Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

Last Week in the Shrillblog (First Week of October)

You know, I would not have believed that the world could see so many shrill screeds of Bush-hatred in merely one single week:

Shrillblog: Philadelphia Inquirer is Shrill: While we cannot claim the Philadelphia Inquirer was ever a bastion of conservative thought, the strident tone they take in endorsing Kerry is astonishing. "...A hooded prisoner on a box has replaced a soaring lady with a lamp as the global icon of America's intentions. Our national discourse has grown peevish, choking on distortion and bile. On Nov. 2, we can return to office the man who, since 2001, has spawned some of those ills and shown a shaky touch at healing the others. Or we can go a new way, one alert to fresh global challenges yet rooted in the approaches that made the 1990s so productive. We can elect Democratic nominee John F. Kerry

Shrillblog: Andrew Sullivan Is Still Shrill: And his shrill screeds of malevolent Bush-hatred still echo through the night: "His distortion of Kerry's healthcare plan didn't flirt with being mendacious; it was an outright lie.... That he has to concede the complete absence of WMDs in Iraq is inevitably brutal on him and his argument about the war. The facts are simply against him, and it shows. He had absolutely no answer on his spending spree. None. If you're a one-issue voter on fiscal responsiblity, Kerry is obviously your man; and this debate rammed that point home. And then there were some simply bizarre moments..."

Shrillblog: USCRC, Shrill?: If you ask us, it sounds as if the Civil Rights Commission is tabling dealing with a report on the administration's civil rights record in order to avoidt the appearence of shrillness: "The report says Mr. Bush 'has neither exhibited leadership on pressing civil rights issues, nor taken actions that matched his words' on the subject. It finds fault with Mr. Bush's funding requests for civil rights enforcement; his positions on voting rights, educational opportunity and affirmative action; and his actions against hate crimes."

Shrillblog: Former Right-Wing Republican Congressman Bob Barr Is Shrill: Shrill unholy madness takes another one...

Shrillblog: Homecoming Day Here at Miskatonic University!: It is homecoming day here at Miskatonic University in beautiful Arkham, Massachusetts. The blue skies! The brilliant colors of the fall leaves! The crisp fall air! The exploits of our football team, the Slimy Cephalopods! The furious arguments with the referees over just how many aeons of eligibility a semi-sentient servitor beast has anyway! The tentacled horrors lurking in the river! The distortions of dimensional geometry that the human eye rebels against and that could drive the human mind... mad... that is, if the human mind had not already been driven mad by the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, and disconnection from reality of George W. Bush and his administration... Today at halftime, while our coach tried to think up a way to defend effectively when our opponents, the Alien Space Bats from R'lin-K'renn-A'a, had control of the ball, the Grand Heresiarch himself recognized one of the earliest members of the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill: one of the first to see things Humans Were Not Meant to Know: John DiIulio...

Shrillblog: Another Eternal Lie from the Bush Administration...: Kerry hits Bush on the vaccine shortage. Bush's spokesman responds with a falsehood: "Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt called Kerry's criticism 'baseless and hypocritical. So few companies make flu vaccines because of a broken medical liability system that Kerry falsely claims to want to fix but has voted 10 times against reforming.'"...

Shrillblog: Submitted Without Interpretation: I've been going through the mail today, and I've noticed that it mostly falls into two categories...

Shrillblog: Kevin Drum and the Cato Institute Together Ascend to Higher Degrees of Shrillness!!: Kevin Drum notes one of Bush's many, many lies from last night. This, however, is an especially powerful one. When exposed to this lie under laboratory conditions, thirty-seven staff members of the Cato Institute found themselves driven into shrill unholy madness. Many of them will never be able to appear on Fox News again. But we will give them a home, and honor them as Lesser Shoggoths in the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill...

Shrillblog: Jonathan Chait Is So Insanely Shrill That Everybody Can Just Go Home: "Now, my "bad" category consists entirely of George W. Bush, with every previous president redefined as "good." There's also the fact that, on a personal level, I despise him with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns..."

Shrillblog: Cheney Claims Saddam Has Ties to Rumsfeld!: Michael Berube learns things Humans Were Not Meant to Know about the triangle Saddam Hussein-Donald Rumsfeld-Richard Cheney, and falls ever deeper into shrill unholy madness: 'When asked about the discrepancy, Vice President Cheney suggested that Saddam might have had close ties to Rumsfeld. “There was a connection,” Cheney said. “A relationship, if you will.'...

