIA director has for holding back such a report is national security. Yet neither Goss nor McLaughlin has invoked national security as an explanation for not delivering the report to Congress.

"It surely does not involve issues of national security," said the intelligence official.

"The agency directorate is basically sitting on the report until after the election," the official continued. "No previous director of CIA has ever tried to stop the inspector general from releasing a report to the Congress, in this case a report requested by Congress."

It's kind of like hearing that a new Harry Potter novel is to be released, but only after you are scheduled to be blinded by having red-hot pokers jammed into your eye sockets.

Well, Duh...Of Course Al Gore Is Shrill

But his speech is noteworthy if only for the fact that he directly addresses the issue of the politicizing of religion by the Bush administration:

"The essential cruelty of Bush's game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals and then cloaks them with a phony moral authority, thus misleading many Americans ... who have a deep and genuine desire to do good in the world," Gore said.

"And in the process, he convinces them to lend unquestioning support for proposals that actually hurt their families and their communities," he said.

"Truly, President Bush has stolen the symbolism and body language of religion and used it to disguise the most radical effort in American history to take what rightfully belongs to the American people and give as much of it as possible to the already wealthy and privileged," he said.

The Order humbly implores participants in faith-based rallies to ignore the messenger and pause to consider these words at face value, if only for a few moments.

Howard Kurtz Is Shrill!

After four years of being in the tank for the Bush administration, Howard Kurtz remembers that he was once a journalist and joins the shrill:

washingtonpost.com: Media Notes Extra: ...Bush keeps charging that Kerry is pushing a "government-run" health care plan, even though nearly all analysts and journalists have concluded that it builds on the existing system of private insurance. That would seem a more fundamental misrepresentation. (Bush repeated the charge in the Arizona debate, and when Kerry cited network reports challenging the claim, the president questioned whether "it's credible to quote leading news organizations.")

Charges are often technically true but still misleading. One Bush ad said Kerry supported a 50-cent gas tax under which "the average family would pay $657 more a year." Kerry briefly expressed support for such a tax in 1994 but changed his mind and never introduced or voted for such a bill.

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank was the lead writer on a May 31 story (to which this reporter made a minor contribution) that recited a litany of Bush charges, saying they "were all tough, serious -- and wrong, or at least highly misleading."

The Oct. 8 Times piece by Nagourney and Richard Stevenson attributed to "several analysts" the idea that "Mr. Bush pushed the limits of subjective interpretation and offered exaggerated or what some Democrats said were distorted accounts of Mr. Kerry's positions on health care, tax cuts, the Iraq war and foreign policy."...

Whatever their orientation, journalists are the last line of defense against public deception. If they fail to challenge distortions by politicians, they might as well join the stenography pool...

Which is where Kurtz has been for the past four years.

Nevertheless, we welcome Howard Kurtz to the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill

Steve Lovelady of CJR Campaign Desk Is Shrill

Steve Lovelady reports on the Bush administration's assertion of a right to lie:

CJR Campaign Desk: Archives:Stunned by the efforts of fact-check teams and "truth squads" in the press who are belatedly holding the claims and counterclaims of the candidates up to scrutiny, the Bush campaign has struck back.

In an extraordinary response to these recent stories, Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt spoke thusly:

"The Bush campaign should be able to make an argument without having it reflexively dismissed as distorted or inaccurate by the biggest newspapers in the country."

Got that?

The Bush campaign evidently grew so accustomed to a campaign press that seldom fact-checked much of anything between March and September that it is downright indignant anyone would have the temerity to muse, "Gee, I wonder if that's right?" and then have the industry to actually ascertain the veracity of the claims and assertions contained in stump speeches and debate transcripts.

We wouldn't believe it if we hadn't seen it with our own eyes, but there it is in black-and-white.

Frankly, as a relatively lonely voice which has since January been urging the campaign press (largely to no avail) to get off its butt and measure charges against known fact, Campaign Desk thinks this is a case of the boys and girls on the bus reaping what they have sown. If you consistently let someone play fast and loose with the facts, you shouldn't be surprised if that someone yelps in protest when you finally ask that most elementary question of all -- "Is he telling the truth? -- and then answer it.

As Kurtz himself concludes, "Whatever their [political] orientation, journalists are the last line of defense against public deception. If they fail to challenge distortions by politicians, they might as well join the stenography pool."

