Semi-Daily Journal

The trip to London was not about US foreign policy. It was a photo op for the US 2004 election campaign. If Reagan did it, Bush must do it. Reagan visited the queen.

Sorry, but "none too pleased" does not equal "shrill." What on earth it shrill about any of that? I think you're disproving, rather than proving, your thesis that the ranks of the shrill are increasing.

If you changed this running headline to "More people join the ranks of those who disapprove of certain adminstration policies," you'd be fine.

From American Heritage:

"shrill
1. High pitched and piercing in tone or sound.
2. Producing a sharp, high-pitched tone or sound.
3. Sharp or keen to the senses; harshly vivid."

Krugman, si; Murray & Frum, no.

Hasn't stopped Frum continuing to make an arse of himself on Newsnight by attempting to browbeat Jeremy Paxman ...

Leaving aside the fact that there were actually *more* people who supported Bush's visit than disapproved, at least according to all the polls I've seen, I didn't realize that an argumentum ad populum had any logical validity. Finally, no matter how correct a critic may be, if he insists on indulging in overheated rhetoric to deliver his criticisms, he has no right to be surprised if sane people shun him.

Bush may be incompetent, dishonest, yada yada yada, but I'll be damned if I'm going to throw my weight behind the sorts of lunatics who compare the UK-US alliance to the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty (as one ignoramus of a protester I saw on the tube actually did on the sign she was carrying with her), or draw similarities between Clear-Channel smashing Dixie Chicks CDs and book-burnings under Goebbels' watch (as Paul Krugman actually did before the offending words were redacted from his column).

I thought about refraining from protesting the war back in January when I saw someone with the sign "Latinos for the metric system."

This was San Francisco, though, and marching didn't seem futile at the time.

Well Maiden Lane, maybe it is that in fact Krugman was never shrill. And Abiola, smashing CDs because their author have said something that displease you is goebbelsian.

DSW

If we stick to the dictionary definitions offered by ML, then of course Krugman isn’t any more shrill than Frum, or Mother Theresa. It is a characterization of his choice of words and the points he makes with them, rather than the sound of his voice, or any other impact on our senses, that is judged shrill. It is not ears, but some brains, that are being jangled. So trotting out a dictionary doesn’t really undermine Brad’s view.

Since we are in the realm of rhetoric, not denotative meaning, it should also be noted that Brad is probably not accusing Frum (or Murray) of actually being shrill, but rather making light of those who say Krugman is by pointing out that these less strident critics of Bush are making arguments similar to those Krugman has long made.

Shrill: Paul Krugman. Non-shrill, anti-shrill, antithesis of shrill: Abiola Lapite. Particularly the part where he calls Krugman a 'lunatic'. Not quite as good as the comment where Abiola likened opponents of school vouchers to the Nazis, but still admirable.

Shrill: Paul Krugman. Non-shrill, anti-shrill, antithesis of shrill: Abiola Lapite. Particularly the part where he calls Krugman a 'lunatic'. Not quite as good as the comment where Abiola likened opponents of school vouchers to the Nazis, but still admirable.

Here is an interesting PK quote:

"One answer is that for some reason there is a level of anger and hatred on the right that has at best a faint echo in the anti-globalization left, and none at all in mainstream liberalism. Indeed, the liberals I know generally seem unwilling to face up to the nastiness of contemporary politics."

http://www.pkarchive.org/column/032902.html

Many in the GOP think PK is shrill in part because they are ideologues. Ideologues have beliefs that they know to be true that are non-negotiable. An attack on the ideology is not much different than an attack on the ideologue. (For instance, can one criticize Calvinism without implicitly criticizing John Calvin?)

This is one of the reasons for the high level of rancor in our political discourse. One side is proferring policies to be debated tweaked and negotiated and the other side is proferring absolute truths, a non-negotiable ideology, take it or leave it.

The process of compromise is messy and disorderly, but we have know that in the long term it works. Eventually the policy arrives at a balance. We also know that absolute truths can be the aboslutely best policy for a limited special interest, but an absolute failure at protecting other competing interests. For instance, the steel tariffs were good for steel short term but an absolute failure for US steel manufacturers and US trade policy.