Shrillblog: Translations From The Krugmanomicon: I have obtained (do not ask me how, for I cannot - I must not - tell) what I believe to be an authentic copy of the most forbidden, most blasphemous, most shrill tome ever penned by the hand of man - if indeed it was so penned.... I shall begin my translation, painstakingly copying, as best I can, the crazed and wavering binary on these pages into some semblance of rational ASCII. The Krugmanomicon...

Shrillblog: "Z.R."of CJR Campaign Desk Is Shrill: The lies that Howard Fineman tells as he tries to achieve "balance" and placate the minions of Yog-Sothoth who have spilled out from the transdimensional rift beneath Lafayette Park--these have driven one "Z.R." into shrill unholy madness: "In exactly what world is it contradictory to say that the war was a mistake and the occupation a mess, but now that we're in that mess we have to carry on and make it right? Is that idea too subtle for Fineman to grasp?... Fineman feels compelled to throw in some jabs at Kerry in search of 'balance'."...

Shrillblog: Mark A. R. Kleiman Brings More Evidence to the Table: Some have taken the mysterious references in the Krugmanomicon to the "strange aeons" and the "eternal lies" to be evidence that Dick Cheney is an avatar of the indescribable Yog-Sothoth.... 'Well, here's what he said: "You made the comment that the Gulf War coalition in '91 was far stronger than this. No. We had 34 countries then; we've got 30 today. We've got troops beside us." Fred Kaplan supplies the actual numbers, from official U.S. government sources: Gulf war: 800,000 non-U.S. troops. Iraq war: 24,000 non-U.S. troops. So, according to the Vice President, a military force of 800,000 is not "far stronger" than a military force of 24,000.'...

Shrillblog: The Duelfer Report Is Shrill!: Saddam Husayn ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the Gulf war. ISG found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program.[...] While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991...

Shrillblog: Yet Another Paradoxical Addition To The Order...: ...far be it from us to identify members who, for the sake of their current positions in government, wish to remain nameless as they wrestle with their unholy madness. Here is one such poor soul, Mr. X, who recently discussed the situation in Iraq: "As soon as the sanctions were lifted, [Saddam Hussein] had every intention of going back" to his weapons program, [Mr. X.] said "...the sanctions regime was coming apart at the seams. Saddam perverted that whole thing and generated billions of dollars." Unfortunately for the sanity of Mr. X, the company he ran in 2000 was one of the major accomplices in providing the funding for these as-of-yet-begun weapons of mass destruction program related activities...

Shrillblog: Howard Fineman Is Shrill: After four years of bending over so far backwards to be kind to George W. Bush that outside observers questioned whether any animal with a backbone could possibly assume such positions, Howard Fineman has finally broken. The newly-shrill Iraq Proconsul L. Paul Bremer has whispered in his ear--some message about the strange aeons and enternal lies of the Bush administration; of the eternal trans-dimensional struggle of The Medium Lobster with Yog-Sothoth, the Keymaster, of whom Cheney is but an avatar; and of Bush administration policy in Iraq. In response, Fineman has descended into shrill unholy madness and is One of Us now...

Shrillblog: The Center for Strategic and International Studies Is Shrill!: Greater Shoggoth Matthew Yglesias modems in from The Shaw to report on a massive addition to the strength of the Fourth Shrill, Unholy, and Mad Think Tank Detachment...

Shrillblog: Paul Bremer Wants You To Know He Isn't Shrill: L. Paul Bremer wants you to know he isn't a member of the order. He wants you to know it so much that he's placed an op-ed for the New York Times discussing his lack of shrillness. Next week tune in to find out who actually wrote the piece...

Shrillblog: Tim Ryan Is Mad As Hell And He's Not Going To Take it Any More: or possibly breaks down, on the floor of the House...

Shrillblog: They Report, We Run And Hide: "For Dick Cheney is no follower of Cthulhu; rather, he is an avatar of mighty and monstrous Yog-Sothoth, the key and guardian of the gate, the All-in-One of limitless being and self whose vile and indomitable essense stretches beyond the expanse of time and space and can only be perceived by mortals in brief glimpses: a form of The Cheney there, a shape of Yog-Delay there, a brief glimmer of NyarlaHastert there. There is not one Cheney, my friend, but a hundred, a thousand, a million - each a monstrous roiling outstretched tentacle reaching from the blackened abyss of the Outer Gods."...