Gee, where have we heard that before?

Knight Ridder Is Shrill

You just have to love the prophetic quality of military PowerPoint presentations:

WASHINGTON - In March 2003, days before the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, American war planners and intelligence officials met at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina to review the Bush administration's plans to oust Saddam Hussein and implant democracy in Iraq.

Near the end of his presentation, an Army lieutenant colonel who was giving a briefing showed a slide describing the Pentagon's plans for rebuilding Iraq after the war, known in the planners' parlance as Phase 4-C. He was uncomfortable with his material - and for good reason.

The slide said: "To Be Provided."

A Knight Ridder review of the administration's Iraq policy and decisions has found that it invaded Iraq without a comprehensive plan in place to secure and rebuild the country. The administration also failed to provide some 100,000 additional U.S. troops that American military commanders originally wanted to help restore order and reconstruct a country shattered by war, a brutal dictatorship and economic sanctions.

Wheeeee!

More Cato Shrillness?

We apparently blacked out while installing Windows XP Service Pack 2, because we just now noticed a Sep 10 piece by Cato Institute senior fellow Doug Bandow admitting that he too has been driven to shrill unholy madness by the mendancity, malevolence, incompetence, and sheer disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration:

Why conservatives must not vote for Bush

Yet Bush's foreign policy record is as bad as his domestic scorecard. The administration correctly targeted the Taliban in Afghanistan, but quickly neglected that nation, which is in danger of falling into chaos. The Taliban is resurgent, violence has flared, drug production has burgeoned and elections have been postponed.

Iraq, already in chaos, is no conservative triumph. The endeavor is social engineering on a grand scale, a war of choice launched on erroneous grounds that has turned into a disastrously expensive neocolonial burden.Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, contrary to administration claims, and no operational relationship with al-Qaida, contrary to administration insinuations. U.S. officials bungled the occupation, misjudging everything from the financial cost to the troop requirements.

Particularly shocking is the administration's ineptitude with regard to Iraq. Fareed Zakaria writes in Newsweek, "On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq -- troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani -- Washington's assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world."

The Shrill From Out Of Space

From beyond time and space comes critique of what passes for shrilldom in another dimension, a dimension where Al Gore won the 2000 election and people are writing fantastic stories about what would have happened if Bush had won instead. Will Shetterly breaks through the interdimensional barrier to provide a strong reality check:

I think the hardest part of Patrick's scenario for me is this: He imagines a Bush who reverses Clinton's record and creates the greatest deficit in history, whose wars in Afghanistan and Iraq result in two unstable countries, who adds a million people to the unemployment rolls and millions more to the number without health care, and with all this, the election between Bush and his Democratic opponent is up for grabs?

Patrick, I love you, man, but you've been reading too much science fiction.

Tough break for Will, he crossed the wrong barrier. The stories his parents whispered to him growing up, tall tales meant to frighten, to keep him on the right path, to keep from knowing things man was not meant to know... they're all true.

Phil Carter Enters a Higher Dimension of Shrillness!

The Blackhorse Regiment is being sent to Iraq. This means that the army is in much more trouble than I had thought. And it drives Phil Carer--who knows whereof he speaks--beyond shrillness:

INTEL DUMP - : The Los Angeles Times provides a long report in Sunday's paper on the deployment of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, dubbed "Blackhorse" for the stallion on its shoulder patch, to Iraq for a year of combat duty. The regiment has long served as as the opposing force, or "OPFOR", for units from other installations coming to train at the Army's National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. Now, with the Army stretched to practically its breaking point over the Iraq and Afghanistan missions, the Army has turned to the Blackhorse regiment for help.

For years, The Box has been a stage for the Army's elite "opposition force" — soldiers expert at assuming the roles of enemy fighters, be they the Taliban or Iraqi insurgents. Their mission is to toughen new soldiers with elaborate simulations — staging sniper fire, riots, suicide car bombings and potentially dangerous culture clashes.

Staging such scenes has long been the work of the fabled 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, or Black Horse Regiment. But starting next month, the 3,500-member unit will begin shipping out to Iraq from the Ft. Irwin National Training Center, near Barstow. Deployments are nothing new in the Army, of course, but there is a special sense of urgency about dispatching the Black Horse to tackle situations that it has trained roughly 500,000 soldiers to handle since 1994. Now the bombs and bullets they encounter will be all too real.