In our ideological climate, you are either for the ideology or against the ideology. Even moderates that propose middle ground are shrill because in this climate, compromise is an opposing view. The only discourse that is not shrill is capitulation. The sooner we move away from strict political ideology, the more civil the discourse will become and the better our government will function.

So is this shrill? From Economy.com:

When Good Republicans Go Bad
By Augustine Faucher, December 4, 2003

On Fox News Sunday, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) said that Congress is “spending money like a drunken sailor.” McCain had better be careful: drunken sailors everywhere may resent the comparison. Under President Bush, federal spending has skyrocketed, and with Republicans in charge in Washington, there’s no end in sight.

This is, of course, a reversal of what we normally expect from the Grand Old Party. Republicans have been synonymous with fiscal restraint, especially on the spending side. Although balanced-budget Republicanism went out with the ascendancy of supply-side tax cuts during the Reagan era, the party’s rhetoric has emphasized smaller government and a tight lid on federal spending. Traditionally, it’s the Democrats who have been viewed as the “tax and spend” party.

But that’s changed under the current President Bush. In the first three years of his presidency, spending growth, after accounting for inflation, has been much stronger than under his four immediate predecessors during the corresponding time period (see chart). Real federal expenditures actually declined during the first three years that President Clinton was in office, as a result of the end of the Cold War, the winding down of the saving and loan crisis of the early 1990s, and an improving economy that reduced entitlement spending.

Some of the growth in spending under the current President Bush has been due to higher military expenditures in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But real non-defense spending, excluding interest costs, has increased by almost 7% annually over President Bush’s time in office. This includes very strong growth in spending on such traditional non-Republican priorities as healthcare, education, and unemployment insurance.

And federal spending will continue to grow strongly over the next few years, at least. Just last week, Congress voted to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare that is projected to cost the federal government $400 billion over the next 10 years; almost all of the votes to pass it came from Republicans, and the bill was one of President Bush’s chief legislative priorities (see “Where’s the Dough for Drugs?”). Although Congress failed to pass an energy bill this year, President Bush will continue to promote it; the version that Republican congressional leaders pushed also called for more federal spending (see “The Energy Candy Store”). And the omnibus appropriations bill that Congress will take up after the New Year will also contain large spending increases.

President Bush continues to talk about federal spending restraint, but his actions speak much more loudly than his words. He, and his party, bear almost all of the responsibility for ballooning expenditures. He continues to push for large spending increases and has yet to veto an appropriations bill. Republicans are in control of both the House and Senate and have promoted the Medicare, energy and budget bills.

One of the Republican rationales for large tax cuts is that it deprives the government of the revenue needed to fund spending. Conservatives argue, some more openly than others, that large tax cuts force the federal government to cut back on spending (see “Starving the Beast”). But this hasn’t happened with the big tax cuts we’ve seen over the past few years. Some of this is related to the post-9/11 need for security and defense spending for Iraq. But most Republicans, with President Bush in the lead, have been unwilling to show spending restraint elsewhere. They seem to have reached the conclusion that voters like federal spending, and they are going to give it to them, whatever the consequences.

The Medicare prescription drug benefit is the primary example. With the creation of an expensive new entitlement, conservatives more philosophically opposed to an expansion of the welfare state have railed against the bill. But President Bush and the Republican congressional leadership view adding drug coverage to Medicare as key to the party’s prospects in 2004, so spending won out over fiscal restraint.

All of this would be less of a concern if Republicans would be willing to actually pay for all of this spending with taxes. But the party hasn’t matched its newfound predilection for federal spending with a willingness to reevaluate its unyielding stance on taxes. The inevitable end result is budget deficits as far as the eye can see. Republicans are now the party of “tax cuts and spend.”

http://www.economy.com/dismal/pro/article.asp?aid=2521

If Democrats are the party of "tax and spend," then Republicans are the party of "spend and borrow."

And on the other topic, it is better to be shrill than to be a shill.

