Mickey Kaus Drives Mark Kleiman Shrill

Mark writes:

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

Frank Rich is Shrill!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sally Quinn Drives Joshua Micah Marshall into Shrillness!

Marshall writes:

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

NO QUARTER Is Shrill!

Their letter to George Tenet"

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rambling Ineloquent Decider Commander Guy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jonathan Chait Says the Shrill is Gone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tepidly.

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

Tepidly.

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

Matthew Yglesias points out what is really going on:

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

Matthew Yglesias Gets Shriller

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Yglesias Is Driven Shrill by Jonathan Chait

Matthew Yglesias writes:

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

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

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

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

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

Duncan Black Is Shrill!

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

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

Duncan links to Matthew Yglesias:

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

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

Now here's Kaplan in March 2006:

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

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

The Shrill Jonathan Schwartz Eviscerates Jonathan Chait

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

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

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

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

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

More Journamalism from the Washington Post

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

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

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

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

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

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

Journamalists

Frank Rich Is Shrill!

George W. Bush and David Broder are to blame:

All the President’s Press - New York Times: SOMEHOW it’s hard to imagine David Halberstam yukking it up with Alberto Gonzales, Paul Wolfowitz and two discarded “American Idol” contestants at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Before there was a Woodward and Bernstein, there was Halberstam... calling those in power to account.... He did so despite public ridicule from the dean of that era’s Georgetown punditocracy, the now forgotten columnist (and Vietnam War cheerleader) Joseph Alsop.

It was Alsop’s spirit, not Halberstam’s, that could be seen in C-Span’s live broadcast of the correspondents’ dinner last Saturday, two days before Halberstam’s death.... This fete is a crystallization of the press’s failures in the post-9/11 era: it illustrates how easily a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the Washington news media in its shows. Such is literally the case at the annual dinner, where journalists serve as a supporting cast, but it has been figuratively true year-round. The press has enabled stunts from the manufactured threat of imminent “mushroom clouds” to “Saving Private Lynch” to “Mission Accomplished,” whose fourth anniversary arrives on Tuesday.... [I]t’s far from clear that the entire profession yet understands why it has lost the public’s faith....

[A]ppalling — and symptomatic of the larger sycophancy — was the press’s insidious role in President Bush’s star turn at the event. It’s the practice on these occasions that the president do his own comic shtick, but this year Mr. Bush made a grand show of abstaining, saying that the killings at Virginia Tech precluded his being a “funny guy.” Any civilian watching on TV could formulate the question left hanging by this pronouncement: Why did the killings in Iraq not preclude his being a “funny guy” at other press banquets we’ve watched on C-Span? At the equivalent Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association gala three years ago, the president contributed an elaborate (and tasteless) comic sketch about his failed search for Saddam’s W.M.D.

But the revelers in the ballroom... served as captive dress extras in a propaganda stunt, lending their credibility to the president’s sanctimonious exploitation of the Virginia Tech tragedy for his own political self-aggrandizement on national television. Meanwhile the war was kept as tightly under wraps as the troops’ coffins....

After last weekend’s correspondents’ dinner, The Times decided to end its participation in such events. But even were the dinner to vanish altogether, it remains but a yearly televised snapshot of the overall syndrome. The current White House, weakened as it is, can still establish story lines as fake as “Mission Accomplished” and get a free pass. To pick just one overarching example: much of the press still takes it as a given that Iraq has a functioning government that might meet political benchmarks (oil law, de-Baathification reform, etc., etc.) that would facilitate an American withdrawal. In reality, the Maliki “government” can’t meet any benchmarks, even if they were enforced, because that government exists only as a fictional White House talking point.

As Gen. Barry McCaffrey said last week, this government doesn’t fully control a single province. Its Parliament, now approaching a scheduled summer recess, has passed no major legislation in months. Iraq’s sole recent democratic achievement is to ban the release of civilian casualty figures, lest they challenge White House happy talk about “progress” in Iraq.

It’s our country’s bitter fortune that while David Halberstam is gone, too many Joe Alsops still hold sway. Take... David Broder, who is leading the charge in ridiculing Harry Reid for saying the obvious — that “this war is lost” (as it is militarily, unless we stay in perpetuity and draft many more troops). In February, Mr. Broder handed down another gem of Beltway conventional wisdom, suggesting that “at the very moment the House of Representatives is repudiating his policy in Iraq, President Bush is poised for a political comeback.”

Some may recall that Stephen Colbert offered the same prediction in his monologue at the correspondents’ dinner a year ago. “I don’t believe this is a low point in this presidency,” he said. “I believe it is just a lull before a comeback.” But the fake pundit, unlike the real one, recognized that this was a joke.