"No one ever thought the Black Horse would be taken out of the National Training Center; they are just too valuable here," said Maj. John Clearwater. "But the Army is stretched too thin, and Iraq is a big mission."

The article misses the most important point: deploying the OPFOR is like eating your seed corn. This unit is responsible for training other units and raising their level of expertise and combat readiness. The 11th ACR is being replaced by a National Guard unit. That's like replacing the Dodgers with a high school baseball team. Sure, they can both play baseball and wear the uniform — but one is a whole lot more proficient and experienced at its job. The OPFOR has a reputation as a tough enemy, and that's a good thing because it forces units training at the NTC to become better themselves. By replacing this unit with National Guard troops, the Army has hurt its ability to produce good units for Iraq in the future. Suffice to say, National Guard and active units that go through Fort Irwin aren't going to get the same tough experience they would have with the Blackhorse regiment as OPFOR — and that means they'll be less ready for combat when they get to Iraq. This is a desperation measure, and I think the Army will come to regret it.

Understanding Relativistic Shrillness

From the lost works of Albert Einstein comes a treatise on relativistic shrillness. The major concept behind the special relativity of shrillness is that shrillness is always relative to the observer. A side effect of this is that extreme relative mismatches in shrillness can lead to apparent alterations in other physical properties such as mass, length, marginal tax rate or likelyhood of voting before running naked into the woods shrieking.

Similarly, general relativity of shrillness predictes that the political landscape is not flat, but is curved and generally affected by the shrillness of things around it. This curvature of the political landscape explains pundit duality (that Bill O'Reilly is both a pervert and a jerk) by showing that the alternating opinions of some pundits (e.g. Tom Friedman) are merely a factor of their movement across the curvature of an apparently flat plane of civic discourse.

The mathematics behind this are pretty complicated, but for a simple example of what happens when someone is accelerated to near infinite shrillness, we present Matthew Yglesias:

I never supported Bush and always hoped he would lose in 2004 since I thought his policies were misguided, but many people seemed to me at the time to have lost all sense of perspective about who the really threatening enemies were. Suskind's article along with other pieces of evidence of what one might call the creeping Putinization of American life (the Sinclair incident, the threatening letter to Rock The Vote, the specter of the top official in the House of Representatives making totally baseless charges of criminal conduct against a major financier of the political opposition [shades of Mikhail Khodorovsky], the increasing evidence that the 'terror alert' system is nothing more than a political prop, the 'torture memo' asserting that the president is above the law, the imposition of rigid discipline on the congress, the abuse of the conference committee procedure, the ability of the administration to lie to congress without penalty, the exclusion of non-supporters from Bush's public appearances, etc.) are beginning to make me think this assessment may have been misguided. Terrorist forces operating in and around Chechnya have done some horrible things -- I was in Moscow for the big apartment bombings -- but ultimately the most harmful thing they have done was to enable Putin to tighten his grip on power.

Readers interested in other links between shrillness and modern physics should read Andrew Northrup's Standard Model of Political Reporting, and may wish to join current work in political string theory by attempting to write "We must all hang together or assuredly we will all hang seperately." repeatedly at sub-Planck lengths.

The Bush Doctrine: Not Enough Troops to Win

2/5 Whiskey Company is shrill:

Eric Umansky: 'Oh, f--- no!': A reporter from Time was embedded with Marines in Ramadi last week. And they give him an earful:

Asked U.S. soldiers if they're in control of the city. "A roomful of grunts responds with phrases like: 'Oh, f--- no!')." On the Ramadi operation, launched at 4 a.mSgt. Jose L. Carillo of the 2/5's Whiskey Company, tells TIME. "These guys [insurgents] fight when they want to fight, not when we want them to fight." "They just keep on recruiting. And I don't mind saying it: we don't have enough people for what we're doing."

By now the only military affairs and national security analysts who are not shrill are dead.

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Thanks to all the Greater and lesser Shoggoths, Tentacled and Bat-Winged Horrors, Nameless and Keening Blasphemies, and all the others who spread the message of shrill unholy madness and of the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, and sheer disconnection from reality of George W. Bush and his administration. Ai! Yog-Sothoth is the Gate! Ai!