More of the "Shrill" nonsense. The only shrill sound I hear is the endless whining of right wing pundits and Fox news. The complaints about the recount, the Wellstone memorial complaints, all shrill.

Krugman is blunt, O Reilly is shrill.

More of the "Shrill" nonsense. The only shrill sound I hear is the endless whining of right wing pundits and Fox news. The complaints about the recount, the Wellstone memorial complaints, all shrill.

Krugman is blunt, O Reilly is shrill.

What Bakho said, especially the Krugman quote.

Besides the habits of compromise learned from normal old-time politics, I think that Democrats and especially "liberals" are too attached to the civilities of academic debate, where you debate with someone every day at lunch and have dinners at one another's houses. I really think that politics has always been a lot more like sports or organized crime, where you win by any means necessary and push the rules to the limit. (Certainly the other side is playing that way right now.) Liberal successes in politics were made possible by very tough unions and urban machines.

The infamous Bartcop says over and over agin: "If the Democrats can't even fight to defend themselves, how can they fight to defend the American people?" Some of the lost voters vote for the Republicans simply because they seem like tough guys and not weaselly quibblers.

There are different criteria for decisions you make while the clock is running. Backing off and discussing things in a thorough, scientific, philosophical way (while taking every contrarian and devil's advocate into account) delays the time of decision infinitely. (Look at analytic philosophy). Between now and November 2004 the American people have to make up their/our minds about Bush. (If someone comes around in December 2004 and says that they finally have accepted our anti-Bush arguments, what they say will not have any point at all.) I think that on the balance, at the present, reasonable well-informed people who are forced to choose -- as we all are, by the nature of politics -- should all come to Krugman's conclusions.

Bahko writes: “In our ideological climate, you are either for the ideology or against the ideology.” I agree.
There are two ways to be against the ideology: you can have your competing ideology, or you can be against all ideologies. Democrats generally, and especially beginning with FDR, were the party without an ideology, but a defined set of goals sought with policies that seemed like the best way to get there, often with some tweaking. When the party lost this pragmatic edge, and tilted towards setting up its own ideology, it lost its center.
Most Americans, I hope, are pragmatic. They want things to work. They do not kowtow to ideological rigidity. They want to use the best tool for the job, regardless of which toolbox it comes from.
The political problem is that ideologues seem so certain that they have the recipe for solutions, while pragmatist offer instead the uncertainties of: this looks like the best thing to try, or, let’s compromise and try that. It is hard to sell tht in a 30 second spot. It may be too hard to sell it to people not used to coping with uncertainty and ambiguity.

If Dems stoop to the Republican gutter level of fighting, however, our democracy loses -- even if the Dems should win.

joe:>"if Dems stoop to the Republican gutter level of fighting,"

American politics has never been a tea party, it has always been a dirty fight, right from the git-go. All the rhetorical pressure to be civil and nice has been a right wing mind game, since only liberals buy it. Right wingers don't ever bother with civility and fair play, they're out to win.

American democracy will only lose if Dem's don't "stoop" to fight.

And all the Repubs win is power, not a better democracy or a better country.

Yep.

"I really think that politics has always been a lot more like sports or organized crime, where you win by any means necessary and push the rules to the limit."

The problem with treating politics like unrestrained warfare is that it all too easily leads to *actual* unrestrained warfare. Godwin's Law notwithstanding, who remembers what happened to the Weimar Republic? As the saying goes - "there is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death."

I have no inclination to support extremists of any hue or persuasion, and that holds whether I am speaking about right-wing lunatics like Coulter and Limbaugh, or left-wing lunatics like Michael Moore and the average "Bush=Hitler" protestor. If the price to be paid for power is that even the most eminent of intellectuals must stoop to the same fetid depths occupied by the aforementioned partisans, then the game is no longer worth the candle as far as I am concerned.

It's a free country, and Krugman and the like are perfectly at liberty to be as hysterical as they please; I am equally free to find their overwrought tone repulsive, and to shun them for it, suspecting, as I have every right to do, that any mind so unbalanced as to emit such nonsense is one in which I can place little confidence as an alternative to the status quo. If I may once again indulge in the sort of invidious historical comparison of which Krugman and others on the left are now so fond, the Tsar's Russia was rightly criticized by the Bolsheviks as suffering from numerous failings, but once at the reins the Bolsheviks still managed to come up with a system that made the old Tsarism seem like a paradise on earth.