The War on Drugs

A manifest source of shrillness:

Crooks and Liars » Cops Admit To Planting Marijuana on 92 Year Old Woman Killed in Botched Drug Raid: Nicole Belle: Two police officers pleaded guilty Thursday to manslaughter in the shooting death of a 92-year-old woman during a botched drug raid last fall. A third officer still faces charges.[...] The charges followed a Nov. 21 "no-knock" drug raid on the home of Kathryn Johnston, 92. An informant had described buying drugs from a dealer there, police said. When the officers burst in without warning, Johnston fired at them, and they fired back, killing her.

Fulton County prosecutor Peter Johnson said that the officers involved in Johnston's death fired 39 shots, striking her five or six times, including a fatal blow to the chest. He said Johnston fired only once through her door and didn't hit any of the officers. That means the officers who were wounded likely were hit by their own colleagues, he said.[...] Assistant U.S. Attorney Yonette Sam-Buchanan said Thursday that although the officers found no drugs in Johnston's home, Smith planted three bags of marijuana in the home as part of a cover story. The case raised serious questions about no-knock warrants and whether the officers followed proper procedures.

Impeach Condi Rice. Impeach Her Now

Scott Horton is shrill:

"Condi’s Really Bad Month": Over the past month it has become increasingly clear that Condoleezza Rice does not, ultimately, call the shots on foreign policy and national security questions. The man in charge is named Dick Cheney. This has emerged from a long series of tussles, of which the response to the British-Iranian fracas from the beginning of the month and the question of closing the concentration camp at Guantánamo are the most obvious examples. Condi’s PR offensive has also begun to lag as voices in the press who were quick to credit her with a new diplomatic offensive have had second thoughts. While diplomacy may be defined as the “art of lying in one’s country’s interests,” a skillful diplomat still knows how to do it without being easily caught. Condi put her reputation on the line with a series of high-profile appearances in Europe denying the existence of European blacksites, even while concluding and signing deals concerning the blacksites on the very same trip. “It was rather breathtaking,” one diplomat told me.

Now her past seems again to be catching up with her. She has blown off Congressional inquiries for some time, taking the acutely undiplomatic view that questions from Democrats didn’t require answers. That posture is a difficult one with Democrats in the majority in both houses. Now her dereliction has yielded a Congressional subpoena, and today Rice told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News that she has no intention of complying with it....

Rice’s reply to the account George Tenet gave this evening of his July 2001 visit and plea for a preemptive attack against Al Qaeda sites in Afghanistan was even more pathetic than her response to Waxman. In her CNN interview, she absurdly parses the word “imminent” giving it a meaning at odds with the dictionary.... Tenet’s book convincingly portrays Rice as an ineffectual and indecisive national security advisor—as a figure who recognizes that the center of power rests with Dick Cheney and who is unwilling to challenge him even over his most catastrophic delusions. The last three months reveal that Condi’s move to Foggy Bottom has not change those core facts. She continues to be little more than a distracting ornament when it comes to critical foreign policy issues.

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (New York Times Edition)

John Broder and Marjorie Connelly would drive anybody shrill. The headline "Public Remains Split on Response to Warming" simply will not cut it:

Public Remains Split on Response to Warming - New York Times: Americans in large bipartisan numbers say the heating of the earth’s atmosphere is having serious effects on the environment now or will soon and think that it is necessary to take immediate steps to reduce its effects, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll finds.

Ninety percent of Democrats, 80 percent of independents and 60 percent of Republicans said immediate action was required to curb the warming of the atmosphere and deal with its effects on the global climate. Nineteen percent said it was not necessary to act now, and 1 percent said no steps were needed.

Recent international reports have said with near certainty that human activities are the main cause of global warming since 1950. The poll found that 84 percent of Americans see human activity as at least contributing to warming. The poll also found that Americans want the United States to support conservation and to be a global leader in addressing environmental problems and developing alternative energy sources to reduce reliance on fossil fuels like oil and coal.

The Bush Administration: Always Worse than You Imagine

Jim Henley is shrill and writes:

The Story Behind the Story, the Continuing Series § Unqualified Offerings: Christopher Hitchens wrote that he went into journalism because he didn’t want to have to rely on the media to get the news. I’ve felt that way in conversations with an unspecified number of real journalists for an unspecified number of real [mainstream media]... organs recently about this business of the President’s wife being secretly separated from him because, among other things, he is drinking again....

[I]f the man who has the authority to launch nuclear weapons all on his say-so is an alcoholic who has gone back on the sauce because of the pressure of his job, that seems to me to be f------ news! The public has the right to know that. And from what I can tell this seems to be the open secret among journalists... something "everybody knows" but nobody is saying. A president who has claimed absolute power based on a couple of stray clauses in the Constitution and a couple of dodgy recent laws is an addict who has fallen back into his habit.