Shrillblog: CORRECTION: B-School Profs Are Totally Shrill: We wish to apologize for and hereby retract our earlier statement in which asserted that no business school professors are shrill. In reality, at least one is. OK, more than one. OK, like over 100 from b-schools nobody has ever heard of like "Harvard", "MIT", "Stanford", "University of Texas at Austin", and "UCLA". It's a vast left-wing shrillness conspiracy...

Shrillblog: Hal Crowther is sshrill: Hal Crowther is sshrill. The extra 's' stands for extra shrillness:
I struggle against the suspicion that so many of my fellow Americans are conceptually challenged. I want to reason with my neighbors, I want to engage these lost Americans. What makes you angry, neighbor? What arouses your suspicions? Does it bother you that this administration made terrorism a low priority, dismissed key intelligence that might have prevented the 9-11 catastrophe, then exploited it to justify the pre-planned destruction of Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with al Qaeda? All this is no longer conjecture, but direct reportage from cabinet-level meetings by the turncoat insiders Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill. ...

Shrillblog: Andrew Sulivan Is Still Shrill: The shrill screeds of Andrew Sullivan's irrational Cheney-hatred echo off the sinister cliffs... "On all the critical questions in this election - why is Osama bin Laden still at large? why did we invade Iraq? why has the Iraq occupation come unglued? why the poor jobs record? why the record deficits? - Cheney had almost no answer at all."

Shrillblog: Federal Judge Gets Shrill on PATRIOT Act: Victor Marrero gets shrill on intimidation of the American public...

Shrillblog: Alan Murray Joins the Shrill: More than anyone else in this administration, [Cheney] provided questionable information about both the evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the likely consequences of war with Iraq. In each case, he spoke with great conviction, as a man who had examined the evidence himself, and who wasn't just passing along the administration's line.... [T]he vice president appeared on "Meet the Press"... to assure Americans that U.S. troops would be "greeted as liberators."... Mr. Cheney confidently dismissed... Army Gen. Eric Shinseki, who said it would take several hundred thousand troops in Iraq for several years to maintain stability. "I disagree," the vice president said without equivocation. "That's an overstatement."... Mr. Cheney... said the administration knows "with absolute certainty" that Mr. Hussein "is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon."... aluminum tubes... [W]hat we don't know -- and what I'd like to know -- is why they turned out to be wrong. Was the vice president misled by those who briefed him? Did he make an error in judgment when evaluating the available evidence? Or did he exaggerate the case in order to build public support for the war? That is no small matter. The Bush crowd, we know, isn't big on mea culpas. That's fine.... But there is a need to find out how and why Mr. Cheney got this one so wrong...

Shrillblog: A New Marshall Plan: Shrill: Marshall Wittmann, who served as Senator McCain's Director of Communications after stints at the Heritage Foundation and the Christian Coalition, is shrill:

Shrillblog: Things Humans Were Not Meant to See, Part LXII: Cokie Roberts Playing the "Liberal": Matthew Yglesias made the mistake of watching Cokie Roberts play the "liberal" on TV. The former mild-mannered bespectacled Harvard moderate who spent his bright college years mocking the sillinesses of the Cantabrigian left and listening through his dorm room's fire door while his neighbor... Let's not go there--ed. What followed was not pretty. Trained paranormal paramedical professionals had to be called in to mop up the ichor. I guess we must add "Cokie Roberts playing the 'liberal' on TV" to the list of "Things Humans Were Not Meant to See"...

Shrillblog: TAPPED's Mark Goldberg Is Shrill: An unfortunate interaction between the rays of the dead, uncaring moon and the incompetence, malevolence, mendacity, and disconnection from reality of the Bush administration have turned TAPPED's Mark Goldberg into a monster: half-man, half-wolf, half-tentacled octopus, he prowls the swamps by night searching for his prey. His keen wolf-nose catches the spoor of Donald Rumsfeld, and so TAPPED's Mark Goldberg JOINS THE SHRILL!!!

Shrillblog: The Kerry Campaign Highlights the Shrill: I have to say, my favorite part of this article is not that it neatly collects a list of a few shrill for us, but rather the title. "Son of a GOP President" has such a lilt to it, yet is still safe to shout in front of small children...