RE: “Ideologues have beliefs that they know to be true that are non-negotiable.”

If this isn’t where the rubber meets the road. The Left cannot abandon relativism in political thought because it provides so much valuable issue-specific wiggle room - no need to apply the messy and confining criteria of consistency. Flexibility and compromise are practical ‘bricks and mortar’ terms that relate to the negotiated solutions so common and valuable in politics, but relativity and context-specific truth never should have been allowed to escape the domain of physics.

In the 1970’s the Left pushed for closure of state institutions for the mentally handicapped using the ’high moral ground’ argument that an institutional environment actively compromised their ability to achieve a full measure of quality existence. As a result, the institutions were, indeed, shut down. Did the people have anywhere to go? In a single word, no. The street took them in. The Liberal Faustian bargain was to trade closure of an imperfect structure (mankind can and must be perfectible!) with access to a morally superior solution that put handicapped people at the mercy of a market system. This was an unconscionable abrogation of ethical behavior on the part of a political party who - to this day -claims to represent ’the people.’ This is one of the lowest chapters in the history of the Liberal Left and for operatives to now argue that the Right is guilty of advocating ‘non-negotiable’ positions, I can only suggest, with all due humility, that the Left re-acquaint itself with some of it’s own history of dogmatic and self-righteous advocacy.

I personally do NOT think that Dems should go the whole way to Rush Limbaugh / Jerry Falwell territory. For example the Clinton Death List stuff was really unconscionable. To the extent that what I said above implied that I thought we should go the whole way, I shouldn't have said it.

Leading, of course, to my second point, which is that no one on the left, and specifically not Krugman, has come close to what the Republicans have been doing. Not just unofficial figures like Falwell, Robertson, Coulter and Limbaugh, but people in office like Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich have made vicious accusations and false accusations far worse than the worst Krugman has ever done.

What I am suggesting is that we should realize that we are in a two-sided fight with no middle, that the other side has been fighting and will continue to fight dirty, and that we have to counterattack rather than sit there wondering what hit us. The polarization that's taking place is real and not of our choosing, and we have to learn how to respond to it.

Michael Moore is probably as bad as the left has to offer, and I don't think anything he has done compare either in viciousness or inaccuracy with the stuff Robertson, Falwell, Coulter and Limbaugh cranked out. The parity you make is false, Abiola, and if you can't see what's happening it speaks ill of you. This has been going on for a decade or more.

Abiola; Ann:

To see such reasoned posts distill down to a final equivalent of a youngster's "I know you are, but what am I?" is depressing.

Yesterday evening I followed a link to the Free Republic. On one thread I witnessed 1 in 10 freepers imploring their brethren for some moral consistency applied to consideration of Rush Limbaugh. One brave poster put it essentially this way: "When they said 'it's only oral sex,' we scoffed. Now, you're saying it's only illegal prescription drug use--with abject sincerity."

Having lived 42 years, on three continents, in 8 countries, I've witnessed superstition, mobs, a civil war and exponential cognitive dissonance. Quite a goulash.

To now hear of mainstream books titled "Treason" referring to members of an organized, legitimate political party; to tune into radio broadcasts across the dial and hear host after host flatly label other citizens who disagree as "terrorist sympathizers"; to hear all this in a "civilized", educated, democratic America well, it makes me weep. Abiola, I'll see your bolshevik analogy and raise you one: Political Purging. In Texas, California, and the House of Representatives. My friend, if we are "ascending" as many say, where, pray, might that be to?

Shrill? No, I would say "pained" is a more apt term. And maybe, "reeling." Definitely "fearful."

You have the car keys, where to?

PK would be less shrill if he would focus more on what Bush should be doing instead of what he is doing wrong.

My instinctive reaction, when someone claims that so-and-so is shrill, is to push for the central point: "Yes, but is he wrong?" If the worst that they can find to say of the critics is that thye are shrill, it rather implies that they can't make a convincing argument that the critics are, in fact, wrong.