That seems important.

Many open secrets among journalists aren't true. Some are true.

Paul Begala: David Broder Is a Gasbag

Paul Begala is shrill:

The Blog | Paul Begala: David Broder Is a Gasbag | The Huffington Post: One of the few regrets I have in life is that I allowed Ann Devroy of the Washington Post to talk me into apologizing for calling David Broder "a gasbag" in 1995. My admiration for Devroy trumped my contempt for Broder.... Broder, of course, is a gasbag. The Hindenburg of pundits. But my respect for Ann knew no bounds, and she thought I was being unfair. In retrospect I was being unfair. To gasbags.

Mr. Broder has been foaming at the mouth these days. A man generally given to soporific prose, Broder has been downright venomous lately. And what has put the Benzedrine in Mr. Broder's Ovaltine? Not the fact that President Bush continues to lie about "progress" in the war in Iraq. Or that Dick Cheney continues to lie about pre-invasion links between al Qaeda and Iraq. Or that the Bush Administration has neglected our wounded warriors, ignored the victims of Katrina, potentially obstructed justice by firing US Attorneys who were pursuing GOP wrongdoing. Not even that the Bush Administration lied to the families of Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch, cynically using their blood to distract from their own incompetence and dishonesty.

No, none of this raises Dean Broder's hackles.

He reserves his vitriol for Harry Reid.

Why Reid? Because Reid has been one of the few politicians with the courage to speak the plain, unvarnished truth to power, and the hallmark of Mr. Broder's career has been to suck up to power. Reid calls Bush a liar. Broder can't handle the truth....

But at the end of a career of sucking up to warmongers and Republicans, Mr. Broder has found his true hero in George W. Bush. Where others see a mush-mouthed semi-literate, Broder sees FDR: "As a counterpuncher to criticism and as a doubt-free exponent of his own beliefs, the current president is right up there with the inventor of the New Deal."

While others were shocked at Bush's callous disregard for the lives of his fellow Americans during Hurricane Katrina, Broder wrote Katrina, "opens new opportunities for [Bush] to regain his standing with the public." (Or at least those members of the public who did not drown due to Bush's incompetence and inaction.)

In February of this year, when the Bush collapse was evident for all to see, the visionary Mr. Broder saw something else. "President Bush is poised for a political comeback," he wrote.

When asked recently if Bush was the worst President in history - a view shared by many eminent historians, including Sean Wilentz of Princeton, Broder replied, "I would not venture at this point whether President Bush will leave the country in better or worse shape than he found it. Internationally, the U.S. suffered setbacks during the Carter administration...." Jimmy Carter, of course, started no wars, invaded no countries, and got our hostages out of Iran alive. But this winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is compared to George W. Bush...

James Fallows Gets Shrill on George Tenet

He writes:

James Fallows | Author and Journalist » Blog Archive » About that Presidential Medal of Freedom, Mr. Tenet: Two and a half years ago, after interviewing many, many people involved in shaping Iraq-war policy, I wrote the following in the Atlantic (and then in Blind into Baghdad): "There is no evidence that the President and those closest to him ever talked systematically about the “opportunity costs” and tradeoffs in their decision to invade Iraq. No one has pointed to a meeting, a memo, a full set of discussions, about what America would gain and lose."

The Administration apparently did not consider questions like “If we pursue the war on terror by invading Iraq, might we incite even more terror in the long run?” and “If we commit so many of our troops this way, what possibilities will we be giving up?” Bush “did not think of this, intellectually, as a comparative decision,” I was told by Senator Bob Graham, of Florida, who voted against the war resolution for fear it would hurt the fight against terrorism. “It was a single decision: he saw Saddam Hussein as an evil person who had to be removed.” … A man who participated in high-level planning for both Afghanistan and Iraq—and who is unnamed here because he still works for the government—told me, “There was absolutely no debate in the normal sense.”

Comes now George Tenet. In those days, as CIA director, Tenet was the man who sat so visibly and solemnly behind Colin Powell during Powell’s crucial UN speech presenting “proof” of the WMD threat from Iraq. Tenet’s sober presence suggested how powerful America’s evidence must be. In those days, Tenet was inseparable from President Bush and from the argument that, as the inescapable next step in the “war on terror,” America had to invade Iraq. On December 2, 2004, Tenet was at the White House for perhaps the most cynically dishonorable day in the history of American public service: the day when the freshly reelected President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to three men: the one who publicly vouched for a misleading case for invading Iraq (Tenet); the one who beat Saddam’s army but was entirely uninterested in what came next (Gen. Tommy Franks), and the one who helped turned that next stage into a catastrophe (Amb. L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer III).