Shrillblog: Senator Chafee Ponders the Party of Lincoln: ...explaining that he would choose a write-in candidate, perhaps George Bush the elder, as a symbolic act of protest...

Shrillblog: Paul Bremer Is Shrill!: Bat-Winged Horror Belle Waring reports that former Iraqi Proconsul Paul Bremer is shrill: "We never had enough troops on the ground," he says...

Shrillblog: Joseph E. Stiglitz is One of Us: The resounding answer is that Bush is to blame. Every president inherits a legacy. The economy was entering a downturn when Bush took office, but Clinton also left a huge budget surplus—2 percent of GDP—a pot of money with which to finance a robust recovery. But Bush squandered that surplus, converting it into a deficit of 5 percent of GDP through tax cuts for the rich...

Shrillblog: Memorandum of Understanding: Please let everyone know that we appreciate their enthusiastic response but are currently buried under a large pile of mail. In fact, the enthusiastic response is exactly why we're buried. We're gLad that gMail gAve us a gIgabyte of storage. We'll get back to everyone, but it may take a while. Please send a shovel...

Shrillblog: Noah Schachtman Is Shrill!: The formerly level-headed and technocratic Noah Schachtman of DefenseTech is driven into shrill unholy madness by Cheney's and Rice's lies about aluminum tubes and Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons ...

Shrillblog: The Anonymice in the White House Are Shrill: From the Saturday Times...: "... one prominent advisor who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of appearing critical of the president." Also Saturday...: "One veteran Republican strategist who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of offending the White House ..."... Sunday's paper...:... "An administration official, speaking anonymously because he also did not want to be identified as critical of Mr. Bush's debate performance ..."

Shrillblog: Head Cyber Libertarian and Grateful Dead Lyricist John Perry Barlow Is Shrill: ...one thing I will say for George Bush, he has disabused me of my old belief that it doesn't really matter who's President. That's because George Bush was and is a package deal. Along with the man himself, whatever his personality traits, we got a large cast of characters who, in aggregate, have been vastly more important than the hands-off President himself. We got Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Condoleeza Rice. We got Ashcroft to a fare-the-well. We got Wolfowitz, Feith, and Perle. And, boy, did we ever get Karl Rove. We got a legion of too-smart-by-half Stepford husbands with flags on their lapels, fire in their eyes, and God on their side. We got pharmaceutical companies designing our health care systems, the prison-industrial complex designing our sentencing schedules, Exxon and Enron designing energy policy, Halliburton and the Carlyle Group and the Center for the New American Century designing foreign policy, Louisiana-Pacific designing forestry policy, and Con-Agra designing agricultural policy. We got the super-rich and multinationals designing tax policy to their personal benefit, creationists designing school curricula, fundamentalists designing scientific research agenda...

Shrillblog: Barry Ritholtz and Kate O'Beirne Join the Shrill: Barry Ritholtz watches Meet the Press and finds National Review's Kate O'Beirne saying that George W. Bush is like an inept sultan surrounded by flatterers, toadies, and evil viziers...

Shrillblog: Andrew Sullivan Says David Brooks Is Shrill: If you read between the lines, you'll discover [that David Brooks agrees with] what is, in fact, the private consensus of many conservatives who are publicly supporting Bush: that the president's heart is in the right place but he has a tenuous grasp of the instruments of government and how to wield them...

Shrillblog: Tom Friedman Is Shrill : Crouched on all fours like some savage, maddened beast, ululating psychotically at the uncaring stars, at long last--in spite of every attempt to retain his sanity by truckling to and licking the boots of the Bush administration--Tom Friedman is shrill!...

Shrillblog: The Guy After the Guy After Clarke Quits In a Shrill Way: The government's cybersecurity chief has abruptly resigned from the Homeland Security Department amid a concerted campaign by the technology industry and some lawmakers to persuade the Bush administration to give him more authority and money for protection programs. Amit Yoran, a former software executive from Symantec Corp., made his resignation effective Thursday as director of the National Cyber Security Division, giving a single's day notice of his intention to leave. He kept the job one year...

Shrillblog: A Note On Clerical Errors In The Processing Department: Some thoughtful readers have pointed out that it should not have been possible for George W. Bush to have joined the Order that is "limited to those who were once sane, fair, and balanced, but who have been driven into shrill unholy madness by the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, or simple disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration."...