My instinctive reaction, when someone claims that so-and-so is shrill, is to push for the central point: "Yes, but is he wrong?" If the worst that they can find to say of the critics is that thye are shrill, it rather implies that they can't make a convincing argument that the critics are, in fact, wrong.

RE: fouro

Having lived 50 years on one continent, I have little but contempt for anyone from any continent who equates critical thought of one position with advocacy of the antithetical position. The assumption that my criticism of the Left performance in closing the State institutions in this country implies that I must therefore support the uber-rightist thinking of public figures such as Ann Coulter, etc is simply, to employ a vocabulary that I expect you relate to quite well, infantile - or - as we said in sixth grade - dumb as dirt.

So far April, no one here has even approached your criteria.

Bakho:>"PK would be less shrill if he would focus more on what Bush should be doing"

Like resigning from office?

Your critique is what I call the "be positive" attack. Since any suggestions PK might offer would be the exact opposite of what Bush *is* doing, why bother? Were he to follow your advice, Krugman would be assured of irrelevancy and failure in accomplishing his primary goal: educating the public about the gross incompetancy and corruption of George W Bush and his orchestra. ( almost singlehandedly... hence 'shrill' )

Sheeesh.

But, Why the Wall
street journal said that Bush conquered Britain?

But, Why the Wall
Street Journal said that Bush conquered Britain?

But, Why the Wall
Street Journal said that Bush conquered Britain?

Delong's use of the term was ironic.

I don't know about "shrill", but my wife and I spent a delightful last half of August in London. We visited with three sets of old friends from geographically, socially and economically separated lifestyles. A major pleasure was the morning walk to the news stand for papers and reading them over breakfast in the conservatory of our small hotel. Another was conversations in the pub or its equivalent with "people". (We have done the tourist thing. This trip was for fun by two fairly realistic, somewhat cynical, but nevertheless real Anglophiles.)

Do we understand Great Britain? Certainly not perfectly any more than anyone understands the US. While we talk comfortably and amiably with many different people, where we stay and what we do influences who we see.

With this said, in a country where ordinary people have an extraordianary underestanding (at least by US standards) of what is going on in the world, our impression is that the present US administration cannot pass the laugh test. A month or so after we returned, we feel fairly confident that this feeling was reinforced by the incident explained below in an excerpt from our "Holiday Letter", eagerly awaited by some 120 friends who put up with us.

"Oddly, our trip to Buckingham Palace provides the impetus for this year’s biting political commentary. The grounds were beautiful in August, magnificent lawns and gardens where thousands of visitors and dignitaries have been hosted each year for a very long time with minimal wear and tear...until the recent state visit by the US President. Three enormous US helicopters, miles of thick cables and the feet of countless secret service agents created a terrible mess…that those who are supposed to represent the American people neither bothered to clean up nor apparently even apologized for. As the saying goes, “The Queen was not amused.” Whether or not this story was exaggerated in the British press (and we really don’t know), the symbolism inherent in this comparatively minor incident is as unfortunate as it is inescapable."

Obviously this incident occurred after our visit and the reports were from the Internet editions of various papers. We have trouble believing that the incident did not simply reinforce what was 'in the air".

Is it better to be the object of "shrill" or the butt of a joke?

Sam Taylor

Um, Ann?

You're probably long gone from here, but how on Earth are you claiming the left closed down the state hospitals to demonstrate equality?

That seems like the result of a particularly heated imagination. The state hospital in my home town closed down in 1981, due to massive funding cuts initiated by the Reagan Administration.

In fact, he started this trend much earlier on in California (see: http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/38/22/28).

Um, Ann?

You're probably long gone from here, but how on Earth are you claiming the left closed down the state hospitals to demonstrate equality?

That seems like the result of a particularly heated imagination. The state hospital in my home town closed down in 1981, due to massive funding cuts initiated by the Reagan Administration.

In fact, he started this trend much earlier on in California (see: http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/38/22/28).

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.

'May you live all the days of your life.' - Swift