Now Tenet tells us — according to this story in the New York Times — that the Administration pushed the country toward war without ever conducting a “serious debate” about Iraq’s threat and the possible U.S. responses.

“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” Mr. Tenet writes in a devastating judgment that is likely to be debated for many years. Nor, he adds, “was there ever a significant discussion” about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.

Gee, thanks for telling us now, Mr. Tenet. Now — not when it was happening, and the news might still have changed national policy and spared us a “war of choice.” Now — not before the 2004 election, which as the President has told us was the “accountability moment” for his policy toward Iraq. (How differently the world would view the United States if, at its first chance after the Iraq invasion, the public had rejected rather than ratified the policies that led to war.) Now — when it’s not clear what difference it can make at all. People open to evidence about the war, including the majority of the public, now generally consider it to have been a mistake, which doesn’t make the decision about what to do next any easier. People not open to evidence still control the Executive Branch. One more book won’t change their minds.

If you felt so strongly, why did you wait to say anything until you knew it couldn’t do any good? Of course, saying something earlier would have meant resigning in protest, a step that still is vanishingly rare. And there would not have been that Medal of Freedom. Perhaps you’ll wear it on the book tour? Just a thought.

One reason American journalism has fallen down on the job is that they are embarrassed to tell the truth when the truth is shrill. Fallows adds:

Addendum: Sounding harsh is not attractive, and it’s possible that I’m being unfair to the whole case Tenet makes. I haven’t read the book (which is not yet officially published) and am judging only on the parts quoted in the New York Times. So why this harshness? It’s my frustration about people who tell us now that they had cold feet about what is either the most damaging, or the second-most damaging, decision in American diplomatic history, the other possibility being Vietnam. (I think Iraq will prove to be the worst. Many more Americans died in Vietnam than will in Iraq, and — unless regional war in the Middle East becomes truly catastrophic — the civilian and military deaths of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians will outweigh those in Iraq. But the slow, step-by-step escalation in Vietnam was, sadly, more logical and understandable than the wholly discretionary decision to invade Iraq. The long term damage to America’s interests and reputation will, I think, be greater — but we’ll see.) So I find it hard to be as understanding and tolerant as I would like to be, when someone who might have made a difference but didn’t, at the time, later tells us he was skeptical all along. This is, similarly, why the Iraq years did such damage to Colin Powell.

Chris Roush: CJR’s Audit needs to come clean about past

Chris Roush is shrill:

Talking Biz News » CJR’s Audit needs to come clean about past: Forbes.com columnist Gary Weiss writes that it’s nice that the Columbia Journalism Review blog The Audit has praised the Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series about backdating of stock options. But the blog — under a different writer — needs to admit that it criticized the articles when they first appeared.

Weiss wrote, “Reading the above, you’d never know that the Audit was actually a major voice against the options backdating coverage when it really mattered–when the Journal was sticking its neck out by publishing those stories. It is a low-risk proposition to praise a series that just got a Pulitzer, and gratuitous (and fairly meaningless) to pile on with 20-20 hindsight after the champagne has flowed.

“The Audit’s two articles on the backdating coverage (here and here) were notable in that they were not the slightest bit well-informed. I was sympathetic with the Audit’s view the options coverage was a bit “overblown,” yet the articles seemed naive and ill-informed in the extreme. I chastised the Audit for its coverage (see here and here), as did University of California economics professor Brad DeLong.

“There’s nothing wrong with being off-base now and then. But this was not an isolated event. The Audit, under its former editor, made a series of embarrassing goofs on a number of subjects.”

Read more here.

Posted by Chris Roush

Media Matters is Shrill!

It's the journamalism of Lori Montgomery of the Washington Post:

Media Matters - Reporting bipartisan desire to fix AMT, Wash. Post left out Bush budget's reliance on it: An April 23 Washington Post article by staff writer Lori Montgomery on House Democrats' plan to shift the burden of the alternative minimum tax (AMT) onto wealthier Americans reported that Republicans "also advocate repealing or substantially rewriting the AMT." Yet the article did not mention that President Bush's Fiscal 2008 budget goal of, in Bush's words, "balanc[ing] the budget by 2012 without raising your taxes," relies on revenues raised from not adjusting the AMT after FY 2008. The White House's prediction that the budget will reach balance or surplus by 2012 rests, in part, on the assumption that Congress will stop raising the exemption level of the AMT -- although the Bush administration proposed that Congress increase of the exemption level again for FY 2008. Without a continuation of this temporary fix, the AMT would increase the income taxes of millions of middle-class Americans in the years to come, as Media Matters for America has noted.